OpenAP: Building a Marketing Team from Scratch

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Brittany Slattery, chief marketing officer at advanced TV advertising company OpenAP, covers how to build a marketing team and function from scratch. In short:

1. Start by figuring out the brand story. Who are you? Who do you want to be? Why should your customers care? And how do you reflect that story across all your GTM efforts?

2. Marketing should help sales by being the voice of the customer. Reflect the customer’s voice in your content, but also feature the customers taking big bets with your brand to show what’s possible and reward brand advocates.

3. Marketing leaders should start to build their teams by considering their own strengths and weaknesses. Fill in the gaps.

Here’s a condensed version of our conversation:

BS: I started my career in broadcast journalism. So, for me, marketing should be anchored in storytelling, whether you're B2B or B2C. I try to understand the audience first. What keeps them up at night? What is the conflict of our story? We're B2B, but at the end of the day, we're talking to humans.

Another big element that I bring to my job is I spent many years on the agency side at Publicis Groupe, IPG, and digital creative agencies. And so, from a marketing lens, I ask, “What is the experience?” How do you marry storytelling with each experience, or touchpoint, that the customer has with your brand?

JZ: A lot of B2B marketing boils down to product comparisons: Yep, we’ve got seven DSPs out here, and we’ll tell you about the minute differences among them. The buyer of that product may or may not appreciate those differences, and even if they do, it is still difficult to get attention in the marketplace if you're trying to sell on product differentiation alone. So, how do you think about that in terms of OpenAP?

BS: We're not a DSP; we're not an SSP. Our role in the ecosystem is to be the pipes and the technology and enablement arm that connects all of the individual investments that both publishers and agencies might have made in data and technology. Several years ago, you saw Publicis Groupe, IPG, and Dentsu acquiring these big data organizations from Acxiom to Merkle. How do you connect these investments across the entirety of your media buy? And how do you do that in a way that's going to drive action from that audience? Further, how do we connect those investments to the investments the TV publishers are making in their own identity spines or clean room solutions, making everything interoperable? We’re unique in this regard.

From a marketing lens and a brand lens, we have often seen ourselves as more of an ingredient brand. It's our role to connect, to partner, to collaborate, to break down silos that exist across all of these organizations. And that shows up in our brand strategy and how we talk about what we do.

JZ: Often when I talk to marketers or anyone in go-to-market, we talk about the bigger story and how you locate your brand story within industry trends. It sounds like your big story is fragmentation in media buying and measurement, and you guys are the interoperability linchpin that can make sense of this increasingly complex landscape.

BS: Yes. Plus, that story has evolved. When we started in 2017, the story was about bringing together TV networks to ensure more effective addressable ad targeting at a time when dollars were flowing rapidly to Google and Facebook. We wanted to make it simple to scale advanced audience buys so that people without kids weren’t getting throttled with diaper ads.

So, now that we’ve helped ignite that advanced way to buy, it's the ability to create more sophisticated audience targeting that matters to the business outcome. If I'm that diaper brand, I can target moms with kids under three and make sure that I can do that across multiple TV networks, screens, and platforms.

JZ: When you have a story that resonates with the market and is differentiated, you then need to figure out, “How do we get it out there?” How have you been tackling that? When you came into OpenAP, what were some of your first moves?

BS: Today, my marketing team is two and a half people. In this early-stage company, I build teams to be generalists. Right now, we don't have the scale or size to hire full-time specialists. When I joined OpenAP in 2019, I focused on brand and GTM positioning. I tried to understand and get our team aligned on the fundamental questions: Who are we? What are we doing? What do we want to be? What is our role in the ecosystem?

Once we have that, it’s about assessing what the right channels are to show up and tell that story. We've leaned heavily on events and earned media, and we have a really unique story given we have been owned and founded by TV networks as a joint venture. Then, we’ve taken on broader demand gen efforts while working hand in hand with our sales and commercial team to figure out how we can be their secret weapon.

JZ: How do you work with your sales team?

BS: It’s about creating a consistent feedback loop between the two organizations. When I was at Comscore, I worked with a leadership team who believed that at its best, marketing should be the voice of the customer, creating content that brings light to the unique challenges that they have and then figuring out ways to sell the solution from there.

Of course, we do standard sales enablement assets like one-sheets and sales deck support, but we also think about the creative things we can do to recognize clients who are leaning into new innovations and taking big bets with us. We’ve featured customers who take on increasingly ambitious campaigns, and we’ll recognize their investments with us through things like milestone marketing campaigns (swag boxes!) to humanize the brand. This helps reward the maturity of clients who grow alongside us.

JZ: You're using marketing to make customers the hero of the story is one way to put it.

BS: Yeah, absolutely.

JZ: Let's say you were talking to another marketer who was coming into an early-stage company. She’s a one-person marketing team and wants to know how to build her team from there. What's some of the advice you would give her?

BS: First and foremost, take a hard look at yourself and understand what your strengths and weaknesses are, and then hire people who might fill in some of the gaps. Those could be gaps that you just don't have the time to focus on or don't have the expertise in.

One of the first hires that I made at OpenAP majors in sales enablement content demand gen, and then she minors in a bunch of other things. We adapt based on what the business needs at a given time. Beyond that, I will tap partners to come in and fill gaps for us that she or and I might not be able to whether that’s due to bandwidth or expertise.