Alain Sanjaume was picked as the digital hero of both Jozef Wallis and Hossein Houssaini. Now he passes on the honour by choosing his, two, digital heroes.
Who is your digital hero?
I have always been supportive and inspired by entrepreneurs. I have to nominate two heroes because they have such similar profiles.
Kasper Skou, CEO of Semasio, leader in unified semantic targeting solutions; and Paulo Cunha, CEO, Velocidi, an amazing CDP and machine-learning solutions for direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands.
I also cannot resist a mention of some special people to me with amazing personalities: Ben Tatton-Brown (Ogury), Brian Fitzpatrick (IPONWEB), Donald Hamilton (Dynata), and Sacha Berlik (TheTradeDesk).
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
Firstly, Kasper and Paulo are visionaries, both predicting over 10 years ago what the market would need. They invested a lot of effort and deployed immense energy to make their dreams happen.
Secondly, their personalities are unique and make them stand out in the crowd. Thirdly, their international curiosity and their capability to adapt to different business cultures and specific country needs.
And finally, their choice of field of expertise, as my motto is “Data is your future”.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
I admire Kasper and Paulo’s dedication and hard work, making our digital industry provide higher quality services with unique offerings, bringing more credibility to our industry, helping to increase budgets and generate growth.
What the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
Of course, the one I am working on, cookie-less identity.
This is the key challenge to be solved by the open internet. An independent and international solution must exist in order to fight against the wall gardens’ first-party data.
Both brands and publishers need to use the same people-based solution for targeting and measurement.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
I enjoy being at the forefront of things and was proud to help launch in major European countries the first search company (eSpotting), the first behavioural targeting platform (wunderloop), first DMP and data exchange (eXelate) and now LiveRamp.
But the achievement that gave me lots of fun was to design from scratch, implement and deploy Teads’ worldwide data strategy that represents a very large percentage of their current business.
