VIEQUES, PR — Perhaps better known to many professionals as an ad-tech analyst, now Joanna O’Connell has gone inside, joining MediaMath as chief marketing officer, to tell the world about the company as it nears its decade in business.
O’Connell spent three years advising marketers as a Forrester analyst before building out AdExchanger‘s research and analysis capability. Joining a technology vendor may seem like a step change – but O’Connell wasn’t always an external observer, having earlier held senior roles at Razorfish and VivaKi. Now she wants to spread the word about MediaMath.
“It’s an incredibly smart, innovative company with sort of the right ideals about what marketers and agencies need and the right vision for the future,” O’Connell tells Beet.TV in this video interview. “But they’re a little too insular in the way they think about MediaMath and the outside world. So I’m there to be a storyteller, I’m there to publicize the awesomeness.”
Arguably, companies in the advertising and communication space, ironically, have a challenge conveying their product offerings and differentiators, often falling back on using the same, insider acronyms as each other in what is a crowded space.
So, what exactly is MediaMath’s ‘awesomeness’? MediaMath began in 2007 as a bid manager to connect ad buyers to ad exchanges, and has since gone on to help advertisers target users and track campaign performance using data.
“It’s a company that I’ve loved since the day I was exposed to the concepts of programmatic,” O’Connell says, recalling how the co-founders “blew my mind” during her first meeting with them at the company’s formation. She says its approach to “deaveraged pricing at the impression level, true data-driven marketing and putting control in the hands of the buyer” excited her.
MediaMath is now up to more than 750 staff in cities around the world. It’s an outfit that continues to draw affection from professionals back in O’Connell’s analyst community – last month, Gartner named MediaMath a “visionary” company for digital marketing.
This video was produced at the Beet.TV executive retreat presented by Videology. You can find more videos from the session here.
