Gavin Flood is Senior Marketing Director, EMEA & APAC at AdRoll. The company’s Growth Marketing Platform specifically helps D2C brands to grow through unified data, channels, and measurement.

We caught up with Gavin to find out more about his role at AdRoll and his career so far.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

As Senior Director for International Marketing I drive the strategy for all our marketing efforts in EMEA and APAC. As one of our core values is to do right by our customers and our community, I spend a lot of my time looking at ways we can provide customers with the advice and education they need to grow personally and professionally. So from our community programme to our content, and from our advocacy initiatives to our lifecycle efforts, I’m constantly looking at how we bring these to life in our International markets.

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

While I sit on the Marketing Team and report to the SVP of Marketing, who is based in San Francisco, I’m also a member of the International Leadership team made up of my peers from Sales, Operations, Finance and HR who work to ensure the International offices have the right level of context and perspective to be able to do their jobs effectively.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

There are some foundational attributes that everyone needs to be successful in their job. For me, there are four in particular that I would call out:

  • Stakeholder Management; the ability to navigate the entire organisation
  • Team Management; understanding how to motivate, lead and develop a team
  • Leading from the Front; the ability to map your own objectives
  • Effective Project Delivery; the knowledge, soft skills and tools to deliver a project in scope and on time

Tell us about a typical working day

A typical working day is long but hugely rewarding. The mornings are the opportunity to catch-up on things that popped up overnight. The afternoons are spent catching up with the teams in the Dublin office where I’m based while late afternoon / early evening is when I get to spend time with the San Francisco based members of the Marketing Team (which is 70% of the team).

What do you love about your job?

I truly believe that as a marketer you need to work for a company whose values are aligned with yours. That’s what provides the spark, motivation and drive to do your best work. AdRoll is a people-first company and its values reflect that and in turn mine, in particular the focus on doing right by the customer and our community. So I love the fact that everything we do is geared towards being a better partner for our customers; someone they can trust and rely on. That gives real clarity of purpose while also being hugely motivating for me.

What sucks?

The challenges around time zone differences that come with every international brand. That one isn’t going away. Having said that the AdRoll workplace is very flexible.

What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

I have a lot of the same challenges as our AdRoll customers – figuring out how to effectively and efficiently grow customer acquisition, whether that’s online or offline. Some of the leading indicators for this are acquisition cost, conversion rate and average spend per customer. Some of the lagging (long term) indicators we would look at are how many people are coming to our site and how are they engaging with our brand (downloading some content, subscribing to our newsletter or joining our community etc.).

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

I think about this in the context of the attributes I called out earlier and how you improve them. So things like frameworks and templates are always things I seek out. One I was recently introduced to by our Director of Marketing Analytics is what he calls the Prioritization Framework, which is a really simply yet effective rubric to make sure you’re putting the right amount of time and effort into the right things. That’s a real enabler when it comes to Effective Project Delivery while something like the RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) framework is a great tool for Stakeholder Management. 

How did you end up at AdRoll, and where might you go from here?

I was actually an AdRoll customer before I jumped the fence nearly four years ago. For me the opportunity to work for a company pushing the boundaries of how marketing can drive business growth is what appealed to me. And what was true then is true now as we can continue to grow to help more and more ambitious brands.

Which campaigns have impressed you lately?

I’m always impressed by any D2C brand that with limited time and resources can deliver a really solid customer experience. Just recently I was purchasing a camera doorbell for my parents. In researching the options I came across a really great local Irish website – Keans of Claremorris – and what impressed me most about them was the incredibly consistent marketing experience they delivered. Now I doubt the team in Keans have ever heard of the concept of omni-channel marketing which is all about delivering a seamless customer experience,  but with a simple focus on the customer, that’s exactly what they delivered. It was really impressive.

Do you have any advice for new marketers?

Look for a company whose values align with yours and a team of smart, engaged marketers who you can learn from. And remember, learning and development is a journey and not a destination.

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