We sat down with Adsquare’s former General Manager EMEA, Vincent Tessier, to ask him to share some of his industry leading insight and top pieces of career advice.
Adsquare gives advertisers and agencies seamless access to multiple data dimensions for more effective targeting, measurement and insights.
Company: Adsquare
Client: Vincent Tessier, Former General Manager EMEA
Looking back, what two pieces of career advice would you offer to your younger self?
I would advise my younger self or any young executive starting in our industry to travel the world and live abroad. Business is international as any career should be in 2019. The other piece of advise would be on building a strong network as early as possible. Our industry is about people and trust, the sooner you meet your peers the better it is. These early relationships will last your entire career and people change job regularly in our industry so without knowing it you will know key stakeholders on the client or vendor side.
When you leave the office what is your go-to method of relaxation?
For me it’s music and gym, these are the things that helps me a lot to relax or focus on something else than business, even though to be honest business never sleeps! Having kids is also definitely a great way to balance life as kids demand all your attention and it is important to spend time and be really present with them (no phones at the dinner table for example is a simple rule to follow!)
What is the primary challenge you face when trying to hire great talent for your team and how are you trying to overcome it?
Competition is of course the main challenge. If it’s not the big platforms that are obviously attractive to young talents, Ad tech is crowded by companies, generally backed by VCs, and even with a very strong and innovative production attracting talents is a challenge. Key elements to overcome this is client reputation, arranging meetings during the process with people who carry the company vision and recruitment agencies like Grey Matter who can help a lot by introducing a great start up to great local talents.
What technology do you see changing the workplace the most in the next five years and why?
I am spending my time doing emails, video conferences or meetings. Emails are not going anywhere and even if lots of companies tried to disrupt it. On video conferences, we all have had mixed experience with video conference calls, with colleagues abroad or clients, I see lots of room for improvement there. I think VR will probably have a great impact and has the potential to disrupt and improve video conferences or client meetings in general. It will take time but it will get there in my opinion.
What habit or trick is your key to improving productivity at work?
Pausing the email flow. There are tons of interesting plugins to gmail, Boomerang is one of them and is a very useful one, and stopping the continuous flow of inbound email helps a lot to focus on your to do or top priorities of the week.
How to do you see marketing and advertising spend changing going into 2020?
Software is eating the world as Andrew Rooswoitz says. In our industry, Programmatic is eating all channels. I expect to continue seeing programmatic spread on all channels, taking different shapes and flavours but automating buying and selling is the way forward, there is no doubt about it.
What is your greatest challenge when trying to retain great staff and how have you overcome it?
Managing a team is an always on task, keeping a good and close relationship with your team is the best way to keep them on board. There are lots of companies but only few good managers, what I see is that people follow the manager they like to their new companies and that the best mark of trust and loyalty one can give.
What has been your most recent inspiring/interesting read and why?
I have read recently ‘Who owns the future” by Jaron Lanier, and have really been inspired by his view, which are controversial in many ways. His proposition of micro-paiement to distribute the value of the data to end users make lots of sense and can solve a lot of problems our economy is facing right now.
Who has been your biggest inspiration / support in your career to date?
There are many great people, leader or founder in our industry. Brian O’Kelley is certainly a great figure to look up and I’m really curious to see what he will do next. In terms of support, I was fortunate enough to work with Fabien Magalon in Paris, one of the early adopter of programmatic when it was called RTB and it was really inspiring to learn from him.
What technology do you see thriving in the next five years?
AI will continue to impact our industry, beyond the noise and the marketing announcements. AI is already there, consumers and clients don’t necessarily realise it but i would argue that pretty much all campaigns make use of AI today. As we know, AI and machine learning are only good as the data you put in, as our industry is working on gathering, cleaning and normalising it in data lake, CDP or DMP, the efficiency of AI will improve dramatically and i believe it will live up to its promises.