Leading martech at Uber
Does your team have to use Uber or they can come to the office with Lyft?
Everyone is free to use other companies if they want! Most of us have actually tried to be either a driver or to do delivery. I think it’s eye opening, to be honest. Earlier in my career, I was already in food delivery, with Foodpanda within the rocket group, and I did deliveries. It is important to know how the business operates end to end and what the experience is for a driver or a rider, so that our people in marketing grasp the reality of the way customers experience our brand. It also helps to get in tune with what our demand looks like.
What do you think helped you the most to progress in your career?
There are a few things I was doing in the beginning which I think are key to success. The first one was, staying very close to details, going deep into things, understanding how they work and how to innovate. When I was at foodpanda, we started testing automated ads from Smartly. It was an early Alpha and we built a feed to serve different promotions in different cities in India. And then my colleagues started getting interested and coming around with questions. At this point I started leading even though people were not reporting to me. From there someone noticed; I got a team and started growing it.
But in a nutshell, it’s really about staying close to the details. Then obviously when you grow into an organisation, you cannot stay close to everything. But having the capacity to zoom in and out, to be able to support teams in a jam session or a brainstorm, and still keep the focus on the big picture, that has been crucial
The second piece is the soft skills. Understanding people, spending a lot of time analysing characters, inclinations, communication style. I try to customise the way I interact with others depending on their personality, the place in the career, or what they are interested in. My goal is to get the best from everyone by adapting my communication style. I started with these two things and they are still my principles today.
Lastly, I learned from the people I worked with. Interestingly though, I would say that I learned the most from people who weren’t even part of marketing, tech or performance marketing, especially in the last few years at Uber. I’ve been engaging a lot with other departments – finance, general managers, operations – and that gave me a 360 degree view on how folks in completely different spaces interpret leadership. That’s where you start seeing that the traits are always the same. It doesn’t really matter if you’re doing tech or business or HR – you find common patterns, such as deep analytical skills, the capacity to simplify problems with frameworks, empathy, and communication skills.
How was your role structured at Uber, and what did you focus on during your tenure as director of Martech?
Well, my role was basically divided into two parts. I managed a few of our paid global channels, including social programmatic, job boards, display and new channels. Basically the non search channels. I also managed two other teams. One was called Marketing Solutions, a tech team that does mostly feed management and BI, and the other, App store optimization and Downloads.
I was using this strategy where I identified every week the area or the pain point in the domains we were managing. If there were areas that are doing well, I didn’t really interact much apart from a one on one with the manager. If there were any other problems or we did not know what to do, or one of my direct reports needed guidance, then I dedicated more time to that specific area.
iOS15, let’s say the no IDFA world, that was the new big topic. How do we adapt attribution? How do we want to adapt our targets? How do we want to think about probabilistic stitching of LTV to campaigns? The other big topic was downloads and app store optimization. We were building a team around it, which meant investing a lot of work directing the team towards the right priorities.
Martech masterclass
How do you make your build or buy decisions?
The first thing we look at is what we need, and if it is available on the market at a fair price. If so, the decision is rather obvious and we can buy a service. But really that’s not my mental model for Martech – I rather think of ‘first mile’ and ‘last mile’. The build or buy decision doesn’t have to be an either or choice, you can do both at the same time. Meaning you can leverage a partner’s tooling and develop a layer on top of it.
That’s why Smartly is so great. They built a set of technologies you can expand on. For instance you can build automated ads, and scale it to any type of ads, and even build a team around it which can continuously iterate with your own data and tech.
The only case we do things in house is if nothing is on the market or the solutions are not customisable enough. But with the current explosion of SaaS businesses it doesn’t make sense to think of having everything in house anymore. The other way around is true too: you always need a part of internal logic and thinking on top of the tools you use.
How do you see the changes in the measurement realm affecting performance marketing?
We need to use media mix modelling and other models given the recent changes in the industry. But I am not sure how viable it is for the industry to go full blown into that type of measurement. At some point, you still need a way to measure your daily effectiveness, which probabilistic attribution is not doing yet.
In performance marketing, you invest until it doesn’t make economical sense to you. You need to know where that tipping point is every day. We lost a lot of direct feedback and data with SKAdNetwork and delays in the postback, that’s certain. But some type of direct measure will still be there to anchor your models, there’s no way around it if you want to be efficient.
The most important piece of work is going to be connecting probabilistic attribution and daily decisions. Some of the gaming players are already far ahead in the domain and start setting conversion values on SKAD based on predicted LTV and such. In my opinion, whoever solves this problem and integrates MMMs in their daily decisions will get a large competitive edge.
We’ve also interviewed Arto Tolonen from Smartly - anything you’d like to request from his company?
Well I know them for a long time now and I brought Smartly to all the companies I have been to. They took over and became global in only a few years. It really is amazing to see. The main thing I was asking them was to add more marketing channels and they are doing it now, so overall we are happy customers.
It truly is a great company and team. That something like this would come out of Finland, of all places, means there must be something in the air in Helsinki: Supercell is also there; Unity ads… It’s a great tech hub.
How do you measure the effectiveness of a brand as a channel? Is there a ratio you think is important to have between brand and performance marketing?
So on the ratio idea – it depends on the maturity of the company. When you start a company, there is demand and you try to capture it, which is the role of performance marketing. That’s actually why you start a business – you find a latent need in the market which you solve. Then at some point in your history you are going to start slowing down, because you have saturated your high demand, high intent users. That’s the point when brand becomes important. Thirty or fourty years out, you have businesses like Nike or Coca Cola where brand is pretty much the entire business.
That’s my mental model for the role of brand marketing at different stages of growth. The measurement side is the complicated one. The two best routes you can go to is either put everything on the same plane ; or use a completely different set of metrics.
The first way you have no Chinese wall between brand and performance like in most companies. You use a media mix modelling and attribute everything together. Obviously brand takes a longer time to generate revenue than performance, so it can be that your models over index in what drives short term value.
On the other hand you can separate your performance metrics from the brand ones. Brand is measured through top of mind awareness, consideration, Nielsen surveys, and this type of KPIs. You focus on getting these metrics up. That’s a cleaner way to separate things but it doesn’t tell you how much to invest in each bucket overall. You can’t put everything back to the same metric, dollar for dollar, so the end decision of how much to invest in Brand is still gut feeling based.
This is where marketing becomes hard. I have seen a trend of trying to overmeasure things but in the end, the big CMOs go with their gut and see what feels right. Is it important to be top of mind? Can we convince finance that it makes sense to invest for a few years? If you think back about Coca Cola and Nike, they sell the same things for generations but the associations with the brand are so powerful, you forget the drink is the same, or the pair of Nikes is only a pair of shoes. These are great examples of how you can go beyond simple brand measurement.
