Dominic Gallello is CMO at dating app Badoo. We caught up with him earlier this year when he was speaking at the Technology for Marketing expo at London Olympia.
Here’s what he had to say…
Please describe your job: What do you do?
Chief Marketing Officer at Badoo, the place to date honestly, helping to infuse clarity and purpose into our 440 million member community.
Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?
I report to the Founder & CEO of MagicLab, Andrey Andreev. Andrey Andreev is both the founder of Badoo as well as of MagicLab, the dating group that builds, owns, and operates other brands like Bumble, Chappy, and Lumen.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Marketing continues to be both an art and a science, requiring creative and analytical thinking. While the world has been swept up in data-driven marketing, building a purposeful brand that can accelerate culture requires taking risks, being bold in your vision, and staying true to your values. To be effective, I believe we need to be artful in how we create and scientific in how we measure.
Tell us about a typical working day…
My early mornings are spent reviewing my data dashboards and running through emails and messages from the night before. Then, I tend to go running or cycling before going into the office, it helps me digest the information and mentally sort how to approach the rest of my day.
Throughout the day I generally have a mix of functional meetings, whether growth, brand marketing, product, etc, or meetings with my marketing leadership to go through any strategic decisions we need to make and push our work forward.
What do you love about your job? What sucks?
Working in dating is a tremendously rewarding experience. We actively help people get back out into the real world and form potentially life changing connections and relationships. While other Silicon Valley businesses talk about changing the world, we talk about changing lives.
What sucks? Not enough time in the day!
What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
MAU (monthly active users) and registration growth, community satisfaction, and our brand health metrics in our key markets.
What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
Badoo has built phenomenal in-house tools to help us both deploy and assess the impact of our marketing. This includes all of our data infrastructure as well as our user engagement tools that enables us to communicate through email, notifications, and in-app modals. It enables us to build a personalised relationship with our users and understand how connecting our values to our community can drive engagement and growth.
How did you end up at Badoo, and where might you go from here?
My career began in advertising working with clients like Coca-Cola and Visa to build global communications strategies for campaigns like World Cup. After business school at INSEAD, I developed brand and go-to-market strategies for technology companies like PayPal, Braintree, and GoFundMe, before leading marketing at Airtime, Sean Parker’s group video app.
Which campaigns have impressed you lately?
I value brands that can leverage data and technology to develop brilliant creative. Spotify is clearly a leader in this space, pioneered from Year in Rewind through to their most recent ‘Listen like you used to’ campaign here in London.
I am also a huge fan of Strava the fitness tracking app, primarily due to their community-led marketing approach and the personalized digital experiences they create for their users, like Run Report.
What advice would you give a marketer just starting out?
The world of marketing is evolving at a breakneck pace, so it’s important to be at the cutting edge of digital behaviors and strategies which younger professionals are well positioned to do. Understanding how to drive growth through underpriced or underleveraged channels or strategies, like the meme economy five years ago, can help create huge business impact and accelerate your career.
Five content marketing examples from dating sites and apps
