Our Employee Spotlight series is designed to provide a deeper look into our talent here at Annalect across all different roles, teams, and experience levels. You can expect to learn about passions inside and outside of our office walls.
What is your current role at Annalect?
As a Director in the Strategy Consulting group, my role is to make sure our clients know why and how the technology they are using helps them achieve their business and marketing goals.
Describe a passion you have for the type of work you do and how Annalect helps to feed your passion?
I personally believe the consulting model is the future of ad and media agencies. I also believe that ad and media agencies have an important role for clients and the advertising industry for the foreseeable future, so it is very exciting for me to participate at the nexus of our industry’s evolution.
Can you think of a project you were a part of that you really enjoyed? Why?
Early on in my tenure at Annalect, we did measurement strategy work for Cars.com. This did not end as yet another deck (although there were some slides, I’m not a barbarian), but rather as me facilitating a conversation with the Cars.com clients about what their measurement strategy should be, the benefits and drawbacks of each particular strategy, and helping lead them to a conclusion. Consulting fun!
What made you first enter your field? Was it planned or unplanned?
I knew I wanted to be in marketing, but I didn’t know what that meant. I started out as an ad sales rep for a small magazine publisher with no website and quickly realized that the internet was the likely media growth vehicle (nailed it) and I was in the wrong place. A few months later, cajoled my way into being hired as a digital media coordinator at Agency.com in early 2005 off of a Monster.com listing. It was a different time back then.
What advice would you give to someone just starting his/her career in your field?
Two things:
- Learn everybody else’s job before yours. Advertising is quite often a pain in the butt, so knowing how the whole operation works, from clients to impressions to reporting to whatever else, is hugely valuable. Plus, media planners that don’t know how an ad server works really grinds my gears!
- Be comfortable in the unknown, and embrace it. Things change. There are no right answers, only reasonably-justified-answers-for-the-time-being. Be okay with that, and learn to use it to your advantage; i.e. YOU are the expert – act like it.
What do you like to do when you’re not at work?
While my character has a very interesting backstory, it is less interesting now. My favorite thing to do at the moment is coach my six-year-old son’s baseball and soccer teams. I worked very hard to install a gegenpress for his soccer team (a tactic in which a team, after losing possession of the ball, immediately attempts to win back possession rather than falling back to regroup) and extreme shifts for his baseball team – and they better darn well execute it properly… or, it is just fun to play with kids that don’t really care if they win or lose and are simply having fun being outside and playing ball.
