Today, we've invited Jessica Feng, UNSW alumni and Platform Services Associate to talk to us about her role at Amobee, a wholly owned subsidiary of Singtel, one of the largest communications technology companies in the world, which reaches more than 675 million mobile subscribers. The company operates across North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Australia.
1. Could you tell us a little about yourself?
My name's Jess, and I studied at UNSW with a Bachelor of Commerce/Economics, majored in marketing and financial economics. Currently, I'm working at Amobee, which is an advertising technology company. I work on setting up campaigns across digital TV and social media.
2. What does your typical 9-5 day look like?
First thing in the morning, I always check my emails, going through them, replying back to client emails, and also checking on the pacing of the campaigns, making sure that the budget we have allocated for a campaign is spent in full for the duration of the campaign period. Also, any new campaigns to set up, troubleshooting, any deals, or if it's underperforming, underdelivering.
No two days are the same, there's always new campaigns to set up, new things to work on and improve upon the performance of the campaigns.
3. Do you have to deal with data? How often do you have to deal with data?
I think data is so powerful, there are so many things you are able to extract from it and be able to analyse and use it to inform your planning of the campaigns, optimisation, and see how you can improve upon performances of campaigns to make sure you're reaching the KPI. It also helps us with recommendations, we look at the data and see what works and what doesn't, and provide recommendations back to the client for what can be improved. We partner up with a lot of different data providers, for example, Flybys, where we kind of have a exclusive partnership with them and then we use the data, the transactional data, the customers' data, and we use it to target in our campaigns, incorporating it in, and making sure that the data is running smoothly and that we're targeting the right people.
4. What hard skills would you say are the most useful for you in your role?
There's times where we have to troubleshoot certain deals that are happening, certain campaigns, and see why it's not performing or delivering. So a lot of the times we run it through the system and download the actual CSB file, read HTML files and extract information and export data from it, and a lot of the time it is kinda decoded into these specific characters, and we run it through decoding and analysing. There's certain elements within that file, for example, when we run campaigns, we run through bids, so when we want to present onto Channel 7's link, Channel 7 will pass the bid to us, and then we'll respond back.
So I'd say with this kind of role, it's being able to decode and understand the data involved behind that bid request, for example, it may be asking for a specific audience, age, or a certain kind of creative size, and that's all incorporated within that HTML coding.
5. How did you get into becoming familiar with all these processes? And Do you have anything to say to people hoping to get into analytics roles?
I'll say definitely it was learning on the job. A lot of things I learned from uni were more...textbook. Whereas the skillset was more learning by application. One tip I'd give is being open to learn new things, and don't be afraid to give things a go, and always ask questions. Because the more familiar you are with it, the more practice, the more you feel confident and comfortable.
Don't be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and really take that leap of faith. You may not know which particular area of analytics you want to go into. Give things a go and then that'll lead you to that path of where you want to take your career further.
Interviewed by: Garry Huang
Written by: Wen Yu Yang
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