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. This week we head to London to speak to the chief executive at idio.
Name:
Edward Barrow
Job title and company:
CEO and co-founder, idio Ltd.
In one sentence, how would you describe what the company does?
idio’s content intelligence platform understands your individual customers and prospects based on their content choices, and enables you to engage them with relevant content to drive improved revenue.
What are the company’s unique selling points?
- Individual, Automated and Integrated.
- idio understands each person’s context individually – no more segments.
- We do it completely automatically, with natural language processing that understands all your content instantly, and personalises in real-time.
- We do it by integrating with your existing channels and technology, so you can get started immediately and see the value without having to replace any existing platforms.
Within the last six months/year, what stands out as the company’s major milestones?
Well, just in the last three months we have launched a market-leading Sales Intelligence product with Salesforce, signed some fantastic new clients, partnered with the top cloud contact centre provider – NewVoiceMedia – to integrate idio’s intelligence into call centres, tripled the size of our sales team in London and New York, launched a great customer success programme to ensure our clients to generate results really quickly, and probably a lot more.
I’m a big believer that there is no silver bullet, but that we have to keep notching up lots of wins like those I’ve listed above. None of them stand out as the major milestone, because every one is actually about keeping our heads down and focused on building a business that delivers real value for companies around the world.
Duration in current role:
8 years – we founded the company whilst at University.
Where are you based?
London, with frequent visits to our New York office.
Previous performance marketing-related companies you have worked at:
This is my first job, apart from working in my father’s business before uni. That business was KiQ – where I got early experience of the power of predictive analytics in driving better customer experience.
What are your main job responsibilities?
Setting overall product strategy, leading the commercial team, and investor relations. As is normal with this type of role, a huge amount of other things also comes on my plate. But I have the privilege to work with the smartest people I know.
Take us through what you get up to on a typical working Monday:
Well as I’m writing this on a Monday… I started off by speaking at an education event for one of our partners, Experian Marketing Services. Our weekly management team meeting is at 2pm, so that will entail hearing and discussing progress across each of our various teams, and is followed by an all-company call to run through some announcements, including the most important discussion of our Christmas party! After that I have a call with our head of product, and then our investors. In between those meetings, I will be preparing for our monthly board meeting later this week.
What top three websites can you be found browsing during your lunch hour?
- LinkedIn.com
- VentureBeat.com
- ContentMarketingInstitute.com
What are your top three tips for someone looking to get their hands on a job like yours?
- Find a business opportunity where there is a big problem to solve, and start.
- Find some other people who you can persuade to join you, preferably brighter and better than you are.
- Keep learning and keep going, no matter what.
Career-wise, where do you see yourself in three years’ time?
Running idio, at a much bigger scale – powering commercial success for thousands of businesses.
Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
I learned to code in 2 weeks to launch the first version of idio when our contract developer was hired by Google. Our engineering certainly don’t let me near any code now!