5 Qualities I’d Look For in an Adtech Marketing Leader

I often talk to adtech CEOs about how to start marketing programs from scratch or rethink an existing marketing department. Part of that discussion is who should be spearheading the program and what that person should bring to the table.

Here are five qualities I’d look for in an adtech marketing leader if I were an adtech CEO. This is by no means exhaustive, but let’s start with these five, and you can yell at me about what I missed.

Ability to See the Big Picture

This applies across business divisions, and marketing is no exception. Yet I think marketing is especially prone to a focus on tactics.

Often, when people talk about marketing strategy, they are really talking about tactics. For example, your strategy shouldn’t be about what blog posts you’ll be writing in a given month. It’s about the business objective marketing is supporting, the messages that will differentiate you and galvanize customers, and, finally, the channels and assets, or tactics, you’ll use to disseminate those messages.

Most marketers are stuck in tactics — this manifests not only in what they focus on (i.e. deliverables) but also the way they approach day-to-day work. And the largest, ostensibly most sophisticated companies are the biggest offenders. How many adtech companies are there with 10+ marketing people workshopping individual lines of blog posts and press releases to death, yet no one hears from them or knows what differentiates them from competitors? That’s a strategic failure.

A marketing leader should be focused on the big picture and have the ability to refocus others on it. What business objectives are we supporting? What is the message — and why? Finally, where and how are we distributing it? These are the questions that matter. A single line in a blog post almost always isn’t worth a marketing executive’s time. Yet people really get lost in the minutiae.

Personal Philosophy on What Makes Adtech Marketing Successful

The no. 1 reason marketing troubles so many adtech companies is that it involves a lot of uncertainty that cannot be resolved, and CEOs and CFOs are uncomfortable with that. To mitigate uncertainty, CEOs (as well as some marketing leaders and agencies who cave to them) come up with bullshit metrics to define marketing success.

Leads. PR placements. Impressions. It’s not that any of these metrics is meaningless. It’s that they’re part of a story, and savvy marketing leaders are able to synthesize and contextualize them to help business leaders understand whether marketing is contributing to business success overall.

The way my collaborator Paul Knegten, the former CMO of Beeswax and Outbrain, puts it is that companies should look for a preponderance of evidence to understand whether marketing is working. Are they getting qualified leads? Are relevant people (e.g. potential customers) commenting on their social content? Is the press covering them? Are customers and peers increasingly saying, “Oh, yeah, I saw you on that podcast, at that event, and in that article. You guys are everywhere.” In that event, marketing is likely working — it’s doing the job of building your reputation and relationships.

To be clear, this doesn’t apply equally across different types of organizations. If you’re doing direct-response paid advertising for a $10 product, marketing success will be much more data driven and clear cut. But if you’re trying to achieve the aim of most adtech marketing — building trust, differentiation, and awareness to generate more relationships and close bigger deals faster — then you’ll never capture marketing’s value on a dashboard.

A good marketing leader shouldn’t run from this inconvenient truth. They should say it with their chest out and help you understand how to gauge adtech marketing success. Because if they’re just feeding you discrete data points, they are likely hiding behind easily manipulated tactical successes to avoid having a genuine, hard, big-picture conversation.

Skill for Differentiated Storytelling

The primary marketing challenge adtech companies face is commoditization. What differentiates one SSP from another? Who the hell knows is generally the answer. (People actually have plenty of answers, but guess what, all of them say the same things.) That’s a problem for every SSP, whether they already have high market share and want to pull away from the pack or are looking to break through.

Customers are the guide. What do your customers love about your company? Many of them will have switched from a competitor, or maybe they were using a lo-fi solution beforehand (e.g. spreadsheets). How do they compare you to the alternatives? What terms do they use to describe you? How do different personas (e.g. ad ops pro and CRO) think about the value?

A differentiated message capitalizes on a connection between the product and the customer that competitors are neglecting or don’t offer. For example, let’s say you’re a business intelligence platform that helps ad ops pros aggregate and normalize data across dozens of SSPs and other sell-side systems. Your customers tell you that, before using your product, they had to spend half their Monday manually aggregating data. And the competitors aren’t accurate enough to spare them that manual work, either. Your overarching message might be Take Back Monday.

Pressed to identify what differentiates their company from competitors, a lot of people, not just marketers, would rattle off a list of product features. That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. The best attempts at differentiation are stories that capture both something the customer viscerally cares about and something that distinguishes the company from its rivals.

Bias for Action

Most adtech marketing organizations get bogged down by uncertainty or perfectionism and simply don’t do enough stuff. They would be better served by a bias for action.

Prioritizing action doesn’t mean you stop being strategic. Actually, seeing the big picture (point number one) and having a bias for action work together.

My biggest pet peeve is marketers who get lost in meaningless minutiae. To me, this is a bias for inaction combined with a failure to see the big picture. You’re getting lost in the details that won’t affect success and prevent us from making an impact.

For my money, the best marketing leaders answer the big strategic questions — what’s the objective? What’s the message? Where and how are we distributing it? — and then take action by creating campaigns and content to advance the message and meet their objectives.

Modern Approach

The fifth quality I’d want to see in adtech marketing leaders is a modern approach. By that, I mean they understand the wide gamut of channels and assets at their company’s disposal to build a reputation and generate more conversations with potential customers and those who influence them.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the marketing leader or strategist personally needs to be a Twitter, LinkedIn, or TikTok star. But it does mean they should get that AdWeek is only going to write a story about you once in a blue moon, and people have webinar and white paper fatigue, so those methods, while still valuable, can’t constitute the entirety of a marketing program.

The best marketing leaders aren’t afraid of things they don’t personally use or understand. They are eager to understand them, recruit people who use them adeptly, and capitalize on every possible opportunity to grow their company’s reputation and relationships (which is how marketing contributes to sales and grows organizations). The vast majority of adtech companies do not meet this bar. That’s a problem for a marketing leader to solve.