“I would not have changed my decision for leaving a very stable career at L’Oreal with a great trajectory to make the leap of faith to come to a fast growing company, that’s very dynamic and has afforded me opportunities that I don’t think any other company would have been able to offer,” says Brian Murdock, Director, M&A Integration at MediaMath.
From working for one of the biggest cosmetics companies, L’Oreal, to transitioning into the adtech industry, Murdock started his professional journey on Wall Street.
Studying business management with a concentration on finance and investments at Marymount Manhattan College in New York City, Murdock always wanted to work in finance. Having a knack for numbers, Murdock’s first job was working in the synthetic CDO market. But in 2008, the global financial crisis occurred.
“With the crash of 2008, I actually lost my job and it was a great time for me to really wake up and realize that I didn’t really like finance and what I was doing.”
His next move? Murdock stepped into the world of marketing for the next four years as a brand manager at L’Oreal as he was always drawn to the strategic side of owning a brand as well as having the opportunity to learn the overall component of how a business ran and operated.
“I loved it,” Murdock says. “I was responsible for building the strategy and making sure that the business was going to grow, be competitive and gain market share. And as a marketer, running a very large brand, I was exposed to not only the evolution but the power of digital media and how that plays within marketing.”
Moving over to the programmatic side, Murdock could see the potential with digital advertising and wanted to be part of the game. At the time, he wasn’t looking to change careers but an opportunity arose at MediaMath. “L’Oreal’s’ a big corporation, that’s how they function, and I wanted to take a risk from a career perspective to really branch out and try a smaller company. Try to take a risk as someone young in my career and be part of that transformation that was taking place within the digital environment.”
In 2014, Murdock joined MediaMath in the product commercialization group where he owned the social portion of the business and was responsible for developing strategies to ensure the social business grew as the company scaled. From there, he moved over to the corporate development team where he worked on the company’s latest acquisition, Spree7 — a leading German digital media consulting and programmatic implementation firm.
“In my new role I was to develop a strategy on how the newly acquired business would fit into MediaMath so I actually moved to Berlin and was there for three to four months, implementing the strategy and integrating the business into MediaMath. That was one of the highlights of my career thus far, I worked with amazing people.” Based in Berlin, Murdock was also able to go back and forth to London to go meet with the team there.
“MediaMath is a very dynamic company. And as we have grown so quickly, it’s very interesting to be in a global role at a global company because it has afforded me the ability to travel to other offices. I’ve loved being able to visit different offices around the world – seeing how different they all are but still having the same values and core components that make MediaMath such a great company to work for.”