Jamie Toward (JT) is Head of Data at Teads in the UK. He has previously held roles at financial publisher Matching Hat (acquired by Incisive Media), the Omnicom content agency Redwood BBDO, MEC (now Wavemaker) and Karmarama (now part of Accenture Song). He is passionate about helping businesses get better by using data, and about helping people not be scared of maths.
Who is your digital hero?
Author William Gibson for writing Neuromancer and for giving us the phrase “The future is already here…it’s just not evenly distributed” – so true…
Justin Taylor, MD at Teads UK – which sounds like I’m brown nosing the boss, but I don’t work for him. We’ve worked together for the best part of 20% of Justin’s lifetime (Happy 50th Young JT) and we’ve achieved some seriously good stuff together. It also means he’s put up with me for that long. But because he’s tried to steal the JT moniker it can’t be him – there’s only one JT on the UK digital scene…
Heroes should be mythical beings and ideally unsung. So, I’m going for the person known only as “AdOps”.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
AdOps truly keep our world spinning. While sales people, strategists, planners and product people hog the limelight, backslapping each other at awards ceremonies, writing “Thought Leadership” articles for the industry press and glorying in the reflected light of their own ideas, AdOps makes it real.
What have they done to win hero status in your eyes?
AdOps make everything the rest of the digital media industry think of turn into reality. AdOps are like magicians who can take an idea someone else has had and turn it into a series of line items.
They do that in this calm and composed manner. While they moan in a truly heroic way they never seem to let any of the rest of us down. When a Digital Strategist comes up with a really ground breaking idea, AdOps end up turning it into 48 line items that will deliver investment, creative and results.
And that happens with barely anybody noticing, people rarely say thank you to them with enough gusto…so I’m doing that for the entire industry.
How has their heroism helped drive digital?
Are you kidding me? AdOps does it all…they’re the people who actually do the hard work. They’ve driven forward the whole of digital media by making digital media happen. There would, literally, be no campaigns without them and they’re utterly under-valued in our industry.
More seriously, AdOps continually make things better (by definition). In an age of AI they’re still the people watching the numbers, tweaking things the industry hasn’t automated yet and continually gaining those tiny increments of efficiency in digital media that all add up to it working better than it did before.
What are the biggest challenges in digital we need another hero to solve?
I think we’ve not done a good enough job in educating the public about how content appears on screens, how it needs to be funded and their massively important role in that.
I really hope someone can do that, to balance consumer perception, privacy, regulation, technology and business models that give us something sustainable into the future.
What is your most heroic personal achievement so far in digital?
Still. Being. Here.
I produced my first website (hand coded HTML) in 1996 and I’m still in the industry nearly 30 years later
I am a proud member of the “Media Coffin Dodgers Society” and a part of what some of my colleagues refer to as “The Data Death Twins” – that’s me and my boss James Colborn (and he’s not even 50 yet – so I think this is unfair on him).
But I love the industry and the people in it. It energises me every day to think about “how do we do it better”, “how do we do something new”, “Oh my word…the by-product of that thing we did is even more valuable than the thing we did in the first place” (never underestimate the value of accidentally discovering gold when you’re doing something else…where there’s muck there’s brass).
During that 30-ish years I’ve worked in agencies, publishers and platforms, I’ve gone from doing “Content” to doing AdTech…all the while still working in “Digital”. So, I think my most heroic achievement is simply being able to stay interested long enough to forge two or three different careers out of it.
