How long have you been working at Rakuten Marketing?
I’ve been with the Rakuten Marketing team for around 16 months.
What’s your typical day-to-day like?
My day-to-day changes frequently! The core of my week generally follows reporting, insight sharing, client calls and follow up, actioning optimisations and strategic changes. I spend a lot of time monitoring budget and performance progress throughout the month and forward planning around clients marketing calendars for the coming months.
I’ve had some incredible opportunities as part of the Rakuten team – travelling to train with my colleagues in Salt Lake City, visiting one of our top clients in Milan and our Scottsdale Symposium event, most recently.
What do you enjoy most about working in client services?
My favourite thing about working in client services is the opportunity to understand the goals for brands within different verticals, at different maturity stages, with different customer audiences and helping my brands reach their goals. A win for a client is a win for us too, so partnering with a variety of brands to work with them towards their goal is exciting and the best part of client services for sure.
What do you think are some of the key trends happening right now in the performance marketing industry?
Advertisers are beginning to understand more the measurement of performance marketing channels, and with that development in understanding, there is a bigger focus on data and transparency. I think a lot of brands are becoming more digitally savvy and brave with their digital branding techniques – we’re seeing growth YoY in the spend towards video, with strategies such as OOH and Connected TV growing too.
And some of the key challenges?
I think last-click is still a challenge, but I do think people’s measurement and approach are changing. A lot of our key clients are using our Cadence attribution tool to give them a holistic overview of how each of their performance marketing channels are contributing to on-site traffic and conversions, and how they are growing YoY.
What’s been your biggest career highlight so far?
Being shortlisted for Industry Rising Star in the Performance Marketing Awards!
Outside of the display channel, what are your interests and hobbies?
This is the question that you think is easy but actually makes you realise you’re a bit boring. My biggest passions outside of work are fashion, music and family. I love live music so I like to spend a lot of time going to gigs, especially in the summer. And I have lots of nieces and nephews so they keep me busy too!
You’ve been shortlisted for this year’s Industry Rising Star Award at the Performance Marketing Awards. How does it feel to be nominated in this category?
It feels great! It’s really lovely to be recognised by your peers and put forward for the award. I’m really looking forward to the award ceremony later this month!
Three words that best describe you?
Hmmm – driven, honest, a good listener.
What are you most looking forward to this year?
There are lots of things happening this year which I am looking forward to. In particular, we have our flagship Symposium event coming up on the 18th of April which is always good fun where more than 600+ of our clients, publishers and partners will come together for a day of inspirational content and networking. I’m also going to be taking part in our Advertiser Innovation Session at Symposium, I’ll be on a panel alongside Bally and Figleaves, so that’s exciting!
Lastly, any exciting things in the pipeline for Rakuten Marketing?
There’s always exciting things in the pipeline for Rakuten Marketing! I think one of the things I’m most excited for is that we’ve restructured our Client Service team to work in client-centric, rather than product-centric teams. Combined with the fact we offer our multi-channel attribution tool, Cadence, to all our advertisers for no additional cost, we’re going to be taking an increasingly unified approach to all the channels and campaigns we manage.