Fail fast, fail often. The new and emerging marketing world.

As if explaining to your parents - what you do as a job, wasn’t already difficult for advertisers and marketers, we now have newly emerging roles. Roles like Content Strategists, Campaign Managers, Machine Learning Engineers, Chief Experience Officers and Audience Managers!

Lastminute.com transformed their media wing to a department called Travel People. They identified the potential and new opportunities that lie in harnessing the power of e-commerce data combined with integrated solutions to develop creative marketing campaigns. This is when they recognised the need for a Audience manager and upskilled their traffic manager to manage their DMP (data management platform).

A key area of growth in the market has been in the data space – more and more clients are looking to become data-led in their marketing. The Travel People team is supporting these clients in identifying the best technologies, data and strategies to realise their goals.

Enter the extremely insightful Rosie (Rosemary) Martin, the Audience Manager at lastminute.com:

1) An audience manager position is a very new concept. Can you briefly tell me how you got here?

I came from New Zealand where I was working as a campaign manager for a publisher. Although my background was always in operations, part of the role was survey design, lead generation and CRM management. When I came to London I specialised in ad operations and started working for lastminute.com and it’s been four years since I started. Two and half years ago, the media team became The Travel people and I joined as the audience manager. The focus was to have audience as the key pillar and build it from ground up. The data management platform integration had already been done but there needed to be a link between campaign management and data management. That’s where my skills helped to build a bridge between campaigns, operations, trafficking and sales.

2) Please tell me more about your key responsibilities.

One of my primary duties is looking at the data management platform and forecasting what can be done in the weeks/ months to come. For example, sales would come to me with brief saying the client is interested in a certain audience. I would then help them plan what audience targeting looks like as well as deciding the scale to work effectively.

Another important aspect is liaising with people (agencies and companies) who want to buy our data programmatics and the different methods they could use that data.

Programmatic marketing vs Traditional media buying:

Traditionally, if advertisers or agencies want to buy ad inventory (set of audience), they reach out to publishers or ad networks to discuss ad sizes, rates, etc. Programmatic automates this process with the help of technology and data. The middle-men are removed, and unnecessary negotiations on rates and positioning are no longer part of the media buying process. This combined with Paid Search, you can also limit the ads to times of day and frequency. You can decide which publishers you want your ads to show on. In this case, lastminute.com acts as a publisher. The ad buying process becomes more efficient, faster, targeted and relevant.

3) How do your previous professional experiences help you in this role?

I manage the full process from when the sales come to me, I create an audience, the content team and design team build the campaign, that goes to account management followed by trafficking. This is where my background in operations helps. We help brands to engage and inspire throughout the entire travel cycle - from initial research all the way through to booking and beyond. Our dedicated in-house teams across Europe are home to a full-service trading desk, content team and creative hub. I know the entire process so I know what’s needed so, I can predict the time it would take, the problems that may arise and how to help best.

4) Is there something interesting you came across today that you could share with me?

I’ve been trying to make lots of different audiences to find insights for our PR team and I found out Skiers are not spontaneous. They belong to the planners category.

We have an attribute in the DMP that determines the time between searching and departing. And I found that majority of the skiers would be looking to travel within three months not only that, a high percentage of skiers travel with children. Mixed with the right time, price and creative and targeted towards the right audience would resonate the most and would definitely show a great increase in sales.

These kinds of insights make us the experts in reaching travel audiences across our sites, but also off-site via smart audience retargeting tools.

In case like me, you were wondering what the job progression looks like, I did a little primary research on Sales Navigator on LinkedIn. Turns out people tend to become Audience Development Directors, VP analytics and audience development, Associate Director, eCommerce Audience Development and Head of Content and Audience Engagement.

It’ll be interesting to see how more and more companies learn and grow their audience management departments. Consumers have become savvier about exactly what they want to see and how they want to see it. As the space has matured and advanced, at the same time, consumers have become much more picky and fickle. Native ads on social platforms need to continue becoming more and more integrated within content, as well as more spot-on in terms of relevancy to the user; to the point that they are perceived as content rather than advertising that the audience is trying to avoid at all cost.