Elen Gasparyan and the case for a slower beginning

The chief executive wanted a strategy. Elen Gasparyan wanted a conversation. She had come to San Diego to help a company prepare a business-to-business campaign, and the meeting already had the familiar ingredients: a marketing team, a plan, a board full of organized thinking. The chief executive suggested that the information she needed was online. As he began describing his ambitions, however, she noticed that his account and the plan behind him were telling different stories.

Gasparyan later wrote about the encounter in a column arguing that B2B marketing should slow down at the beginning. It is an awkward proposition for someone whose business includes making campaigns. Clients rarely arrive hoping to purchase a pause. But her question was practical: what happens when a team becomes efficient at delivering a message its own leadership has never quite agreed upon?

That concern runs through her career, from banking in Armenia to co-founding Davel Creative Agency and expanding into Los Angeles. She likes a story, but she also wants to know what holds it up. A good-looking campaign can still have a loose screw.

The banker who needed agency experience

Gasparyan began working in banking at eighteen. Her five years at HSBC involved business analytics and client relationships, an education in listening to people who expected both discretion and useful answers. The work supplied habits that would survive her change of industry: preparation, consistency and an appreciation for the gap between what someone requests and what they need.

She also pursued formal training, earning a master's degree in management from the Armenian State University of Economics and a Professional Diploma in Digital Marketing from the Digital Marketing Institute in Dublin. Her LinkedIn profile dates the latter to 2016-2017. The combination put business judgment and marketing study alongside one another before she had an agency of her own.

Getting into an existing agency proved difficult. She has described encountering the experience requirement familiar to career changers: agencies wanted someone who had already worked at an agency. The entry ticket was apparently available inside the building. Gasparyan chose another route and co-founded Davel with Davit Gasparyan, her husband, in 2017.

The agency began in Armenia. Its later work would include financial services, wine brands, technology and consumer campaigns. Gasparyan's own move into creative leadership therefore carried an unusual continuity. She had changed the work she sold, while keeping her interest in the person across the table.

A campaign that began with laptop stickers

For Oriflame's WAUNT launch in Armenia, Gasparyan and Davel faced a specific audience: young women whose attention was already being courted by competing beauty brands. The assignment called for a campaign within two months. Simply borrowing whatever was popular on TikTok would have been a rather expensive way to arrive late.

The team researched the audience's everyday choices, including clothes, gathering places and the stickers on their laptops. Those details were useful because the campaign concerned choice itself. The creative idea gave young women room to express independence in a culture where expectations about their roles could be restrictive.

Execution brought together Armenian creators working in music, dance and social content. A soundtrack and choreography gave the message something people could perform, adapt and share. Gasparyan was credited as creative director; the wider production included designers, photographers, filmmakers and a campaign manager. A personal profile can make creative work sound solitary. The credits restore the roomful of people.

There is a connection here to her later writing about Gen Z. She argues that a brand's visual identity, website and cultural presence must add up to something people want to spend time with. A trending sound cannot do all that work by itself. The WAUNT project gave that argument a concrete form: research first, then a creative language built around the audience's own habits.

What a playground asks of an advertiser

Another assignment replaced the consumer purchase with a community invitation. Read and Play at Vaghuhas sought funding for a children's playground and library. The village community opened its fundraiser on reArmenia, and Davel developed the campaign with Gasparyan as creative director. The appeal had sixty days to reach its goal.

The creative decision was to show children already participating in rebuilding their village. Donors could join that effort. Television and radio appearances helped carry the appeal, while diaspora outreach and a book drive extended it beyond a single donation page. QR-coded collection boxes in bookstores connected the physical act of giving a book to the online campaign.

The project account records 7,663,462 Armenian drams raised and further pledges for school and community equipment. These are the sort of results that give a creative idea a second life outside its presentation deck. The campaign ended with money and books committed to a place children would use.

It also makes Gasparyan's interest in storytelling easier to understand. Here, the central choice concerned how to present the people involved. Showing their initiative changed the invitation being made to everyone else.

Six verbs, two moments of judgment

In June 2025, Gasparyan published a 96-page ebook, The C.O.S.M.O.S. Method: A Framework for Marketing Campaign Evaluation. It turns her concern with preparation into six stages: Clarify, Observe, Shape, Materialize, Orchestrate and Survey. The title has astronomical ambitions; the verbs are reassuringly ready for work.

Clarify establishes the objective, audience and measures of success. Observe asks for research into the market and its participants. Shape develops the idea. Materialize turns it into actual creative assets. Orchestrate coordinates the launch. Survey examines what happened afterward. Each stage gives a team a particular job, rather than leaving strategy suspended somewhere above production.

The method evaluates the campaign at two points. The first five phases produce a score before launch; the final stage brings actual performance into the assessment. A team can address weaknesses before spending the full budget and carry lessons into the next assignment. The framework gives creative discussion a place for both intent and evidence.

For a creative director, this creates a useful obligation to explain decisions. An appealing image needs a role in the campaign; a distribution choice needs a reason. Colleagues can discuss those choices before production makes them expensive to reverse. The framework's two assessments also keep an early judgment open to revision. What a team expected people to notice and what people actually responded to can enter the same conversation.

A paper bearing the method's name also appears in a Plekhanov Russian University of Economics collection. Publication documents the framework as an articulated approach. Its usefulness for a particular campaign still depends on the questions a team asks and the information it brings. A system cannot supply the listening on everyone's behalf.

A bigger market, another beginning

Davel expanded into Los Angeles in 2022. For Gasparyan, the change meant developing professional relationships in a market where her previous work did not automatically introduce her. She has described rebuilding her network in the United States, taking the experience accumulated in Armenia into conversations that began without that shared history.

Her account of the move resists treating Armenia as a chapter that had to be discarded. The agency could grow across borders while retaining the perspective it had developed at home. That distinction matters in a business where an address can become shorthand for the quality of the ideas produced there.

Her present work includes judging the Webby, Anthem, The Drum and Digiday awards. She is also an executive member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences and a member of The One Club for Creativity. Reviewing other teams' work puts her on the receiving end of the carefully assembled case she must prepare for her own projects.

“Geography is not a ceiling.”

Elen Gasparyan

She has spoken about the practical obstacles facing smaller studios: entering the competition, translating the work and explaining its significance. A good idea still needs someone to put it forward. Her advice to younger Armenian creatives is to let the work be considered. The ambition is straightforward, though submitting anything for judgment remains an excellent way to discover how attached one has become to it.

An International Design Awards record credits her as creative director of Embracing Masculinity, a Silver winner in the multimedia social-media campaign category. Designers Anahit Rushanyan and Arman Simonyan are named alongside her. The attribution offers another small reminder that directing an idea includes giving other people's contributions a coherent place.

The discipline follows her out of the office

Outside agency work, Gasparyan practices competitive karate and trains in traditional Japanese weapons and sword disciplines. She has connected those pursuits with patience, humility and repeated improvement. Growing up, she encountered the assumption that martial arts belonged more naturally to boys. Her continued training gives that assumption a fairly direct answer.

She also credits her mother with teaching her consistency. It is a less cinematic explanation for a career than a single flash of inspiration, and a more useful one. Her public account repeatedly returns to showing up, adapting and keeping commitments. Even the six-stage method ends by making the team look back before it begins again.

The San Diego meeting belongs to that same pattern. Before the campaign could proceed, Gasparyan wanted to hear how the person running the company understood it. A conversation exposed something a board full of plans had missed. For someone who makes a living helping messages travel, she spends a considerable amount of time checking where they start.