Damien Alzonne, Director, Platform Solutions for MediaMath France, was recently interviewed by French publication Viuz about the significance of programmatic skills in an increasingly fast-paced digital industry, which continues to innovate. In the interview, Damien discusses how to combat the programmatic skills gap for marketers, MediaMath is not only launching programmatic training in France, but rolling it out across the globe.
Below is a translated summary of this interview – you can also view the original interview in French here.
Viuz: Why has MediaMath launched this programmatic training project?
Damien: MediaMath noticed that in France in early 2011 – with the growth of programmatic – it was proving difficult for the company as well as our own clients to recruit the right talent. We believe that learning should be at the heart of corporate strategy and arming your employees with the skills necessary for not only personal development but ultimately business success and ROI, in a demanding and constantly evolving industry, is essential.
So, we decided to implement training through the “New Marketing Institute” (NMI), a MediaMath company – with the aim of evangelising the sector and programmatic advertising practices. The idea was to develop a strong educational centre that goes beyond the inner circle of specialists and thereby extends to the broader public – with the value of upholding best practices and keeping in line with the level of service and support that MediaMath offers its customers.
Simply put, we are launching this training because there are not enough marketers with programmatic trading skills, which impacts recruitment and development of the industry. Our goal is to prepare the new generation of programmatic marketers.
Viuz: Describe what sort of training is offered?
Damien: The training programs can be completed online or in person with a view to become certified, enabling MediaMath employees, customers and anyone else who is interested in learning about programmatic. To date, over 5500 certifications have been issued, so more than 1500 in 2015!
NMI offers three modules and certification levels:
The first module is an Introduction to Digital Marketing and focuses on the evolution of digital advertising to programmatic, a general explanation of the sector, stakeholders and procurement models and also provides an introduction to the most basic aspects of online advertising, starting with the vocabulary.
The second module is divided into two stages, ‘TerminalOne for Beginners’ looks at MediaMath’s Marketing Operating System TerminalOne ™ and offers an introduction to the platform that covers campaign setup, strategy setup, pixels, targeting, and the basics of reporting, while ‘TerminalOne Advanced’ is a deeper dive that explores yield optimisation, insights, campaign strategies, “The Brain” and advanced reporting tactics.
The third certification module, ‘Omni-Channel Certification’ is a multi-module certification course on the technologies that marketers need to know in order to be truly literate in the programmatic space. We provide three separate tracks on tactics that go beyond regular display: video, social, and mobile. We recommend mastering each omni-channel offering to gain full-funnel knowledge of the digital ecosystem. Another NMI offering is the “Marketing Engineer Program”, which aims to train young graduates by immersing them in a department rotation for six months, many of which result in employment at MediaMath or with our customers.
Viuz: Tell me about future projects.
Damien: We are launching an initiative to bring us closer to colleges and universities to incorporate programmatic marketing in higher education. The idea is to offer access to our tools in TerminalOne to allow media students and future traders to manage their first budgets (such as marketing activity in their school).
Aligned with this, we are developing bridges between the New Marketing Institute and professional training institutions to offer relevant training in programmatic – and as such we are building a “Train The Trainer” program to also prepare future trainers as programmatic experts.