Tune in to episode 12 of AdTech | AlikeAudience, where Programmatic Ads Trainer Helene Parker, and AlikeAudience Chief Strategy Officer Elice Lau, talk about training new entrants to the programmatic advertising market and staying on top of the fast-moving digital space, with business and technology journalist Duncan Craig.
Tune in to get intriguing insights on:
- • Building and empowering future programmatic traders with fundamental knowledge and practical experience.
- • The need for ongoing training and consultation to keep skills refreshed in the programmatic industry.
- • The need to understand the different learning patterns of the next generation and implement a customized onboarding process.
- • The struggles involved in retaining talent and how to overcome them.
- • Leveraging LinkedIn, engaging with companies, and staying consistent in learning to get started in the programmatic industry.
Hello from AdTech | AlikeAudience
Duncan Craig
Hello and welcome to the AdTech with AlikeAudience podcast. This podcast is brought to you by AlikeAudience, the premier audience-targeting company with high-performing mobile audience segments. Every month we spotlight leading executives and marketers from industry-leading companies. My name is Duncan Craig. I’ve been a business and technology journalist in the APAC region for a decade and worked in AdTech content and comms since 2013. We’re aiming to speak to as many interesting people in the AdTech and digital marketing and advertising industry.
Guest for this Episode: Helene Parker and Elice Lau
And this week, we have a special guest all the way from Raleigh, North Carolina, Helene Parker. Helene is the founder and chief programmatic coach of her own programmatic training consulting and business, Helene Parker Consulting, and host of the Programmatic Digest Podcast.
We also have Elice Lau joining us from London. Elice is the Chief Strategy Officer for AlikeAudience. She leads the corporate strategy on company expansion and next-generation PETs, which is Privacy-Enhancing Technologies for AlikeAudience. As a serial entrepreneur, Elice’s passion in MarTech began with a very first startup in 2011. Today, she continues to contribute to the industry by sharing her knowledge and vision on AdTech.
So, Helene and Elice, welcome to episode 12 of the AdTech with AlikeAudience podcast, and thanks for your time.
Helene Parker
Thank you for having us. We’re excited to be here.
Elice Lau
Thank you, Duncan.
Helene Parker – the origin story
Duncan Craig
Thanks, team. Okay, the first thing I had to ask Helene, I have to ask you about your origin story. How did you, even before we set up your own consulting training business, how did you start in the industry, please
Helene Parker
Isn’t it a really interesting question to ask? But I think most of us in the industry can relate to my story. So when I graduated from college, I was a social media intern. And then realized that I did not like social media as much as I thought I did. And so, the company that hired me as an intern also had a different division. One of them was a newsprint paper called Employment Guide. And so I was hired under the Digital Department of Employment Guide and moved around a little bit. And so when Employment Guide was acquired by another investor, I was laid off a few months after. And, of course, that happened maybe a year and a half to two years after college graduation. So I had a lot of loans, I was motivated.
So from that part of my journey, I went ahead and found a job for an Ad agency in Virginia Beach, Virginia, that hired me as their first programmatic trader. So I had no experience in programmatic before that. I had some marketing experience, but not that much, because it was a newsprint even though we were handling digital software was still different than writing.
Duncan Craig
Different than writing.
Helene Parker
Yeah, And honestly, I had applied to another job for that agency, but they called me back, saying, you’re not qualified for this one. But you would be really good with this one. So I thought, oh great. And almost 10 years later, this is how the programmatic journey started for me, as a trader, and moved into planning, moving to director, and now owning an education business.
Duncan Craig
Right. So you were working in an agency? Is that correct?
Helene Parker
Yeah, yeah, I guess a newspaper print, it’ll be considered a publisher. But again, I was a marketing analyst for Employment Guide. And that required back in the days, which is, again, only 10 years ago, they would offer the digital space on Employment Guide as an added value. Now, it’s flipped over, right? Now you receive the actual print paper as an added value, and you receive a magazine, and you don’t even know when you signed up for it, right? So I was responsible for helping just upload those banners into the website and just tracking analytics at that time, whatever analytics was.
Creating, building, and empowering the future programmatic ninjas
Duncan Craig
Thank you. So when and why did you decide to move into training, coaching, consulting, educating, that part of the business?
Helene Parker
So about three years ago, summer of 2019, I got to a point in my career where I wasn’t challenged and fulfilled in what I did in the way that I needed to do. I know I had a bigger purpose and I know I had a vision. And also very, very candidly, I was just extremely drained and emotionally exhausted from being maybe the only person of color, the only person that had an accent, you know, originally from Senegal, my first language is French. And so it was very exhausting to have worked in environments of ad agency where I was the only one or one of the few. And so from that on, I told myself, I was only going to freelance full time, and God had another path for me. And I followed His guidance. And that’s how I landed into consulting. And we offered activation, because again, my experience is programmatic activation and training other people. And so I turned this knowledge into a course that anyone, whether you have marketing experience or not, can invest in and learn. And at the end of the course, you’re able to apply to a job like a programmatic buyer or anything in AdOps or account manager, so that you have some fundamentals that are really much required nowadays.
Duncan Craig
Thank you. That’s my next question. What do you focus on with the training and how do you help people get into the industry and become adept quickly, which is what the industry wants?
Helene Parker
That’s the million-dollar question right there, right? Thank you for asking it. I think I have a million-dollar answer. So my program focuses on just that. Creating, building, and empowering the future programmatic ninjas, like I call them. So we did a course last year, and we turned it into this live program that is like 6-7 weeks long. So the program teaches just that. We are going through programmatic fundamentals, the ecosystem, different types of placement, what are tactics, what are targeting capabilities in programmatic, and then we layer an overview of some DSP assignments.
So each of those programmatic ninja in training, have at least experience of working in a DSP, building a campaign, pulling a report, optimizing a report. They are taught how to be flexible in Excel. They are also introduced to things like brand viewability, brand suitability, and an introduction to strategy planning, introduction to reporting. It’s basically anything that a programmatic trader would need to advance efficiently in their career, but also the key skill set that I found that most companies, whether you’re in-house branding, or whether you’re an ad agency, those skill sets are in demand right now, like everyone needs a trader that knows how to do one of these things I mentioned, right?
Following the trend & updating training content
Duncan Craig
Interesting. Elice, how does this resonate with your role and the challenges that you face at AlikeAudience.
Elice Lau
I totally resonate with what Helene just mentioned in regard to the skill sets to equip everyone in the programmatic, especially for the new generations to just onboard in this industry for the first few years. I’ve heard from different conferences in the US and in Europe that most of the talents nowadays are not equipped with enough skills on operating on platforms like Google and meta. So I don’t think it is only these two platforms that require training. But we have a handful of platforms in a lot of key markets in the US and Europe and also in Asia. Of course, there are also trainings from the platform itself, but there is no one size fits all solution. So it would be great if we have some consultants that are following the trend and update the teaching content to the candidates from time to time to make sure our skill sets are also refreshed at all times.
Onboarding new talent in programmatic industry
Duncan Craig
Interesting, isn’t it? We have the same challenge in Australia with, let’s call it, the skill shortage right across the tank, and training is a huge issue. So I’m curious to know, from both of you actually, what are the characteristics of successful companies that onboard programmatic new talent effectively. What’s the secret sauce to onboarding do you think, Helene?
Helene Parker
So I’m going to stir the pot here, and I hope you won’t receive hate mail for this, but I strongly believe that the talent is available. But companies don’t have a proper onboarding process. I love this question that you’re asking, how should we onboard this talent? I think that this next generation that’s coming in, I’m talking as if I’m just a millennial, but the next generation, you know, just 5-10 years old or younger, are very, very clever in how they want to learn. And they’ll also understand that they don’t want to do all, they want to be masters and special, like they want to have specialties.
So with that knowing, companies need to understand that learning patterns are different, and that as much as we don’t like processes, we need to standardize them. So what I mean by that is that you have to understand that onboarding doesn’t stop on day one. It continues up to six months for some of these employees, whether it is a junior, or whether it is a senior. Of course, a senior-level employee or member of programmatic ninja will not need as much hand-holding at first. But it’s very essential that we don’t assume and that we continue empowering them in a way that they know, I know, you’re expert, but let me make you even more expert or let me teach you this other specialty. Let me give you a vision of growth in the company that is going to look like this in the next two years. And every time you have a timeline, and you have those milestones that you get to celebrate with them.
Skills required in a junior trader
Duncan Craig
What is the most difficult skill to learn on the technical side if you’re a junior trader? Is it the optimization? Is it the reporting? Is it being across multiple platforms? What do you think is the detailed technical, biggest issue right now? And I know the market changes every quarter.
Helene Parker
I would say, it’s not so much a technical issue, it’s more making the time to develop that technical issue. So a lot of traders still understand their roles as managing campaign, blah, blah, blah. But taking the time to optimize like you said, it’s just, that’s how you get better. Okay, so it’s a technical skill that you can really improve, if you just allocate consistent time to play around, right? And then reporting, always being able to pull insight, I would say, is one of the things I’ve received from hiring managers, because I work a lot with those hiring managers to hire the people that we train. And they all come back and say, you know, we need people that are able to do data analysis.
So when you look at this Excel sheet, or this date dashboard, what can you tell me? What is it, you know, what’s the magic? And so pulling that insight, I think can be can be challenging at first, but as it’s a learned skill, anybody can look at data and understand what’s good and what’s not good. But you don’t stop just there. You have to take it to the next level. And that’s the skill set that’s missing a little bit.
Onboarding freshers at AlikeAudience
Duncan Craig
Thanks, Helene. What about you, Elice? What challenges do you have or senior management AlikeAudience have in training staff? Because you’re in a number of, what is it, three continents? Is that correct?
Elice Lau
Right. We have data activated in 12 countries.
Duncan Craig
12 countries?
Elice Lau
Yes. Coming back to your question. Indeed, there is a challenge, especially with the unique positioning of AlikeAudience, whereby our businesses are kind of worldwide, while the majority of our headcount is actually based in Asia due to Covid, of course, part of the reason. And on training staff, there are two votes. And I see step number one as being very crucial. That is to identify the right candidates with cultural fit for the relevant position. And one of our values within AlikeAudience is impact. From cofounders to team, I reckon the talents within AlikeAudience have a DNA in common that is competitive, but patient.
And you can sense from nearly each of us having a hunger to win, but we don’t appear to be self-asserting at all times. The candidates on AlikeAudience love to take on challenges. I mean, most of them, and they challenge themselves for bettering in their career. And they often also challenge the status quo of AlikeAudience.
So first thing first is to hire the right people. And second, is the onboarding process. And I resonate with Helene so much that it can easily take up to six months to onboard one person to be equipped to understand the AdTech landscape. Because the AdTech universe is gigantic, and if you open the Lumascape every year, you will easily see hundreds of players in our field. And you see new names, you see old names fading, and each provides one or more than one unique value. And sometimes, they just overlap, and sometimes they are complementing in the ecosystem. And as an Asian who’s education system is filled by stuffing information since childhood, we understand so well that stuffing information to colleagues nowadays can rarely be inspirational or influential. And therefore, we split up the onboarding process into three to six months as well.
In general, in month one of the onboarding, we give an overview of the industry to our colleague from a 10,000 foot view. And from their first onboarding day, anyone can join our all-hands, optional, weekly stand-up meeting and listen to what’s hot in the market from the stand-up session. And that is to help them ramp up their understanding of the industry faster. And on also day in and day out basis, we have a Slack channel named Web Article, where everyone can share all sorts of upbeat news within AdTech.
So we’re talking about from, you know, the latest investment of AdTech to topics like ChatGPT, of course. And oh, we also have a knowledge management system, where we aggregate videos, and new joiners can crunch the historical knowledge that they need from the knowledge management system. And we also have our current team to refresh their memory from the KM system, if needed.
Duncan Craig
Elice, that is all fascinating. I have questions. But Helene, did you want to comment on what Elice said?
Helene Parker
I think it’s great what they are doing, encouraging knowledge sharing internally and normalizing something as simple as just reading an article. I think a lot of us in the industry don’t make the time to continue our own training, we expect the company to do it. But as an individual programmatic ninja, I think it’s really important that you do that with due diligence and read the article, one article a day, one article a week, whatever. And then share it, share it with somebody at work, share it on LinkedIn, share it with somebody, because in order to learn, you got to teach it. So if you read this article and you don’t remember, you cannot teach one thing from the article, read it again and teach it and try teaching it.
I really value this one skill that is explaining any concept that is programmatic or AdTech, or MarTech, for that reason, to a five-year-old. I challenge everyone listening if you’re unable to tell a five-year-old and five-year-olds are very smart nowadays, okay, but if you’re unable to explain to a five-year-old, what is happening, okay, to the best of their ability, then I think you don’t understand enough, and that’s okay. But that’s a challenge you should think about like, Oh, I just read something, I just learned something, how would I explain it to my five-year-old niece or nephew? Okay, so I really commend Elice and her team for encouraging something as simple but so powerful as article sharing, like, this is what I’m learning guys, this is very interesting. Because the more we grow, the more we develop those soft skills that I mentioned earlier.
Grooming talents in the onboarding journey
Duncan Craig
Thanks, Helene. Thanks, Elice. I want to go back to something you both said. Because I always think about a lot, to be honest. You hire someone and in the first six months, they’re in training mode. But how do you identify if that person’s got the skills to go on the journey or not necessarily that computer software skills, but the kind of what you said Elice, about being competitive and being patient? How do you identify that person? You can go first, Elice.
Elice Lau
We do have a very stringent hiring process starting from the recruiter to our internal hiring process to make sure that candidates equip with some sort of hot skills from the industry. Or they do have some personal traits from the personality tests that is falling into a part of our standard operating procedure for hiring to make sure that that candidate might have some personal traits that is in common to our culture already.
And of course, then there could be mistakes, but chances are higher that, we are also very patient on hiring, we only hire slow, but we hope to hire right. So of course, there will be chances to fail, but this is what our patience comes from. And after onboarding, then we would have a procedure within HR as well to have a monthly reflection and feedback with the colleague together, whether they are to the beats or whether they need a longer process of hand-holding.
And from our experience for juniors, they might need up to three months or four to handhold. And we do have a mentor for them. And for middle-level positions to key members, and usually we would have a project for them starting in month three or four to handle by themselves. So we give liberty and autonomy to our colleagues as well, to see how far they go. And if there is not a major failure, then we let them fail as well. We learned most from failure. So that is how we implement our hiring strategy. And so far, for our company size, it works pretty well.
Duncan Craig
Thank you. Thank you, Elice. Helene, it sounds like finding that great talent early on, is really about the person’s intention to learn and eagerness to learn, what do you think
Helene Parker
I think it’s right on. I think this is it. We can go ahead and end the interview right there, I think. I liked what Elice said about, we take our time hiring because we want to make sure we hire for the right culture fit. I’d like to maybe rephrase that. It’s also about adding to the culture, the individual should not only fit the status quo, but also add to it and help grow the culture. I think that’s how we truly encourage diversity, equity and inclusion, and representation by not limiting but adding and adjusting.
So I love that Elice is doing that with her team, but also like something as simple as a personality test can take you so far. So far, it’s super important to understand the person because this person that you’re hiring, you’re not only hiring them for the job that they’re doing now, you’re hiring them for longevity, for growth, like you want the person to stay with you. You can’t control it. But you can encourage it. So you can start at a position and then help them grow to another position. And that’s how you keep your talent. That’s how you retain your talent, you continue growing them.
So let’s just rephrase something we just said earlier that training takes six months, training does not have an expiration date. Onboarding may take up to six months to a year, okay? It’s okay, if it takes a little longer. But training is continuous. Now training needs to evolve as much as this employee. And the more you empower and encourage training, especially internally at different levels, the longer they stay. That’s like given.
We know that, and I’ll end with this, we know that statistically, the number one reason why an employee, an excellent talent leaves is poor leadership, okay, toxic environment. Number two is because they don’t see growth, like I’m just doing this for a minute, now I’m tired, I’m trying to find something else. They’re not motivated, they’re not excited to come to work or log into work every day. So number one can definitely be addressed. But number two, you start from day one, and you continue that path, like Elice said, and I encourage everybody again, don’t stop at six months.
How to build a career in programmatic advertising
Duncan Craig
Interesting. Thanks, Helene. The three of us have been in programmatic AdTech digital for a decade. But what about the Day One people? The people that want to enter the industry? Someone wants to build a career in programmatic advertising digital, where do they start? How do they get in these days? Helene, what would you advise them, him or her to do?
Helene Parker
Well, that’s the people that we train, right? The people that sign up for our program are self-starters, they’re motivated, and they invest their own money into the program. The program is not free. And so that tells me that they’re a great candidate for any company because they’re self-motivating and they’re self-starters. Because they did that out of their own quiet time, you could have gone to yoga, or cooked for your family, but you’re in a class at night with me, learning about this thing called programmatic.
Okay, so that says a lot about somebody that wants to start. There are transferable skills that everybody that has worked in some shape or form in this industry or others have a transferable skill that is going to be very, very valuable as a trader, as an account manager, as anything. So I will look at a transferable skill set.
If you want to get started and you don’t know where to get started, I think you’re in the right place by listening to this podcast! But I would leverage and maximize something like LinkedIn, you know, look up who’s hiring for programmatic, connect with those companies. We have a framework that we call FEEL, which is Find and Follow the company and the hiring manager. Engage with them, okay, so make sure you reach out and say, hey, I’m looking to start in the industry and don’t know where to start. Can you tell me your number one advice or whatever, engage with them, and then explore opportunities.
So what I mean by that is that just go to LinkedIn jobs, type programmatic keyword, put your filtering, put entry-level, whatever whatnot, and look at the recommendations or the requirements that some of the companies are looking for. Follow those companies, leverage LinkedIn, leverage the knowledge that you can acquire from other people, and stay consistent in your learning. So don’t start one day and then don’t come back six months from now. But stay consistent once a week and do your thing. You know, it’s tough to get into the industry.
Duncan Craig
Yeah. Elice, your thoughts at all
Elice Lau
I totally resonate with what Helene mentioned. I understand, of course, the latest laid-off news from tech giants has caused a massive outflow of talent. But while there are also startups with aggressive growth, who are looking for talent, and just an article that I read from CNBC described that nearly 80% of the laid-off tech workers found their new roles within three months of beginning their job search, according to the latest survey. Which also means that talents are there, jobs are there, you just need the right skills to be equal when you’re starting your new job again.
And as a startup, we run our team with agility, and we all know that change is the universal constant. And therefore, rather than having our hard skill to be equipped, the mentality of staying hungry and staying foolish is very important. And if I told you our fundamental skill is to take all the certifications from FANG to TTD, there might be an obsoletes period anytime as our technology advances. So staying hungry to learn is very important. Coming back to what just Helene mentioned, to support our colleagues to be able to get handy to equip their new skills. We also have a learning budgets allocated to every colleague to learn whichever is relevant to their career on a monthly basis.
And from the operational level, of course, taking certificates from official channels like TDD or Google would be helpful. But from other alternative channels, I just came across a great one, such as Data Clean Room and Identity Fundamentals from the U of digital and free courses like data driven planning from The Edge Academy of TTD, or the courses provided by Helene would be really helpful as well. Of course, if you’re on a management level or on a mid-management, it would be wise to also stay alert with the privacy law updates and news from your industry bodies, such as IAB and NAI in the US, so that we could always keep ourselves up on the trend.
Duncan Craig
Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for your time, Elice and Helene. Helene, we wish you all the best for the rest of the year with Helene Parker Consulting, we’ll be watching you. I know you post a lot of content, right?
Helene Parker
I actually try. We believe in sharing knowledge. So we try to stay as active as possible for anyone that is just trying to learn and doesn’t know where to start, you know.
Subscribe and Stay Tuned!
Duncan Craig
Well, thank you very much. We appreciate your time. And to our audience, thanks so much for listening. To find the show notes and transcript and more information about AlikeAudience segment offerings, log onto the website www.alikeaudience.com. And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to hit subscribe and leave us a review. We’ll catch you in the next session. Goodbye.
