Our ‘Profile: A Day in the Life of’ feature takes a look at some of the global professionals working within performance marketing. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the flourishing industry:
Name: Giulio Montemagno
Job title and company: SVP of International, RetailMeNot, Inc.
In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?
RetailMeNot, Inc, which is present in the North America, the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands, operates the world’s largest digital coupon market place and provides more than 500,000 digital coupons from more than 60,000 retailers.
What are the company’s unique selling points?
RetailMeNot’s nine websites and four mobile apps enable consumers across the globe to find digital coupons from their favourite retailers, both online and in-store.
Over the past 12 months, more than 500 million visitors have come to our network and these visitors have generated over $2.5 billion in sales volume for retailers.
Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?
In the past year we have accelerated our development and built out our global footprint to consolidate our positioning as the world’s largest digital coupon market player. Milestones were the acquisition of Actiepagina.nl in March, which has allowed us to enter the Dutch market, the launch of RetailMeNot.ca in Canada in June, as well as the acquisition of the leading social codes website ma-Reduc.com in France in July – which is a great addition to our existing portfolio of brands. Last month we acquired ZenDeals, an early stage technology company with patent-pending proprietary digital coupon verification technology, which we believe will be a great asset to our technological development as we strive to ensure that all of our offers work and bring satisfaction to our users.
At the same time we have also ramped up our mobile offering, which becomes increasingly important to engage with consumers.
Traffic from mobile channels now represents over 25% of our overall visits and our applications have been downloaded more than 8.8 million times so far, including 2.7 million downloads from the UK.
We’re aggressively developing our mobile products across Europe and ramping up our investments into web to store programmes in the UK and France. Since the launch of the VoucherCodes.co.uk app in September 2011, our relationship with many retailers has expanded to take on a multichannel approach, with exclusive discounts being redeemable online and in-store. A campaign we ran with The Body Shop this past June drove over 50,000 customers into their stores in just 11 days and allowed The Body Shop to acquire 41,000 new customers. Other retailers we work with on a multichannel approach include Marks & Spencer, Debenhams, Mothercare, B&Q and New Look, to name but a few.
Last but not least, in July we completed our initial public offering on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, which has allowed us to raise $80 million and where we’re now listed under the ticker symbol SALE.
Duration in current role:
Eight months
Where are you based?
I’m based in Paris, but I’m on the road to our offices in the EU and the US 80% of my time
Previous performance marketing-related Co’s you have worked at:
Before joining RetailMeNot I was general manager of western Europe for PayPal. I have spent 12 years at eBay and its PayPal subsidiary, serving in other various senior management roles within its business development, product management and corporate strategy teams in the EMEA markets
What are your main job responsibilities?
I’m responsible for RetailMeNot’s profit and loss outside of North America. My role is to work with the team to define and execute our strategy in every market, build great products, hire strong leaders and develop our internal talent.
Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:
There is no such thing as a typical working Monday, but in general I go through operational reviews with the country managers and functional team leaders, I work with HR on people development initiatives, I have meetings with partners and I follow up on 3-4 strategic projects.
What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?
The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and the paper version of Financial Times Weekend. This would be the ideal lunch hour that I never have time for…
What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?
Be passionate, hire passionate people and always try to bring on board people who are ahead of the curve for the position you are hiring for, regardless of the fact this may mean hiring people with more experience than you or that are actually better than you. This has paid off phenomenally well for me over the years.
Think bold, take risks and strive to come up with products and services that are 10 times better than what your competitors offer.
Always aim to go beyond what you are asked. Try to over-deliver every time, especially when you’d think there’s no point in doing so.
Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years time?
I’m perfectly happy where I am today so I don’t think about where I could be three years from now
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
I listen much more than people at work think I do.
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