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10/20/2021 08:30 AMJohn Visgiliois back where he started out after college: Chester. John had a freelance job with Chester resident Peter Good. Good and his wife Jan Cummings are nationally known graphic designers.
Now John has brought his own marketing firm Overabove back to Chester, to a building currently being renovated on Main Street.
“I always kept in mind the vibe of the Chester community,” he says.
Overabove is both a new firm and an old firm. John ran the business in Essex for nearly 20 years with a partner, Ralph Guardiano. Now, the pair have gone their separate ways, with Guardino forming his own agency, Option A Group in Centerbrook, and John now the chief executive officer of Overabove.
“We’re creating the next chapter,” he says.
The name describes the firm’s goals.
“It’s over and above expectations,” John says. “We want to create tomorrow.”
John doesn’t like the term advertising agency.
“I hate to describe Overabove as an advertising agency,” he says. “It is the alternative to a traditional advertising agency.”
He terms what the firm does as data-driven marketing, most of it through social media.
Which of the growing number of social media sites to use, John adds, is determined by the products he is dealing with. The firm’s clients include a diverse list from travel and leisure firms to financial services, real estate. and private boarding schools. Overabove according to John, now has nearly 40 employees, many of whom will work at the Chester headquarters.
Data driven, John explains, means targeting advertisements to people who have already clicked on a site, indicating some level of interest. The agency doesn’t know who the people are, what their names are, only that a particular site elicited a response from them. The firm follows the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a European Union standard for dealing with concerns about privacy.
John notes that data-driven marketing alone is not the answer. Data points are essential, but so it the human side of the equation.
“Intuition, gut instinct, you can’t forget humans; emotional decisions matter,” he says.
In designing Overabove’s new headquarters, John flips around the now-familiar description of working at home.
“Work ought to feel like home,” he says. “You spend a lot of time working.”
The result is a somewhat unconventional design for the new Chester office, with the kitchen in the center.
“The kitchen not off in a corner somewhere. It is the central place; it’s like home with people gathered around the island. You ought to feel like you have a home at work,” he says.
That floor plan, he adds, promotes collaboration and creativity.
Building brand loyalty is only half the job of marketing.
“It’s not only awareness; it’s creating a response,” John says.
The response is using the product, not simply recognizing it.
“Creating a response is about doing something: eat, drink, buy,” he says.
John grew up in East Hartford; his first association with the field of graphics came through family. His father was a printer. He attended the University of Connecticut where he met his wife, Wendy. The couple has four children.
While he was at the University of Connecticut, John spent his junior year abroad in Florence, and describes the time as his most meaningful college experience.
“I grew by leaps and bounds,” he says.
He speaks Italian, travels still to Italy and describes himself as a passionate Italian cook.
Before the founding of Overabove, John worked as a broadcast designer at television station WFSB and for nearly a decade at Sonalysts Studios in Waterford where he was vice president for design. Sonalysts was once solely a defense contractor. John was one of the people who built the commercial side of the business, adding media production and services beyond its original scope.
Beyond his professional connections, John has been active in High Hopes, therapeutic riding center in Old Lyme. He also served as a co-chair of the board of the Lyme Academy of Fine Arts from 2012 to 2018. He is delighted that after the University of New Haven discontinued its association with the academy, it has found new life as a venue for students studying art.
The world of advertising and graphic design has undergone vast changes since John’s student days. His oldest child, a 26-year-old daughter, now works for Overabove and John had to explain to her what the graphics business was once like.
“I told my daughter when I started out there were no computers. She had no idea what I was talking about,” he says. “The amount of change is astronomical. And the speed of change is massive. We embrace it.”
John learned on his own the basics of computer-age media that he now deals with every day.
“Never turn off that opportunity to learn,” he says. “It’s not just nice. It’s a necessity.”