1. Tell us about your role in Skimlinks?
I’m the VP of Marketing at Skimlinks. My team owns our brand, creates content that explains what our company does and how our clients can make best use of our platform, and distributes that content to attract new customers. I view our mission as ensuring customers have a fantastic experience with Skimlinks.
2. Can you tell us about your journey into this market?
I started my career as a Marketing and Insight Executive in the media world when the internet was barely a thing. I was intrigued by how media businesses could use the internet to distribute information, build an audience and hopefully make money while maintaining a decent print business. I loved working on a market where you had to grow a consumer audience while selling this audience to advertisers and made my way up the ladder to Marketing Director. Then I moved to the tech world, at Yahoo! where I ended up running their B2B Marketing for EMEA before joining Skimlinks as VP of Marketing in 2018. I feel so fortunate to be in a career where there is always something new to discover.
3. How do you think technology is upgrading marketing Sector?
Mainly in two ways. First, marketers can measure everything and make better decisions. We’re now able to rely on what a campaign achieves and what customers do as a result, rather than relying on what they think they do. Then, technology enables small teams to address multiple audiences across the globe while still having customized and relevant messages. With such powerful data and tools, planning and execution are more important than ever.
4. How does your content monetization platform empower marketing professionals?
Skimlinks technology automatically monetizes product links in commerce-related content to earn publishers a share of sales they drive. You can see some of the best examples here. Publishers independently decide what they write about.
It’s an opportunity for brands with smaller advertising budgets but superior product experience to emerge. The proliferation and popularity of commerce content means marketing professionals have to focus on the benefits of their products and the customer experience.
5. Can you explain how does your platform help advertisers in growing their affiliate program?
Through Skimlinks advertisers have access to a global premium editorial network: the quality of our network is constantly monitored, and every new publisher is rigorously vetted. Skimlinks also provides fully transparent data to the advertisers at publisher level on impressions, clicks, order values, conversions… It helps merchants decide where to put their money and decide on a fair commission for the best performing publishers.
$2.5m worth of transactions are made every day on our platform! This level of experience empowers our account managers to give relevant recommendations to advertisers to expand their affiliate strategy. Our top 100 Merchants saw their total order value increase by 11.75% and their AOV increase by 76%.
6. What features of your platform makes it a perfect fit for publishers and advertisers?
We are obsessed with our customer experience and how our platform fits into their workflow. In their own words, what publishers and advertisers value the most is that the platform drives sales at scale and the reports they access help them grow their strategy. We are constantly innovating to help publishers get more clicks, increase the conversion of those clicks, and the value generated. On the advertiser’s side, our efforts are on providing them with full transparency which they are unfortunately not used to in the ad tech world.
7. What advice would you like to give to the technology Start Ups?
Focus on your clients and how your product will make a difference for them.
8. How do you prepare for an AI-Centric world?
For me, AI is the natural extension of more data collection and better processing.
I’ve not seen a major disruption yet, the fundamentals remain the same as when everything was manual: understand what data you are looking at, focus on your business goals, and don’t be creepy.
9. Can you tell us about your team and how it supports you?
I manage a team of specialists (sometimes with several specialities). That means that no two people in the team have the same role or skills! What we all have in common is our obsession with customers and knowledge of how our individual and team inputs contribute to company growth. Our diverse backgrounds, cultures, and expertises are an immense wealth that make us more creative and more efficient .
10. What movie inspires you the most?
There are too many to choose one. My top 3 favorite movies this year were Someone Somewhere by Cedric Klapish, The Farewell by Lulu Wang and Games of Thrones (the series has a movie quality). Despite having different styles, they all have strong characters with their own ways of looking at the world and making big decisions. Ned Stark actually changed the way I write; I now avoid using ‘but’ in a sentence.
11. We would love to catch some glimpses of your much talked about chic and fabulous work culture
Our culture revolves around four values: We aim for better, we move the Needle (so many things to do, focus on what has an impact), We embrace change (because we work in tech AND in the media world, change is the only constant) and We respect each other (because we work hard in a changing environment, we want to reward our people and help them grow). We made a video of it that we like very much, you can watch it here.
12. Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?
I mainly use my phone to listen to music (Spotify), communicate (Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Slack, WhatsApp), learn (Hello Chinese, Yousician), move (Google Maps, Uber), get information (20 Minutes, Guardian, Twitter), access my documents in the cloud (Google Docs and Evernotes, Google Photos), take pictures and when I’m travelling watch movies (Netflix).
Those are all the apps on my phone:
