Katie Ford
Chief Client Officer at Amobee

Marketers are constantly under pressure to do more with less, across channels and devices. We spoke to Katie Ford, Chief Client Officer at Amobee, to understand the biggest challenges for technology platforms in meeting the needs of customers.

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Tell us about your role at Amobee and the team/technology you handle.

In my role as Chief Client Officer, I oversee Amobee’s strategic agency and brand solutions, helping solve challenges for marketers who are under increased pressure to do more with less, across more channels and devices, faster than ever before. With my background on the agency side, leading Publicis-owned, Spark Foundry, I have a 360-degree view of the business and understand the needs of both the marketer and the agency. With Amobee, we’re able to serve those needs with an innovative, efficient and data-driven approach to engage consumers on a global scale.

I lead the introduction and adoption of Amobee platform with agency and brand clients, partnering with them to proactively address their business challenges through flexible, customized, innovative products and technology solutions. We work to establish successful, long-term partnerships through a client-centric approach with brand, agency and technology working together to identify opportunities and affect change.

We’re at an important inflection point for the ad-tech industry, and for branding and advertising as well. Technology is allowing us to deliver relevant messages at scale, using data intelligence to be more precise in the delivery and support creative solutions on how to enhance the consumer experience. It’s an exciting time and Amobee is driving the transformation between technology, data and creativity.

What draws you to DMEXCO?

Each year, DMEXCO is an excellent venue for the tech-savvy, key players in digital business, marketing and innovation from both sides of the Atlantic to come together. It’s an important industry event, where our clients can learn and stay informed about the next-generation technology and solutions that will directly affect their business.

The chance to meet face-to-face with clients and prospects is incredibly valuable to me and our extended team, which now includes Videology. Advertisers are looking to understand how the right technology partner can help them expertly manage data to inform everything from insights to activation in a way that advances their business and delivers on important metrics.

You can’t talk about the next generation of advertising without addressing the rise of Advanced TV and what it means for the ongoing convergence of digital media. The industry is at an important flashpoint with addressable TV advertising and our recent acquisition of assets from Videology allows Amobee to lead the digital and TV convergence, bridging TV and digital ad data to help marketers meet growing consumer demand for premium video and connected TV content. We’re delivering next-generation advertising solutions for leading brands and agencies by allowing them to see across the walled gardens to better understand and orchestrate the consumer journey and understand how each channel is performing.

Which key events in Marketing Technology, OTT and Programmatic Advertising industry have made the biggest impact on your business and how?

With the converging world of digital media, we’re seeing an expansion of consumer touchpoints and new ways for marketers to reach people. Consumers are living increasingly fluid, improvised lives, deftly moving from one device to the next with little predictability. Marketers have to decipher their habits and develop smart cross-device targeting that reaches them no matter what screen they’re viewing. The task for technology partners is to solve for that fragmentation by bringing channels — programmatic, social and TV — together to help marketers develop elevated, omnichannel strategies that are driven by deep, data-driven analytical insights to reach consumers and achieve their business goals.

We’re going to continue to see a more vertical integration of technology stacks and Advanced TV experiences begin to scale. With that, the right applications of AI are already helping to better automate buying and optimization to free the marketing and agency teams to focus more on strategy, messaging and creative. Science and technology should power the art of marketing, not replace it; you absolutely must have the right data and the right technology but without the right team interpreting the analytics and developing the strategy, AI alone will not move the needle for your business.

With Advanced TV, we’ve reached critical mass for consumer adoption of video on demand and other convergent media formats as Advanced TV budgets continue to grow as part of overall spend. Seeing these emerging trends, and by adding Videology’s leading technology, we’ve consolidated programmatic, TV and social on our platform, empowering advertisers to use data to optimize campaigns and spend across all digital mediums.

What are the biggest challenges for technology platforms in fully meeting the needs of customers?

Two key challenges have emerged: the rise of walled gardens, with those walls only getting higher, and having the ability to provide a fully integrated suite of services that reflect a true end-to-end omnichannel platform with the central component centered on strategic planning and ensuring marketers have the right intelligence, data and insights to inform decision making.

If you’re a marketer in this environment, you know which search and social sites are considered must-buy. But we’ve seen a demand for marketers wanting an alternative and the ability to better understand consumers beyond the walled gardens that have historically captured the most advertising dollars.

The challenge for tech providers is that they now have to solve how to plan, activate and optimize for social, TV and programmatic across a fragmented landscape in order to meet the needs of marketers. Being able to make sense of the data and connect the dots empowers a higher level of consumer understanding that, in turn, creates an ability to cultivate a highly personalized consumer journey. The best platforms are ultimately able to solve this fragmentation puzzle by helping brands and agencies drive results with solutions designed to orchestrate execution across multiple channels powered by strategic planning and applying deep, contextual insights to achieve the KPIs that matter most.

What is the best B2C client acquisition model for technology companies today?

It’s no secret that marketers want to partner with a tech company they can trust and one that is transparent about how they’ll work together to develop tailored, right-sized solutions that will help marketers reach their goals and solve the specific challenge they’re looking to address. As a vendor, you have to make it easy for marketers to test your platform and see first-hand the analytics and performance they’ll be utilizing. We’ve seen a shift from technology-based selling to solution-based selling; not every marketer needs every capability that a vendor provides. But they need a technology partner who is ready to help them scale and lead them in a forward-moving, phased approach to add new solutions to the mix as their needs change. Any technology partner should stand ready to work together with a brand or agency to accelerate their digital transformation when the time is right.

Tag a person from the industry whose answers you would like to read here —

Geoff Ramsey, Chief Content Officer and Co-founder, eMarketer

Would you like us to recommend you as a speaker to conferences relevant to your technology?

Yes.

Thanks for chatting with us, Katie.

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