Steph Miller is UK Commercial Director at Adnami – a tech company that delivers programmatic, advertising solutions. We recently caught up with Steph to find out about her role, plus her predictions on advertising’s ‘cookie-less’ future.
Please describe your job: What do you do?
Adnami has had enormous success in the Nordics and enjoys some great partnerships in the UK. Following significant venture investment, it is proactively growing its UK presence and I have come on board to help with that.
Talk us through a typical day…
I only recently started my role as Commercial Director, UK, at Adnami so daily tasks involve a healthy dose of Zoom meetings with internal teams at our Danish HQ. I also spend a lot of time meeting with UK publishers and agencies to discuss the Adnami proposition and how we can work with them to help their high impact offering grow. We are trying to recruit some UK superstars at the moment, too, so if I am not meeting clients, I am typically interviewing.
How do you maintain an effective work/life balance?
Now we are all working remotely, it’s really important to break up the day so that we all stay engaged when we have a lot of screen time. I keep motivated by going for regular walks and I have just ordered a Peloton bike which means I’ll have no excuse not to workout, even when it’s cold outside! I make sure I organise my day by scheduling some admin time to reply to emails. We also have meetings for 45 minutes rather than an hour to have some gaps in between meetings. And I try to have some meetings on the phone to avoid Zoom fatigue and reduce screen time.
How has strategy changed at your company?
We have the ability to pivot on strategy since Adnami is an agile business, in the process of scaling up. As advertising continues to evolve in response to shifts in consumer behaviour, with more time spent online than ever before, and the ‘cookie-less’ future edging closer, brands are looking for more innovative ways to engage with customers.
Our strategy for 2021 is to help brands achieve greater returns from their marketing investments, through impactful and creative display advertising. As a vendor, we offer tech solutions and services that bring creative and brand building into display and enable publishers and media buyers to trade high impact as easily as they do normal display.
Adnami benefits from a very talented team. We are improving internal processes and becoming more streamlined which will help us to be more efficient. This will ultimately allow us to scale effectively in the medium to long term.
How has customer behaviour (or your clients’ customer behaviour) changed during the pandemic?
Brands want to deliver more engaging advertising and messaging that resonates with consumers. Adnami offers formats that enable this. It’s worth noting that high impact advertising isn’t only reserved for big brands with big budgets. We’ve noticed that smaller brands are realising how cost-effective this channel can be, and they, too, are seeing a healthy ROI during the pandemic as a result.
What do you predict for the future?
Brand messaging will remain very important in the coming years and more brands will turn to high impact formats that make their brands look beautiful as we move into a post-cookie world.
Adnami is passionate about creating more responsive ads that deliver real-time messaging for consumers, which means more effective campaigns in 2021 and ultimately more opportunities for greater ROI.
What advice would you give a marketer right now?
Make high impact formats a default line item on all media plans. A rule of thumb for brand advertisers is that two-thirds of your budget should be allocated for upper funnel activities. I dare to state that this is far from the reality when it comes to most digital plans today. Don’t be so committed to persevering with your current strategy that you miss out on exciting opportunities to engage your consumers. Learn to pivot in response to a crisis. Go back to advertising basics and release the power that you have in a great brand message, wrapped in beautiful creative, and presented in an impactful format.
