Name:
Marius Smyth.
Job title and company:
EMEA Managing Director, AdRoll.
In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?
AdRoll is the most widely used retargeting platform in the world, providing an innovative and easy-to-use marketing platform to enable brands and agencies of all sizes to create personalised ad campaigns based on their own website data.
What are the company’s unique selling points?
We’re retargeting specialists and take pride in driving innovation across the industry; offering solutions that bring powerful advertising technology to brands and agencies to increase their ROI and competitiveness. We help marketers to collect, analyse and act on valuable first-party data in a way that is affordable and easy-to-understand, enabling them to evaluate the performance of their online marketing and develop appropriate strategies.
Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?
In April 2014, AdRoll closed a $70 million funding round led by Foundation Capital. In conjunction with the financing, Eric Liaw of IVP joined AdRoll as a board observer.
Within the last year, we set up our EMEA headquarters in Dublin, allowing us to increase our EMEA head count and we also have plans to open an office in London later this year.
In terms of performance, we’ve grown our UK customer base by 217% and we recently made Facebook mobile retargeting widely available to our customers via our self-service dashboard.
Duration in current role:
Nine months.
Where are you based?
AdRoll’s EMEA operation is headquartered in Dublin, Ireland.
Previous performance marketing-related companies you have worked at:
I spent eight years at Google, where I managed sales and support teams across EMEA. I was most recently the Country head for SMB Sales for UK and Ireland working as part of Google’s leadership team to drive strategy and Sales in the sector. I also led teams in Mobile, Agency and Inside Sales throughout my time there.
What are your main job responsibilities?
I am responsible for managing the operations and leading the strategic development of AdRoll’s business across the EMEA region. I joined the company to build the European headquarters and drive revenue growth as it expands internationally. It’s a really exciting time to be part of this company and to witness its hyper growth.
Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:
At AdRoll we start the week with a Sales Team Gathering, bringing the whole team together to call out successes of the past week and share areas of focus for the week ahead. Monday ends with an AdRoll tradition – Monday Night Dinner. We order in food to the office every Monday night, and this happens in San Francisco, New York, Sydney as well as Dublin. The team gets together to hang out and share some food, and catch up on what happened at the weekend.
What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?
- www.bbc.co.uk/football – at the moment for the World Cup but ordinarily for sports news.
- Twitter for breaking news.
- Various ad tech blogs / websites for tech industry news and features.
What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?
- Excel at sales and build broad commercial experiences.
- Get the experience of an MBA or an financial accounting qualification.
- Think bigger on everything you do and want to achieve. Assume leadership where it currently does not exist.
Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years’ time?
Continuing to grow AdRoll revenues across EMEA and globally and continuing to build a great culture to work in.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
I used to be a DJ and a qualified butcher….. not at the same time!