Florian Gramshammer is Managing Director EMEA for performance marketing technology company Impact. He previously held senior positions in companies including CJ Affiliate by Conversant, Gartner, and immediately prior to Impact was MD of IgnitionOne.
Who is your digital hero?
Luke Judge, CEO at Incubeta UK and US who has risen to a CEO position by being a genuinely smart person and is very ‘human’ in his approach to managing business relationships. Luke believes in the power and importance of creating real partnerships to do business.
I have always bought into his idea of partnering rather than selling and respect how he has always approached business from a partnership angle and has used that to be successful in his career – as well as to help others be successful in their careers.
What has he done to win hero status in your eyes?
Despite his meteoric rise through to board level, Luke is heroic in my eyes for the brave step he took in taking time out from his career to volunteer; leading an independent volunteer group which aided refugees who were fleeing from war-torn countries like Syria and Yemen.
How has his heroism helped drive digital?
Throughout his career across the last two decades, Luke has been outspoken on various issues and is a driving force behind showing how you can deliver exceptional growth in digital marketing.
He is not afraid to be innovative, diverse and show how ambitious growth plans can really pay off.
What are the biggest challenges in media we need another hero to solve?
Now more than ever we need people who are totally attuned to valuing partnerships and deploying them to bring commercial success to the industry. The challenge that we are currently facing is a global dip in the economy and we need heroes that are both commercially astute and considerate of hardships.
What we will need to see is business leaders who show how you can come back stronger and deliver initiatives that are both sustainable and durable.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
I am most proud of an initiative implemented by the Impact EMEA team in March 2019 called Positive Impact, a genuine team effort that came from a real desire to want to try and improve our wider community. Each quarter, any member of our team can put forward a suggestion for something we can do to make a positive impact, either within our company or, more often, in the world outside our doors.
Then, as a group, we apply our time and skills to make it happen.
One of our mottos is We Embody Passion and the essence of Positive Impact is to harness the passions of our team, and then use our resources to take up the causes they care about. So far, our Positive Impact achievements have included donating food from our weekly lunches to a local soup kitchen, organising an ITea Party to teach elderly local residents about online security and troubleshoot their computing challenges, regularly donating blood, as a group, to our local blood bank and introducing the Impact Piggy Bank which raises funds for the chosen charities.
I am definitely most proud of this joint heroic effort to have created a framework for an ongoing pattern of activism that has woven new creative and charitable strands through the fabric of our company.
