NDA’s Marketing the Marketers series talks to the marketing and comms leaders behind the success of our leading companies. Next up is Vanessa O’Connell, Marketing Director at Nano Interactive. She has over 20 years marketing experience across brands including Freeview, Yahoo, Macmillan Cancer Support, BT & Nano Interactive.
What exactly does your job entail?
As Marketing Director at Nano Interactive, I lead all aspects of the marketing department from shaping the overall strategy through to managing the team in executing across comms, product marketing, digital, brand and events.
A key part of the role is working in close partnership with our brilliant teams in Sales, Client Success, Insights and Partnerships ensuring we’re crafting simple narratives and GTM campaigns that showcase what makes Nano unique and consistently highlighting the outcomes we bring to our clients across a range of advertiser sectors and markets.
What campaign or piece of marketing/communications are you most proud of in your career and why?
It’s hard to pick just one, having worked across media owner, ad tech, and brand direct roles. But at Nano, I led a pivotal piece of research exploring consumer attitudes towards privacy and online tracking. In ad-tech, it’s easy to become consumed by the mechanics and features of the technology and lose sight of the consumer-the very reason driving our innovations.
This research re-centred the conversation on consumers and their sentiment towards being tracked online. It delivered insights that were an eye-opener for our brand and agency clients. It has also helped strengthen our positioning in as leaders in ID-free intent – with privacy, relevance, and brand suitability at the core.
This has since led to our recent online and DOOH advertising campaign that hit the streets of New York and London last month – spotlighting the fact that with AI powered intent advertising, you’re able to unveil the true, multi-faceted elements of an individual consumer leading to far greater outcomes for brands.
Another highlight has to be from my time at Macmillan Cancer Support, where I led the brilliant partnerships marketing team. We implemented a hugely impactful integrated campaign with Boots, providing invaluable support for patients undergoing treatment. It was a really meaningful experience and an example of how marketing can make a tangible difference in people’s lives.
Who has been your biggest inspiration in your career to date and why?
I’ve been fortunate to work with many brilliant people throughout my career, but two incredible women really stand out from my time at Yahoo -Jo Tomlin (PPA) and Laura Chaibi (Roku).
They exemplify what it means to be inspirational leaders: building powerful networks, showcasing great storytelling, mentorship and doing so while being a working mum – long before hybrid or flexible working was ever a thing. Their resilience, leadership, and ability to balance it all is something I aspire to daily.
What is the biggest challenge in your sector and how is your company helping to address it?
One of the biggest challenges in our sector right now is that it’s becoming harder for brands to really ‘see’ their audiences. Between increasing privacy expectations, new regulations, and big tech platforms locking down their data, brands are losing access to the signals they’ve traditionally relied on.
Many have tried to fill the gap with broad contextual targeting or by leaning heavily on their first-party data inside walled gardens, but both approaches have real limitations – contextual can be too generic and biased, while walled gardens offer scale but very little transparency or control.
That’s where Nano come in as we’re able to offer the best of both worlds – something privacy-safe, accurate, and scalable. A complement to first party data strategies, uncovering new and often surprising affinity interests that advertisers didn’t even know existed enabling them to reach people more effectively while staying fully compliant and informing their long-term marketing strategies.
What is the biggest opportunity in your sector and how is your company helping to make the most of it?
There’s no surprise that AI is the biggest opportunity for us today. It’s reshaping not only how technology functions, but also how marketers plan, optimise, and understand audiences -unlocking new levels of efficiency, precision, and insight. At Nano, we’re embracing AI from every angle while ensuring human oversight remains deeply embedded throughout.
Our intent graph – at the core of our LIIFT™ platform – has been powered by AI since Nano’s inception. Most recently, our GenAI solution for building audience segments through Intent Prompts is transforming targeting precision. Rather than relying on simple keyword lists, we can now use natural-language descriptions of clients audience personas. The output uncovers the underlying intent patterns and affinity signals that allow brands to identify and target users who truly match their desired audience – at scale and in a privacy-safe way.
This approach also helps brands move beyond a one-dimensional view of their customers. Traditional segment data and planning techniques have long flattened audiences into overly simplistic groups. With AI, we’re enabling brands to “de-average” their audiences – revealing the multidimensional complexity of real human behaviour. And in doing so, we’re helping them turn that depth of insight into a meaningful competitive advantage.
How important, and why, are the following in helping you promote your own company?
The press
The trade press remains vital for our industry – it’s where clients, agencies, and brands go to stay on top of trends, forecasts, insights, and opinions. It’s a key component of our marketing mix, providing a credible platform to share our perspectives, amplify our successes and drive quality thought leadership.
Events
I’ve always valued face-to-face engagement as a fundamental part of B2B marketing – not only as a way to strengthen existing relationships but excellent for lead gen and bringing the brand to life. They’re becoming more and more important as a means to humanise what companies in our space do and bring to life the creativity that often gives brands the edge over competitors. Our industry is lucky to have world-class events, as well as smaller, more boutique formats that foster meaningful connections and create memorable experiences.
Owned media
Our owned content – whether whitepapers, research reports, or video – has huge power in building our narrative. We’re demonstrating that in our recent owned media project ‘The Future of Advertising’ designed to bring the human voice to own case studies. It brings an emotive and relatable edge from the lens of our internal experts and clients.
