NDA’s Marketing the Marketers series talks to the marketing and comms leaders behind the success of our leading companies. Next up is Sarah Aird-Mash, VP of Marketing, Adludio.
What exactly does your job entail?
I am the Global VP of Marketing at Adludio. We are a groundbreaking, AI driven, mobile advertising company engineered to help agencies and brands deliver engaging, innovative mobile ad campaigns, which enable brands to really interact with customers and win attention.
We’re still in start-up mode, so my job is to make as much noise as possible in the market so that every marketer in the world knows who we are. Not a daunting prospect at all! I’m lucky to have a fantastic team who work really well together to deliver activity across multiple regions and disciplines, giving the sales team and other business leads everything they need to meet their objectives.
It helps that our amazing product/tech team have developed a world class product leveraging groundbreaking AI, which everyone we speak to is really excited about.
What campaign or piece of marketing/communications are you most proud of in your career and why?
Haha, this is a little tricky to talk about as it’s the campaign we’re currently developing to launch our new SaaS product to the market in 2024. I’m afraid it’s all under wraps, so I can’t say too much, but we’ll be using our new product to develop the whole campaign end-to-end; from building the brief, to design, campaign management, scheduling, bidding, pacing, optimisation and reporting. It’s going to be exciting to be able to showcase exactly what we can do.
Who has been your biggest inspiration in your career to date and why?
For the first part of my career, I was driven by proving myself to everyone. I discreetly manoeuvred around obstacles, never calling out bad behaviour, priding myself in becoming respected for my abilities and being ‘one of the boys’. Then I had children. Having two girls really changed my perspective on this. I realised I didn’t want them to have to navigate everything I had, from being underestimated, dismissed, bullied, manhandled, patronised and basically really fighting for my place at the table.
There are enough challenges in this world without having to work around a broken establishment. But until that time I’d been enabling what was broken and if I wanted things to be different for my girls, I was going to need to operate differently. Now I consciously advocate, support and challenge my peers and colleagues to make the world a more equal place and I do this for my kids. They are definitely my biggest inspiration.
What is the biggest challenge in your sector and how is your company helping to address it?
There are currently two interconnected challenges that the mobile advertising sector is experiencing, which we are well positioned to address.
The first is the impending promise of a cookieless world. In an age where digital advertising is undergoing a seismic shift, the impending changes surrounding Google cookies and the emergence of privacy-centric browsers like Brave are reshaping the conversation around advertising metrics. The importance of engagement in a cookieless world cannot be overstated. As we move toward a future where tracking user behaviour becomes increasingly challenging, CPM faces a huge obstacle.
So that’s the first and second challenge – a cookieless world and an industry that needs to reframe how mobile ad campaigns are planned and evaluated – it’s no longer about reach, attention is the new currency.
Adludio has years of data, which enable our clients to plan realistic campaigns based on ROI reflecting customer attention and engagement rather than ‘impressions’, which are becoming increasingly obsolete. One of the difficulties of changing metrics will be in identifying, and implementing, an industry standard to measure and report on attention. This is why we are part of the taskforce working with the IAB attention council to achieve just that.
What is the biggest opportunity in your sector and how is your company helping to make the most of it?
Data shows us the deeper the level of attention, and the more time an audience spends on mobile ads, the more likely they are to be absorbing the brand’s message.
There is growing evidence that attention is largely dictated by the quality of creative, especially in a cookie-less world. In fact, Dentsu found that quality of ad creative has the single largest effect on user attention, impacting recall by up to 17%.
This has been at the core of Adludio’s solutions from the start. Leveraging AI to design and build interactive mobile advertising campaign delivery, Adludio offers better ad experiences for consumers and more efficient, quality buying for brands and agencies.
Simply put, we believe the most effective ads are those that get people’s attention and we are using data to inform that.
How important, and why, are the following in helping your promote your own company:
- The Press
The press is vital to our success from both a client and investor perspective. Whenever we get coverage we see an uplift in organic searches by company name on Google, as well as increased website traffic. When you’re an early-stage start-up, press coverage is worth its weight in gold.
- Events
Content is king – as a business we are all about attention metrics and engagement so of course both external and internal events are absolutely critical. We are very disciplined about setting out clear objectives and KPIs for every event we run, so we can truly understand what moves the dial and what we could do better. We are constantly learning. We have one rule when it comes to events; do fewer, better. In fact that reflects the whole team ethos.
- Your company’s owned media
We are in the marketing industry so of course it’s vital we are able to market ourselves on our own channels. They are the first place that any potential customer looks when they hear our name and the best place to shout about some of the excellent work the Adludio team and clients are delivering on a daily basis. As I mentioned, we’re laying the foundations for a new campaign next year, so if you want to be the first in the know, make sure you’re following us on LinkedIn and our socials.
