Ask Me Anything
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4 min read
We asked Matthew Gill a few questions about his role at Advertio and got to know him a little better. Here’s what he had to say.
We have been running for 5 years now (yay, happy birthday to us) and during this period product was definitely our main focus. With a growing company, where we have more partners and clients joining us every month as well as a bigger team, it’s only natural that we start to expand our product capabilities. We are looking into adding more features and testing new functionalities while also strengthening what we’ve built so far.
To help us do that, we count with the help of Matthew Gill — our Head of Product and Partner Engagement — so we asked him a few questions about his role at Advertio and got to know him a little better. Here’s what he had to say.
The most successful products launched to market are built on the foundation of delivering unique value and benefits to customers that are not otherwise addressed by other products that are available. Added to that, the value your product brings should be very simple and clear to explain. You should be able to describe any product in an ‘elevator pitch’ scenario if you set the right context.
I dread to think how many hours of my life I have spent on the Sony Playstation but there is a reason it is regularly the best selling-console on the market. Firstly they leveraged existing technology better than their competition (in the early days, the first console with a CD drive, allowing them to build bigger and better games and build an audience). This is very relevant to the work Advertio does today considering our tech is reliant on what the publisher networks are offering.
Coming back to Sony, they have been commercially savvy - striking exclusive deals to bring popular game franchises (like Final Fantasy) to their platform in the early days and becoming a must-have purchase for gamers. And finally, they continue to innovate - you can hardly consider the PlayStation 5 a games console anymore, it is a complete Home Entertainment System which.
As for other great products, like them or loathe them, Apple’s iPhone introduction and the services they built-in to complement it (App Store, then iCloud, then Apple Music, etc) completely revolutionised modern mobile technology and essentially meant consumers had to nail their colours to the Apple mast, or elsewhere. Creating a loyalist mentality as strong as this is virtually unparalleled anywhere else in the world. Anyone remember Blackberry? Without BBM, they had nothing!
This is quite simple for me. Put yourselves in the shoes of our customers, understand who they are and what their objective is. Who are our customers? There are two broad customer types we should keep in mind - Small/Medium sized business owners (direct advertisers) and Partner Agencies that manage a large number of these SMEs. What is their objective? To maximise the return on their investment from the campaigns they run with us. This doesn’t change across either customer group. Everything we do should be geared towards making that objective easier to deliver.
Individuals have much greater autonomy to make quick decisions that have an impact on the fortunes of the business. Bigger corporations are bogged down with drawn out approval processes and bureaucracy which often leads to long periods of inertia. More effort is put into getting approval for a project, than executing the project successfully. Another major advantage is the ability to build strong relationships with the whole organisation, rather than being forced to seek allies in different departments to help you along as it would be impossible to spend time getting to know everybody. There are very few people I haven’t yet had a valuable experience with at Advertio.
I had to take what I’m sure is a highly accurate online test to get this result and I am apparently a Deer….
Hmm, I’m not sure I’ve visited it yet. I’d have to say Rome for now, but I want to get out to Wellington in New Zealand and watch some cricket :)
Hmmm, this is a toss up between Mexican and Italian. Maybe a Calzone for Starters and Enchiladas for main… Can I do that?
Not really a dessert kinda guy, but it would have to be Chocolate Chip for me.
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