Our ‘Profile: A Day in the Life of’ feature takes a look at some of the global professionals working across performance marketing. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the flourishing industry:

Name:

Scott Allan

Job title and company:

Chief Marketing Officer at AddThis

In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?

For the smallest blogger to today’s largest sites, AddThis offers solutions that drive content engagement through a combination of website tools, advertising services and big data insights.

What are the company’s unique selling points?

AddThis is unique in that it brings powerful personalisation capabilities through behavioural data to even the smallest blogger. Using a dashboard interface, you can add social and recommended content widgets to your site that will drive engagement and ultimately drive traffic. You see all your engagement trends in one convenient dashboard and you can promote and suppress select content.

Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?

The company’s major milestones over the past year include:

  • The launch of AddThis Pro, a subscription-based offering that uses the power of the AddThis behavioural data pool to significantly increase a site owner’s content engagement metrics. Although we’re famous for social sharing, we’re now bringing bringing powerful easy-to-use personalisation content recommendation tools to the masses.
  • The launch of SmartLayers, a new suite of data-driven tools that enable online publishers to drive more traffic, increase content engagement, and generate more revenue across mobile, tablet, and desktops. Launched in July it already has over 450,000 domains using it.
  • Being ranked number one among distributed content and ad focused entities in the US by comScore.
  • AddThis tools helped advertisers, publishers and brands drive targeted content engagement that reached over one trillion page views in 2013.

Duration in current role:

Seven months.

Where are you based?

I’m based in our office in New York City. Our headquarters are in Vienna, Virginia with sales offices around the country.

Previous performance marketing-related Co’s you have worked at:

Rakuten LinkShare.

What are your main job responsibilities?

I’m responsible for managing and driving the company’s internal and external marketing communications programmes.

Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:

There is no typical day it seems which makes a job like this fun and interesting. I could be writing marketing materials, working on future messaging around upcoming products or working with the sales team on presentations or even a business development meeting. It really runs the gamut.

What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?

The New York Times, Techcrunch and PerformanceIN.

What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?

The ability to write both creatively and clearly is such a valuable skill these days in a world that has become driven by social media and small snippets of writing, so being able to write at greater length is extremely valuable to all organisations.

Secondly, throw yourself into a range of projects. Marketing departments these days are run very lean so you need to be able to do everything and multitask. And third I’d say learn a second language and think internationally.

Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years time?

I think in the world of technology marketing it’s very difficult to predict where one will be in three years time, as products and markets change so quickly. But I can see myself working at AddThis and riding a wave of spectacular growth!

Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?

I’m half Canadian.

 

Did you catch some of the other profiles on PI?

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