How have your first six months at DCMN been so far? Could you describe your role?

I joined DCMN in September last year as the Director of Product, and the journey so far has been great. My core responsibility is leading the tech and product teams within DCMN and ensuring our company’s product vision and product strategy come to life. I’m thrilled to be leading the teams focused on operational efficiency and our proprietary products: TV Cloud and DC Analytics. 

My first few weeks at DCMN were packed with lots of new information but the step-by-step onboarding plan made this transition smooth. As newbies go, I had a lot of questions but within the first few days itself, I could see how welcoming and supportive the work culture at DCMN is. Everyone was open to guiding me and this definitely helped to settle in a lot quicker. 

You joined DCMN from IPONWEB, and have built up years of experience in the ad tech industry – how has this prepared you for the role at DCMN?

Having worked on the technical side of marketing, mainly on offering solutions for optimising TV and digital channels, I gained a deep understanding of both the demand and supply side of things. DCMN is a huge growth driver for global digital brands, so my adtech background has helped shape our data-driven product strategy. The biggest change has been transitioning to a pure marketing and client focus, but I’m thoroughly enjoying it.

Could you tell us a bit more about how the tech teams at DCMN are organised?

The tech department at DCMN is made of four teams, namely DC Analytics and TV Cloud,which I lead, and the IT support and Data Warehouse teams which are led by my colleague, Dmytro Lytvyn, Head of Data Infrastructure at DCMN. 

While each team has their own core responsibilities, we’re a bunch of agile, creative and strategic thinkers that share a common goal of powering our clients’ growth. This year, specifically with our internal products, we’re looking to unify the differences between channel executions. We also have big plans for DC Analytics, so stay tuned! 

What are some of the current challenges you’re seeing clients come up against, and how are DCMN’s tech teams working to address these?

The two challenges we most often hear from our clients as well as from the industry more broadly revolve around building a multi-channel approach and how to accurately measure their campaigns. 

When it comes to building multi-channel campaigns, channels and strategies are constantly evolving. Digital and offline channels have gone through a massive transformation in the past few years, and every offline channel you can think of now has a digital counterpart: for TV, there’s CTV; for radio, there’s digital radio and so on. 

Naturally, brands want to try the newest format but often make the common mistake of siloing their channels. This in turn makes it more complicated for them to track their multi-channel campaigns. At DCMN, we try to solve this by offering our clients a more holistic approach, where we make the various channels work in tandem, instead of analysing each of them separately. This allows us to keep track of multiple channels in real-time, and also make suggestions to our clients about which would work best based on their marketing spend, target groups and campaign goals. 

The second challenge concerns the measurability of campaigns, which is an ongoing challenge across the industry. With the lines between offline and online becoming increasingly blurred, it’s even more crucial for marketing partners to utilise measurement tools and understand the finer details of how all their channels are performing. 

In your opinion, what are some of the biggest trends in marketing tech this year? 

Some of the biggest trends for this year are advertisers looking to activate first-party data and preparing themselves for the cookie-less future. The way we track online campaigns will be going through a major overhaul in the coming months and we need to adapt as things happen.  

We’re also seeing many clients wanting to build a stronger understanding of customer lifetime value (CLV), even from smaller brands that previously wouldn’t have had such a big focus on the topic in the early stages. CLV is key because the higher the number, the greater the profits — and for growing brands, this helps them better predict their long-term growth plans. Given the recent tracking and privacy upheaval, mastering CLV strategy is only set to get more important this year.