Andy Ashley, Global Marketing Director at SmartFrame Technologies, gives us the lowdown on the past, present, and future of the digital marketing industry
What’s your background?
My background is in advertising, marketing, and media. I landed my first job in the industry at a small agency on the media planning side of things, and that led me to work for bigger global agencies such as Saatchi and Saatchi and McCann, which was then known as McCann Erickson. I spent a bit of time client-side as well. It was good fun – I learned a great deal and worked with incredible people.
After that, I moved into smaller digital agencies and got involved in a few startups from a marketing and sales point of view, helping to scale and sell them.
Most recently, I’ve been working in B2B technical solutions where I spent ten years helping to build out the European and – subsequently – global function and strategy of a SaaS company. It was a very interesting role in terms of learning how to adapt B2B marketing strategies in different markets, changing the nuance and focus to get the best ROI out of the efforts in each of those markets.
What attracted you to SmartFrame?
SmartFrame really interested me because it clearly has the potential to be the YouTube for image streaming and ad tech.
With a background in marketing and advertising, I was drawn to the fact that the technology is very visual. At the same time, a large part of my experience has been in ad tech, so the fact that SmartFrame also has that component to it made it an easy transition.
What do you like about the tech startup world?
I like building things. Over the years, many of my roles have involved building out functions and capabilities, so I really enjoy that aspect of it.
In the startup world, it’s a green field. That means you can build up capability pretty much from scratch in terms of things like performance marketing functionality, inbound channels, outbound channels, and so much more.
How has the marketing industry changed during your career?
The biggest change has to be the move from analog to digital. When I first started out, the main form of long-distance communication was the telephone. We drew up media plans with a ruler and a pencil, and our proposals were put into a typing pool to be typed up. There was no such thing as the world wide web, so it was very print, TV, and radio orientated.
When the internet was introduced, it achieved widespread adoption very rapidly, both in terms of consumers and businesses – and suddenly a whole new media channel opened up.
I was involved in the early days, setting up small departments that were running some of the first banner ads, which was the mainstay of digital advertising back then. In a very short period of time, I went from doing media plans with pen and paper to setting up one of the world’s first online gaming sites – so the change was dramatic.
The upshot of this change was the globalization of the industry. When I first started out, there weren’t jobs where you could develop strategies in one country and roll it out in another with ease. However, the increased internationalization that came with the dawn of digital meant that new markets were ripe for going into, opening up a world of opportunity and making international travel more commonplace.
This increased globalization took me from a European role to spending time in China, Japan, India, Singapore, and various parts of North America – mainly the great city of Atlanta. So things became very different, both professionally and geographically.
What is your advice for staying ahead in such a constantly evolving landscape?
I think that you’ve got to have a natural interest in the industry and a bit of natural curiosity. Things change so quickly, so it’s a never-ending quest for learning. For example, in an average week, I will have three or four calls with new technology providers that might complement the work we do at SmartFrame. Some are a better fit than others, but every now and then you come across something truly brilliant that will make a big difference. So being proactive in discovering new technologies and techniques can be extremely valuable.
When it comes to sourcing that information, sign up for news alerts, attend conferences, and listen to podcasts. There’s a lot of great content out there and many fantastic speakers who are happy to provide expert insight.
What are the biggest challenges and benefits of the remote/hybrid working world?
One big challenge is the distance. People often like being in groups, collaborating and working together side-by-side. Moving away from that has been a big jump for a lot of people and it has the potential to impact team building and communication.
The flip side of this, however, is the fact you are not restricted geographically, which means you can get access to talent you wouldn’t normally have access to. Plus, because your team can be based anywhere in the world, it is possible to scale businesses much more rapidly because you don’t have potentially prohibitive overheads that come with bricks-and-mortar office space.
Furthermore, while some have struggled to communicate remotely, many have thrived, with technology arguably enabling a higher level of collaboration. There are so many great tools out there that allow you to disseminate information and act on it much more easily, such as Dropbox, monday.com, and Confluence, and this allows project management to be seamless. And with programs like Slack and Microsoft Teams, you can communicate really effectively too.
Overall, I think the hybrid approach is probably the best if it’s possible. That way, those who prefer the office environment can get it and those who prefer to work remotely can have that too. And I think with the technology available today, it can be easy to achieve.
In this era of such big data, how can we best harness its power?
Today, there’s more data gathered about consumer behaviors than ever. To harness it effectively, you need tools to disseminate and act on that information – and these are rapidly becoming available.
I think artificial intelligence (AI) will be central to decision-making that’s based on big data. The age of AI is really going to start when the tools get more refined, at which point I think it will become the cornerstone of decisioning for every industry, particularly marketing and advertising.
What advice would you give to marketing managers walking the data-privacy tightrope?
I think it’s really important to look at first-party data solutions and technologies that adopt a privacy-first approach. SmartFrame’s contextual in-image advertising system is a great example. It enables cookie-less targeting because it’s matching ads to the content of the image and webpage, as opposed to a user’s personal information.
As the third-party cookie starts to disappear, I think using things like contextual targeting and first-party data solutions will become the norm. And I think people are starting to adapt to that quite quickly. At SmartFrame, for example, we’re seeing a big demand for our contextual targeting solution for that very reason.
How important is technology in achieving marketing objectives?
I think it’s essential in this day and age. The number of things you can do cost-effectively through multiple channels is vast, so when we build marketing strategies, they are multi-tiered and within those tiers, there are several strands because you’ve got to test and learn what works and what doesn’t.
And again, in each different market and each different country, the focus you put on one element will be slightly different from another. So if you’re constantly trying to optimize and evolve, you’ve got to understand all of the nuances and the interplay between them.
That’s virtually impossible to do without good digital tools. And, while there are many systems that can tell you how effective your marketing is, the challenge is putting it all in one place and understanding the whole picture so you can adjust it.
There are some great dashboards out there that tell us which media is working the best, what our cost per lead is, how much market penetration we’re getting, what our share of voice is against different competitors, and more. So I think it’s really important to ensure you have all the right digital systems and tools in place to do the job effectively.
What are the key ingredients of a successful marketing strategy and why?
It all begins with the fundamentals. Who are you trying to influence? What are you trying to do? Who are you speaking to? That’s the bedrock of it.
Next, it’s establishing the size of the market. What is your total addressable market? What is the opportunity?
After this, it’s understanding your competitors in the context of that market. You need to work out how you’re going to compete with them, both in terms of share of voice and messaging. The key to doing that is the value proposition.
It’s essential to understand your customers’ wants, needs, and pain points, and to supply messaging and solutions that meet those needs. Once you have that core value proposition, you can build communication strategies and media channels around it that address those pain points.
While those are the fundamentals of building a successful marketing plan, you also need to consider the day-to-day aspects of putting it into practice.
One of the most important things is to ensure that you’re aligning yourself with other departments – especially the sales and product departments – to make sure you achieve your objectives.
For example, I set out objectives and key results (OKRs), and those OKRs filter down in a waterfall effect. So, while you have an overarching objective, you also have to pull in all of the other departments to make sure you achieve things like MQLs and SQLs. Ultimately, you’ve got to tie that all back into what the business objectives of the company are. Is it realistic? Is it achievable?
What marketing trends are you keeping an eye on in the future?
Possibly the biggest issue at the moment is the demise of the third-party cookie and the rise of first-party data. With privacy laws becoming more restrictive, the industry is increasingly looking for ways to target people without using personal data.
With this in mind, I think shifts toward the attention economy and the rise of contextual targeting will be significant. For example, one report estimated contextual ad spend in 2020 to be around $160bn, rising to $370bn over the next five years – a huge increase.
The growth of AI is another thing to keep an eye on, not just in ad tech, but also in decision intelligence, which will be a big area in marketing.
And finally, there is the issue of data transparency and provenance. The industry is working towards a more open platform and more transparent way of doing business that doesn’t rely on what are perceived as cloak-and-dagger tactics, so I would expect that to also be a key area of development.
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