When Ajay Gupta was 12, he experienced two life-changing events.

One was obvious. His family emigrated from India to California. But the other was a seed that would grow over the next dozen years into a successful marketing company in San Antonio.

“When I got to the U.S., because I grew up in a pretty small town in India, it was the first time I really got exposed to the internet,” Gupta said. “I started this website when I was a teenager, Wrestling Life, and it was really a pro-wrestling website because I was super into pro-wrestling when I was a kid.”

But his small website became one of the top hits on search engines for users seeking out pro wrestling in the early, wild days of the internet.

“All of a sudden, it went from 10 people a month to 50,000 people,” Gupta said. “When I was a teenager, it was like, ‘Wow, this is pretty cool.’”

He even sold ads on that website.

It wasn’t a career, but that idea lingered as he went to college, including graduate school at Texas State University, and volunteering for national political campaigns, where he saw how large volumes of data could be used to target incredibly small audiences.

“I really was always kind of drawn back to, ‘Hey, what if we built something and scale that — did what I was doing as a teenager, because I really enjoyed that.’ That’s how the original idea for Stirista came,” Gupta said. “I combined both my previous marketing and web design experience with the data and microtargeting to come up with the idea of a data-driven marketing company.”

Gupta started Stirista in 2009 in San Antonio.

Now, it employs 80 people locally and 240 across the country.

It’s continued to expand — in July, it acquired data marketing company Alesco — and Stirista serves customers like LG, Castrol, Univision and horror movie makers Blumhouse Productions.

We sat down with Gupta in his far Northside office in July to learn more about what it’s like being a marketing and tech company in San Antonio, how Stirista is using artificial intelligence to grow, and the ins and outs of using data for online ads.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Tell me more about what you do. A data-driven marketing company sounds complicated.

The best way to explain it is we help other brands find new clients. The biggest challenge for any business tends to be how do we find the next customer. 

We really say, ‘hey, we can help you find your next 100 customers.’ The way we do that is by looking at your customer data. Where we work best is if you are, say, a retailer that collects customer data or an online website that’s been collecting customer data, we can help analyze that data and see who is actually buying from you to better understand your customers. Then we find more people like that that might not be buying from you. 

We do that in a couple of different ways: mostly online channels, but we place connected TV ads, which, in the simplest terms I can explain, is when you’re watching Hulu or Amazon, and those ads pop up, and a lot of times, you’re wondering ‘why are you getting a car ad?’ Or, if not done right, you’re getting the same ad 25 times.

But if done right, we’re targeting you because you are in the market for something and now you’re thinking, ‘hey, OK, this ad makes sense.’ 

Consumers tend to have questions about their online data. When you‘re doing marketing work, how detailed do you get? Can someone be tracked individually? 

There is a lot of data out there about individuals that people don’t always know about. If you own a house, for example, you can go to the county website and look that up. If you’re registered to vote, that’s all public record. There’s things that are public record that I think a lot of people don’t realize are public record. 

Let’s say you’re filling out an online survey or even if you’re at the rodeo and you see a resort that’s selling you a timeshare, a lot of times those companies are collecting information in exchange for giving you a gift or something along those lines, right? 

There’s a mixture of ways in which this data is tracked. Historically, when you get a direct mail piece, for example, those are usually tracked at an individual level if it says your name on it. If it says ‘current resident,’ it’s probably been tracked as an aggregate. 

Online advertising is different. Nobody’s really tracking, we can’t really tell it’s you. What we can tell is that this group of people are interested in this topic and that’s done at an aggregate and an anonymized level. 

That’s why a lot of times if you’re in an office and you’re looking to buy cars, an office mate might start getting ads for cars, and that’s done by design because the way the data is tracked is at an aggregate level versus an individual level. 

A lot of times people are like ‘companies are listening.’ Not really, but there’s probably someone on that IP address doing a search with a website that is then sharing that information that, ‘hey, this cluster of IP [addresses] is potentially looking to buy shoes.’

There are not a ton of companies like yours in San Antonio. What’s brought you here and what’s kept you here? 

It started off somewhat accidentally because I had lived in San Marcos, and I was teaching a summer class. I was trying to figure out what to do with my life.

I was teaching a summer class at University of Incarnate Word, and never really had lived in San Antonio. I had been to SeaWorld once, but that was about it. 

I spent about three months here teaching and I was just trying to figure out, ‘Is this a place I want to live in?’ 

A couple years down the line, I ended up working in San Antonio at Texas Med Clinic, and I really started liking the city and the culture here. 

When I started Stirista, it was really a mixture of a very friendly business climate and environment, which made me pick San Antonio as our home base. I lived in California while I was in high school. It always kind of thought I’d go back to California at some point, but the business climate in San Antonio was great. 

The other nice thing was, because there were no external investors and we were kind of funding this company in San Antonio, we found that there’s a lot of good talent because of all the universities here. We hired a lot of people coming right out of college. 

I actually took it as a positive that there’s not a lot of companies like ours because it allows us, even today, to tap into some of the best talent that’s coming out in San Antonio. If you want to work in technology and marketing, we’re one of the few places that can kind of combine those two things.

How are you using AI? 

Think about all the advertisers in the world and all the websites in the world. How do you connect you to the ad that you are going to see? There are infinite possibilities. One of the things AI has made happen is instead of like a billion web pages that you could see an ad on, it’s helping us narrow down, just from past behavior and what ads you have seen, to hundreds of websites instead of a vast number. 

It also helps with being able to reduce the cost. Think about all the websites that historically you’d have to ping to figure out who we should show this ad to. That has become much faster as a result of technology. The second thing that’s becoming faster is analyzing data. Oftentimes we are dealing with billions of records and transactional records. How do we fully understand a human being? Historically, it takes an analyst and multiple hours of work and queries. A lot of times the AI models are now learning and doing it faster and, if you’re trying to understand what a customer base looks like, what would have taken two weeks is now taking a couple of hours.

The third thing we’re using if for that I think every company can use it for is just building your internal products and web development tools. 

Now, with a few lines of code, you can build something that’s fully functional. It’s almost going from six months to a week now. That is something every business can use. 

Another cool application we’ve done is, as a marketing company, we have to apply for a lot of RFPs (requests for proposals). If we’re trying to win business, that’s kind of common and these things take a lot of time. There’s hundreds of questions. 

Unfortunately, you don’t actually win a lot of RFPs. You’re winning a percentage of RFPs. What we’ve done now is created a knowledge base and an internal tool where a new RFP comes in, we put it in. Based on previous answers, AI is actually taking a first stab at filling out the RFPs, which is saving hundreds of man hours. Then a human is going through it, but that’s a lot faster than doing it from scratch. 

Have you seen AI affect your workforce? Does it change what kind of jobs you need people to do? 

We haven’t cut any roles because of AI. What we are encouraging everyone to do and all departments have a mandate to do is, if you have employees that want to learn some of the AI applications, we will provide the tools and the online classes so they can upgrade their skill set. In the next set of hirings we’re doing … that’s a question we ask: ‘Hey, are you using AI to do research on clients and how are you using it?’ 

When cell phones first came out, it changed how we lived and how we did business and the real-time demand for answers became greater when you could text somebody.

We see similar things happening with AI. People who are adapting to it regardless of whether you’re in tech or not. You could be in marketing, you could be in sales. If you start using AI, you can get a leg up on somebody else. 

What do you see as the future of Stirista? 

There’s so many siloed services that marketing companies offer where you need one company to do your online marketing and then another one to do your email and another one to manage data. 

We are trying to become a one stop shop for anything that’s online marketing- and data-related. We feel that, by some of these acquisitions we have done, we’re getting pretty close to having a single platform where you’re able to do searches and activations in one place and being able to, if you’re kind of head of marketing at a brand, be able to see how everything is performing in one dashboard. 

We see that, with continued use of AI, we’re able to make these things available faster. When I first started in the industry, if a client had a question or wanted to do a campaign, it wouldn’t be unheard of to do a 7 to 10 day turnaround. One of the things we did differently was we said, ‘we’re gonna do it in 48 hours.’ It’s our guarantee.

Now, with AI, people want the answer today. We have a whole generation, like my kids, growing up demanding answers on their phone from the time they’re born. It’s also putting in processes and chat agents that can answer a lot of those questions because no one wants to wait for answers anymore.

The same thing we try to provide for our clients, we have to do for ourselves too. When there is somebody in, you know, Oklahoma searching for marketing answers, they need to find us and be able to get that question answered without having to go through reps and without having to talk to somebody. People just want to be able to type it somewhere and get an answer, because we’ve all been programmed to do that from Google. 

Use of AI is really only speeding that process. Historically, with large agencies running campaigns, you have almost 10 people on that account. They’re working on crafting these reports, and then you’re meeting with the CMO (chief marketing officer) once a month. But now CMOs want that at midnight, if they are bored. They want to look at their dashboard to see how things are going. They don’t want to wait for an executive meeting once a month. A lot of what we’re building towards is that goal that people can achieve those results on their own … 

One of the things we [are asking], is how do we provide complex data solutions to small businesses as well? 

Because most solutions that exist for data are based on having a team of analysts working on your customer data, which would be almost impossible and cost prohibitive for more small businesses. 

Can somebody upload their customer data and get that analysis and feedback without going through a very expensive application? 

A lot of people are focused on starting a company, finding success, and then being able to sell. What do you think of that?

There’s a lot of serial entrepreneurs, but I tell everybody, ‘This is my baby. This is my sole passion.’ It’s common, what you’re describing. People do it for 5 to 10 years and are looking to flip, but really, for me, this is it.