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Careers Culture DIGITAL MARKETING Media People Uncategorized

Connecting the Dots: An Economics Major to Designer and Everything in Between

June 30, 2016 — by MediaMath

Economics. Journalism. Graphic Design. Ad Tech.

These may seem like completely different career fields but for Peter Noah, Manager, Global Creative at MediaMath, his multifaceted background has helped shape what he does professionally today.

A graduate of UCLA, Noah earned a degree in Economics, with the intent that learning the fundamentals of supply and demand would provide a broad enough base to go in several different career directions. But entering the real world meant more than practicality.

“Towards the end of my time at UCLA, I realized that I was really interested in creative expression and I had always had a knack for creative writing,” Noah said. “So I thought at the time, journalism would be something I really needed to pursue because it would be the ultimate way of expressing myself creatively in a medium that I had an affinity toward.”

So right out of college, Noah spent a year interning at the Los Angeles Times and eventually got a job in Allentown, PA working as a general assignment reporter for the local paper The Morning Call. But his reporting days were to come to a close when Noah realized late in the game that just because he wanted to write, did not necessarily mean he needed to be a reporter.

“I was still interested in the act of creative expression, but I realized that I needed to make some adjustments in terms of what I was doing and why I was pursuing reporting.”

After leaving sleepy Allentown for the cosmopolitan city of New York, Noah discovered the world of web design as a producer for Popular Science. He helped to build an online version of the magazine, implementing ad tags on the website. That was the light bulb moment where Noah started focusing on advertising and marketing design. His next move? Parsons School of Design.

Shortly after putting together a portfolio, Noah landed a job at Saatchi & Saatchi Advertising Agency as a junior art director. He stayed in agency life for a few years and put his economics education to use, working with finance-related clients. Noah then decided to move to in-house marketing. As his career was headed towards financial services, Noah came across a job opening at MediaMath for a senior designer position.

“What I didn’t realize at the time was that MediaMath was this perfect combination of opportunities for me that tapped into all of the experiences I had in the past,” Noah said. “And it wasn’t until a few months after I got in that I realized it was going to really let me take advantage of everything I had learned to date in my career.”

Today, as manager of the global creative team, Noah works on everything from designing ads for a journal to designing a booth for an upcoming exhibit. Working with a talented group of individuals, Noah is now in a unique position to help develop MediaMath’s brand identity in a meaningful way.

As Noah looks back on his career trajectory, what would he tell his younger self?

“No regrets.”

“I think I’ve always believed that all of your experiences count. I believe even when you’ve had bad experiences, it becomes part of the fabric of who you are. It makes you stronger, it makes you more well-informed, it gives you a broader perspective of the world and it makes you more attuned with how people work. It just makes you a better person.”

Careers DIGITAL MARKETING Media People Uncategorized

6 Million Americans Will Take an Online Class This Year. Here’s Why.

June 9, 2016 — by MediaMath

Maybe you’ve noticed a recent trend: lately, it seems like more and more of your coworkers are carving time into their schedules to attend a webinar or a remote class. According to Pew Research, three out of four adults consider themselves to be lifelong learners, and 63 percent attend at least one training course per year. Babson Survey Research Group has seen a 3.9 percent year-over-year increase in the amount of people taking online courses in the United States.

Instead of investing in costly higher education, more and more adults are taking education into their own hands. This makes sense as 57 percent of managers are concerned that they will not have the skills needed to succeed in five years, and a staggering 96 percent of entry-level employees believe that college did not fully prepare them for the workforce, according to CLO Media. Employees who care about their future are not content to fade into obsolescence.

In fact, the advantages of remote sessions are tremendous. Let’s take a look at the top four reasons why people attend online sessions.

Democratizing Knowledge

Anybody can take a remote session. There are no admissions processes, no applications. The knowledge is available to anybody who would like to sign up for a course. At the New Marketing Institute (NMI), we believe that truly everybody should have the information they need to perform their jobs more efficiently. Our sessions don’t care where you are, what your background is, or who you are, just that you come eager to learn.

Global Information Share

The internet has changed the way we live and work, particularly the way we communicate across the world. That may seem like a very facile statement, but it cannot be underestimated. As a facilitator, I have taught professionals from all over: South Africa, Singapore, Japan, India, France, Brazil, Argentina, Germany…the list goes on. Having people everywhere learn how to speak the same “language,” in our case, the language of digital marketing, is vital to creating better global teams.

Minimal Time Commitment

As we mentioned earlier, higher education is time-consuming and expensive. The average graduate school requires years of commitment and can cost upwards of $40,000. A university’s continuing education space is typically less costly, but still requires a time commitment of roughly 20 hours per class. Most workers don’t have that time as the pace of modern life can often be overwhelming. And, as cited above, those who have invested in higher education, still consider themselves to have gaps in their learning and were not appropriately prepared by those higher education sources. Online classes are typically concise and cost efficient, thus allowing more people to take advantage of the benefits.

Instant Feedback

One of the best advantages of live remote sessions is the ability to interact directly with the facilitator. The Q&A period is a gold standard to ensure participants retain knowledge after the session. Online live classes allow them to continue the age old practice, just via digital means. In fact, we often see shy participants more eager to participate by being able to ask questions in a relatively anonymous environment, without fear of judgment.

Research shows, there will be more and more learners to engage via these types of remote sessions. If you are curious about attending one yourself, take a look at our upcoming Emerging Trends course that runs July 13-August 10^th in partnership with the Direct Marketing Association (DMA). The series covers everything from email marketing basics to programmatic and omnichannel advertising. Additionally, stay tuned for NMI’s upcoming webinar series, launching in August.

Marketers, here is your chance to take advantage of all of the convenience and benefits that online courses provide!

Careers Culture People Technology Uncategorized

Here’s What Happens When You Give Your Employees More Independence

June 6, 2016 — by Ari Buchalter

This byline originally appeared on Fortune.

Instilling creative thinking within an organization as it grows is one of the key differentiators that turns small companies into big ones and big ones into market leaders. As companies grow—especially in the technology sector—it’s important for them to balance the need to maintain what’s been built with the need to encourage new ideas and innovations. Growth requires structure, process, and discipline to operate the business in a stable way, but also requires the organization to think creatively—even disruptively—about new problems that emerge. In our technology organization, that balancing act is top of mind, and there are three principles we follow to keep us on our toes:

Embrace a mindset of change
It starts with understanding and really embracing the fact that nothing is ever done. With whatever product we put out, customers will always want enhancements and competitors will try to outdo. Whatever internal system we’ve adopted or code we’ve written, something will come along that can do it better or faster. Whatever today’s answers are, they will eventually reach their limits, so it’s everyone’s job to be ready for what’s next. It’s not just our product that’s on version 2.0, but our hardware, our code base, our organizational structure, our individual skills—everything. Embracing change establishes a fluid and creative mindset and a focus on always getting better. We try to learn how other companies do things. We try out new computer languages and methodologies. We reserve 80 hours per employee each year for training and learning on any topics of their choosing.

We’ve learned from experience that not everyone thinks this way. We’ve seen employees wedded to a particular answer, unable to change their thought process or approach, while opportunity passes by. We know that’s not a good fit, and so we look for a change-embracing mindset when recruiting at every level.

Read the rest of the article here.

Careers Education People Technology Uncategorized

Artificial Intelligence Needs the Human Touch

May 26, 2016 — by MediaMath

This byline originally appears in the Tech section of HuffPost UK. Read an excerpt of the article below:

The robots are coming and, if media hype is to be believed, they’re going to put us all out of a job.

Predictions about the future impact of technology on our jobs sound bleak, with suggestions artificial intelligence (AI) and automation could drive global unemployment as high as 50% over the next 30 years. The UK is expected to reach this position even sooner. But those forecasting a catastrophic conflict where human intelligence is pitted against the ever-expanding might of the machines are forgetting that technology – no matter how intelligent it becomes – is ultimately designed and operated by humans.

Robots simply aren’t able to go it alone. Microsoft’s disastrous AI chat robot was supposed to become smarter through conversation, but began tweeting racist and sexist comments within a few hours without human management.

Yes, AI will soon become a huge part of many job roles, but people will always be required to pull the levers and to manage those doing so. The key is not to resist technological development, but rather to be equipped with the digital skills needed to excel alongside it.

So, what can you do to succeed in a world that increasingly depends on machines to perform tasks previously undertaken by humans?

To read the rest of the post, click here.

Careers People Uncategorized

7 Deadly Career Mistakes Developers Make

May 17, 2016 — by MediaMath

Want to avoid the most common career traps made by engineers in the adtech space? MediaMath’s VP of Engineering, Ben Donohue, shares his thoughts on how to navigate an ever-changing tech market while pursuing this professional path, via an InfoWorld article published by Paul Heltzel.

Read an excerpt of the article below:

Your expertise in one stack may make you invaluable to your current workplace — but is it helping your career? Can it hurt to be too focused on only one stack?

MediaMath’s Donohue doesn’t pull any punches on this one: “Of course it is — there’s no modern software engineering role in which you will use only one technology for the length of your career. If you take a Java developer that has been working in Java for 10 years, and all of a sudden they start working on a JavaScript application, they’ll write it differently than someone with similar years of experience as a Python developer. Each technology that you learn influences your decisions. Some would argue that isn’t a good thing — if you take a Java object-oriented approach to a loosely typed language like JavaScript, you’ll try to make it do things that it isn’t supposed to do.”

To read the full article, click here.

Careers Culture People Uncategorized

From English Major to Ad Tech (in One Generation)

April 26, 2016 — by MediaMath

The first job I took after graduating from Wesleyan University was at a publishing company. After four years of dissecting the narrative genius of Joyce, Shakespeare and Hemingway as an English Lit. major (my thesis: “Defender of the Faith: Philip Roth and the Jewish-American Experience”), I was predictably bored out of my mind at my 9-to-5. There was a lack of creative anything. The real world was too real—and I had to wear shirts with buttons and tuck them into my pants.

I got out of there fast—like less than six months—quickly jumping to a multimedia publisher as a content editor. It made sense, from the writing standpoint. I’d had minimal exposure to tech and the internet at this point. It was 1999 after all. The turning point was when we were contracted to create a website about personal finance education for young adults. I had to write the content and organize the pages thoughtfully. I went into a room and started clicking through the shell of the website. It was dynamic. It was off the page and onto the screen with a click of a button. And it was so cool.

I want to do THAT, I thought.

Thus began my foray into understanding the inner workings of the web and the early beginnings of online marketing. Through a series of serendipitous steps, I ended up really enjoying learning about the underpinnings of technology, especially the structure of the internet. I’d bounce around to a few more jobs before getting into the proverbial adtech space, as it’s known today. My roles were always client-facing and super interesting because of the diversity they afforded. I never worked with just one client or industry.

When I joined Akamai back in 2009, my technology and marketing knowledge began to converge. The first month there, I truly thought I was in a different country. I literally did not understand what people were saying. I had no grasp of the terminology being spoken around me (DNS, CNAME, 302 redirects anyone?). The “aha” moment came when I finally began to understand and speak articulately to the ways in which systems talked to one another. I started to have these moments in micro form—This is what’s literally happening behind the web page when it’s loaded.

Then it all began to make sense…And then it didn’t—because this industry is always changing.

After MediaMath acquired the advertising business that Akamai had incubated, we re-branded as Adroit Digital in 2013 and I started running Product Marketing and Commercialization (the marriage of product understanding and true go-to-market strategy) which I loved. Since Adroit was reintegrated back into MediaMath earlier this year, I’ve been leading our national sales engineering team, partnering with our North American sales team to unleash our product expertise and offer strategic support across the sales cycle. It’s been quite a journey.

My 11-year-old daughter recently asked me about my childhood, “What do you mean you didn’t have on-demand television or carry a phone around?” (No Instagram?!) It didn’t exist when I was 13, email was barely mainstream in college and I didn’t even have a portable phone until I was 23. And now it’s a necessity. It’s woven into the everyday. And this is completely changing how we do marketing, and I love being at the helm of helping marketers figure out how to fully adapt to the new and ever-changing reality—the reality that my daughter will be the always-connected, totally demanding consumer one day very soon.

But back to that 20-year-old English major for a second.

It’s funny to think about what creativity meant to me back then (when I used a—gulp—typewriter to fill out my college application forms) and what it means now. I don’t think I really knew the potential of the creative process until I got interested in technology. It sounds a little crazy, especially when naysayers shout about how all our gadgets and gizmos are making our minds idle. But I truly think technology is transformational. It’s now at the forefront of the practice of marketing, and it’s amazing. It’s forcing businesses to evolve, not just in digital and in how ads are becoming more relevant, but in how they are reorganizing themselves internally. They’re building new centers of excellence, new marketing “muscles” and adopting technologies that didn’t even exist five years ago.

How is that not inherently creative, when you’re continually disrupting the way you do things?

Careers People Uncategorized

Engagement, the X Factor of Memorable Communication

April 6, 2016 — by MediaMath — 2

Wildly successful communication requires you to engage your audience, no matter which field you’re in. Information bombards us through print, portable devices, digital displays on subway cars, buildings, highways; even in taxis (at least in New York) we are exposed to messages constantly. Who can reach us in this environment of over-exposure and heightened visual stimulus? Without some reason to linger, we rush off to the next thing. Only those who engage us win our attention long enough for us to become connected to something in their message. In my last blog post—Ad Tech, Communication and You—the focus was on clear communication and delivering your intended message. This time I want to go deeper and explore ways of making that message powerful and inspiring. Let’s make it sticky.

What is engagement?

One of my favorite definitions of engagement is: to engage someone is to bring her into the conversation. As marketers, we know that messages come and go but only some are remembered or felt. In business and marketing, it is our job to get to know who we are communicating with and bring them into the conversation. Who are they? What do they want or need? Knowing your audience is the key to engaging them, and the only way to get to know your audience is to Listen with a capital L. Through listening, we can tap into the thoughts and desires of the person with whom we are communicating, whether we are just chatting, presenting formally or marketing. In marketing, much of today’s listening occurs digitally though data, and through user-generated content from social media.

I know engagement through the act of teaching. In any learning situation, whether it’s a corporate classroom or a social learning situation, the road to engagement is the same. First, be engaged with your story and content. If you aren’t passionate, can you expect others to be? The passion you bring to the conversation draws people in for more. As the “conversation” continues, listen to your audience with full presence of mind and body. This will shape your content, allowing you to home in on the needs and wants of your audience, creating a shared experience and possibly a transformation. Engagement is “other-focused.” Why has engagement become such a pervasive hot topic? Perhaps a closer look at one of the fastest-growing areas in marketing will reveal why business, amongst other fields, is enthralled with the power of engagement.

Engagement prompts involvement

Content marketing is all about engagement and it is gaining ground in the adtech world. According to PQ Media’s Global Content Marketing Forecast 2015-2019, “Content marketing will be a $300 billion industry by 2019.” The rise of omni-channel marketing enables marketers to reach consumers everywhere they click. The problem is, just putting more content out there does not increase engagement. In fact, it seems to be having the opposite effect. The content marketing paradox is the phenomenon where generating more content produces lower returns. As more brands increase their spend on content marketing, the competition stiffens to get and keep consumer attention on your brand (for the full report from TrackMaven, click here).Where does this leave the marketer who must find a way to engage consumers?

Marketers must get very good at knowing their customers and with creating the ads that speak to their business for B2B, or their lifestyle for B2C—the effective use of programmatic native might just do the trick. Programmatic native brings together the power of purchasing superior impressions and the personalized content to which consumers have grown accustomed. In the best native campaigns, the consumer engages with the ads and the surrounding content seamlessly, generating a digital experience that supports their lifestyle or business aspirations. It’s as though the ads were born there. This level of successful engagement comes only with a lot of planning, predictive modeling and well-executed, personalized content. True engagement takes work.

Communicating in an engaging way deepens your connection, making your message meaningful and memorable. Through focused discourse, infused with passion, you can engage an audience through any media, in any field and for a variety of outcomes. Delivering seamless conversation across touchpoints for your intended audience and reacting to their reactions informs the frequency and cadence of communications. Engaging communication is possible. You must take the time to get to know your audience and deliver a message that connects them to what they need or want.

In this way, whether it’s in marketing or in life, you learn the art of engaging your audience effectively so that they will hopefully not only remember what you communicated, but also use the message to put into motion the desired action you want them to take.

Careers Culture People Uncategorized

The New Marketing Institute Employs Action-focused Approach to eLearning

March 8, 2016 — by MediaMath

It’s not what you know – it’s what you can do.

What do data, knowledge, and a coat of paint have in common? They’re all useless until you apply them.

Since its inception in 2007, MediaMath has recognized the immense potential of data technology to transform marketing. With the rapid growth of big data, marketers have witnessed profound changes in the way advertising is bought and sold and how campaigns are managed. In the pre-big data world, they could see and hear their campaigns’ performance, but it was a vexingly one-sided conversation. Marketers were left to reflect on their wins and losses and hope what they learned had some value in the future.

Data technology, and to a greater extent all technology, was and still is useless without application. Even the most precise and relevant marketing data equates to nothing if it can’t be applied in a meaningful way. However, long passed are the days of marketers identifying targets, analyzing trends, preparing their message, negotiating deals, and ultimately wishing their campaigns the best after they launch. With the TerminalOne Marketing OS™, marketers can make smarter, more informed decisions in the moment on an ongoing basis. In a very real sense, they can now speak back as their campaigns speak to them.

The New Marketing Institute (NMI) believes the same principle should hold true for education. Using an action-focused approach to online training, NMI emphasizes applicable skills rather than knowledge alone as its end goal. From the time instruction is planned to its delivery, trainers work toward what learners should be able to do, not simply what they’ll know. In platform training courses, for example, online learners engage in live, interactive sessions focused on building and managing digital marketing campaigns for fictional advertisers. The courses cover key concepts related to TerminalOne, but knowing about the software is not the primary objective. The purpose of these courses is to build skills needed to use TerminalOne to its fullest potential. For this reason, trainers employ a learner-centric model in which the participants, not the facilitators, drive the sessions by raising points of discussion, making setup and optimization recommendations for various campaign scenarios, and sharing with one another their own background and experiences as they relate to course content. The result is that learners can then apply critical thinking and a thorough understanding of TerminalOne’s capabilities as they manage their own campaigns.

A common pitfall of many eLearning approaches is that they rely on passive instruction with little or no active engagement from the learner. Under this model, learners read documents or watch videos to gain information but rarely do they practice applying that information at the time. How are they to know if what they’re learning will ever translate? NMI’s online learner-driven trainings focus not just on building knowledge of digital marketing, but actively applying that knowledge. After demonstrating their skills through interactive training and online assessments, learners become certified through NMI’s Brandon Hall Excellence Award-winning Certification programs. Also recognized as a Brandon Hall Excellence Award winner, the Marketing Engineer Program offers hands-on industry experience, providing participants with all the tools needed to be successful in the ever-evolving programmatic space. Taking learning and training even a step further, NMI created the TerminalOne “Train the Trainer” program which helps digital marketers build the skills needed to educate others on TerminalOne using the same interactive, action-oriented approach.

In both Ad Tech and EdTech, what’s of ultimate importance are results. MediaMath looks to drive informed, actionable results not only in its clients but in the industry as a whole. After all, it would be nothing short of hypocrisy to stress the importance of applied knowledge while failing to act upon one’s own. MediaMath uses its stance as an industry leader to better understand and meet the needs of the programmatic market. Joe Zawadzki, MediaMath CEO, was recently named chairman of the IAB Data Center of Excellence, which aims to “help advertisers and marketers operationalize their data assets while maintaining quality, transparency, accountability, and consumer protection.” As MediaMath’s educational arm, NMI reflects this commitment to action in its approach to education. It is their mission to educate, engage, and empower the modern marketer, with the third component being perhaps the most essential.

Careers People Uncategorized

Employee Spotlight: From Math Teacher to Digital Marketing Student

March 4, 2016 — by MediaMath — 1

For almost two years, I spent my professional life teaching mathematics and coaching the boys’ soccer and basketball teams at a boarding school in Maryland. Last summer, I left the education field and entered the ad tech space, and now work at MediaMath headquarters in New York City as a Specialist for the Programmatic Strategy and Optimization team.

This may seem like an odd transition to some, but the move made perfect sense to me.

My good friend Dan Wissinger from college (who happens to be my current roommate and works on the Product team) told me about the Marketing Engineer Program — a three-month digital marketing training program offered by the New Marketing Institute at MediaMath — and thought I’d make a great fit. He was right.

The program exposed me to various professional development opportunities where I got to work on different digital marketing campaigns, get trained on the TerminalOne Marketing OS platform and work with clients. It was the client engagement component that allowed me to put my interpersonal skills, honed during my teaching career, to good use. I soon realized that I was drawn toward the Platforms Solutions team at MediaMath, which deals directly with clients and helps them strategize and optimize their advertising campaigns.

Now, talking with individuals who run digital marketing strategies every day is definitely different from dealing with dozens of teenage boys. But odd as it may seem, there’s nothing more that could have prepared me to work for client services than my role teaching at a boarding school. Both my analyst and teacher roles require interaction and communication with a wide variety of people — from headmasters, parents and students to CMOs from a wide range of industries and digital heads at agencies. What I loved about the school at which I taught was its history and the core values — not unlike my current company’s “Math Values.” But unlike the eight-year-old MediaMath, my school, great as it was, did not allow much opportunity for me to innovate given it was such a long-established, fixed structure. Towards the end of my last school year, I knew I was ready to be somewhere more dynamic, both in geography and skill set, that allowed me to grow within an evolving industry.

With my love for learning, the marketing world has challenged me to react and respond faster than an advertising pixel loads on a website page. It’s a totally different classroom in terms of the unpredictability of my day-to-day, whereas at school, everything was somewhat foreseeable. Now, instead of me telling a kid how to solve a math equation, I’m the one asking the questions. Each day brings a new learning, and I imagine that will continue even as I get more acquainted to my transition from advisor to the adolescents to specialist to the advertisers.

Careers Education People Uncategorized

Talking ‘Ed-Tech’ at Boston University’s TechConnect

February 8, 2016 — by MediaMath

To many of us, going to school and getting a great education is usually the preliminary part of life, leading to a specific destination as the end result. The true key to success, however, is the inherent desire to continue to want to learn, innovate and integrate education into any stage of life. This holds true to many of the students Vanessa DiSpena and I interacted with at Boston University over the last weekend in January—a profound group of curious lifelong learners. As part of a partnership with Boston University, New Marketing Institute (NMI) sponsors the MS-MBA Association through the Questrom School of Business.

This was an eye-opening day, bringing together an intelligent group of 75 graduate students and working business professionals curious about the future of technology and its visible impact on an ever-changing consumer world. The roster of corporate attendees, including Disney, Priceline and Lyft, touched on the subject of transformation in platform technology and the rise of entrepreneurship from varying business models. With a strong insight into TerminalOne, Vanessa was the perfect spokesperson for NMI, representing MediaMath’s core offering as a part of the Product panel.

After an afternoon filled with questions on platform models, client interactions and cyber security, Vanessa and I had a chance to wind down and reflect on the experience. What struck us both was a quote from an up-and-coming entrepreneur who said, “If you are completely happy with your product when you release it, you’ve released it too late.” Think about it.

What intrigues me the most about that statement is how it applies to more than just technology. As MediaMath’s product is taking on a rapidly changing and competitive market, so too is every individual within the organization. We, as a growing company, and as individuals are never 100 percent ready to face the challenges of the industry and what the real world brings. It was really a turning point in the conversation at TechConnect as the topic of preparedness stood out the most among students and panelists alike. How ready will you ever be to meet the demands of a class, a job, or the market? The value of NMI and what its training content provides was truly felt in that ‘ah-ha’ moment. The willingness to dive in to the unknown, be it new technology or an unpredictable external world will always seem challenging at first, but the value of experience remains immeasurable.

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