Extremely curious and easily bored

These qualities sounds like a recipe for disaster by distraction, but these are two traits that I have relied on a great deal in my career. The outcome has been anything but disatrous. As the saying goes:

“A jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one.”

I have built a career in the field of advertising and marketing. By most measures, it has been a successful run (so far at least). While the name and logo on my paycheck has only changes a few times. In 15 years, I held jobs and titles that span the entire breadth of the advertising and marketing domain. From corporate communication, media buying, creative strategy, analytics, and product development — I have “jumped” from job to job. Each and every career opportunity identified from curiosity and intentional decision to shift. Those intentions almost always emerging from boredom.

Public Relations

I graduated Syracuse’s S.I. Newhouse School Of Public Communications, without any real job prospects. To kickstart my professional career, I somewhat arbitrarily decided that Chicago would be a great place to begin my journey. With a location picked out, I sent my resume through every online portal I could find that had a listing related to Public Relations in the Second City. From the 100’s of resumes I sent out, I received one call back. As luck would have it, I landed a job as a corporate communications intern.

This job was a near-perfect fit for my green, but specialized skills. At the time I was an expert in the writing rules of Modern Language Association, uncanny ability to recall the Arthur Page Principles of Public Relations. I was ready to put my knowledge into practice. While most days were spent writing internal memos, media profiles, and bio blurbs for the company leadership, I most enjoyed the people I met. Much of my job was focused on promoting and getting our agency leadeship in the press, on panels, and quoted in trade. I would set up 15-minute meetings with the most senior leaders of my company to interview them to gather quotes and perspectives that I could use to generate interest. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but this mundane task provided me incredible access to the c-suite. In the moment, I was too busy focused on deadlines and trying to limit the number of revisions requested from my supervisor. While I was taking these meetings I was learning. I learns how the company worked, how we made money, how we staffed, and the latest innovations in the advertising world.

At the end of my six-month internship — I took a job that I didn’t create for myself and this would be the first and only time I did not choose my next “job”. I took it because I was in financial debt and I didn’t have any great prospects. My managers at the time helped me by transitioning me from the corporate communications intern to a full-time media buying position.

Media Buying

I didn’t pick the job or the client, but I could not have be happier with where I landed. I was doing print, digital, and TV deal negotiations for a international beer brand. Being a writer I was comfortable in Word and PowerPoint, I did have experience using the tools of the bedia buying trade — mainly Excel. I found quickly that my excitement for spreadsheets outweighed the excitement of negotiating Prime Time Live Sports CPMs.

I started to use Excel to make my own job easier, but quickly realized that the tools, templates, and automations I build for myself could help all 100+ members of my client team. When this skill caught the attention of my managers, I got permission to reduce the hours spent negotiating, buying and reporting on our campaign performance and spend more time building tools and processes that enabled others to be successful. So when the company won a new, fast-rising client technology client, my newfound skills made me a perfect fit to make a jump.

While my new job still had the title of Media Buyer, I did everything other than buy media. As the new account team grew from 10 people to 300 globally in 3 years, I developed and lead all digital workflow management, taxonomy management, data collection and global reporting. My self-taught Excel skills that served me well started to fall short the demands of the account proved too big and complex. This wasn’t a me-problem, it was an Excel problem. My curiosity got the better of me and I began to learn basic programming in the hopes that I could build a software solution that could scale across my team.

Analytics & Ad Tech Consulting

I failed to create anything meaningful on my own, but I did attract the attention of the company’s analytics department. This team was had brilliant leadership and an amazing set of media analytics experts and most importantly they had software development resources. While working for my tech client, I spent 90% of my time working with the analytics team designing, creating, and improving the software that I envisioned. Luckily for the company, the software solved a real problem and it began to scale as a paid-service for the company. While I can’t say for certain the direct new revenue the product brought in, I can be certain that its value far exceeded my salary at the time — not so lucky for me. I grew bored and perhaps frustrated with media buying and decided to make the jump to a job in analytics.

After a year or two of building, testing, and releasing new features of the platform I became a full blown product manager. For a time I loved it. I loved capturing user feedback building new features, and seeing ideas go from paper to interactive interfaces. While I was focused on product, all around me there was amazing analytics work happening. The new data sources, data warehousing, statistics, and modeling were a new challenge. I became increasingly curious about how new technologies (including mine) could be connected to measure the impact of marketing on business outcomes. I cared less about drivign client outcomes and was more simply amazed at the ability to figure out the puzzle. How to collect, connect, and store information. I became fascinated with diferent statistical approaches and methods of analysis. It was a new world and I found a way to split my time between the software product and learning about measurement approaches and digital advertising technology solutions. At the time, Data Management Solutions (DMPs) and trading desks coming to market as the new age of programmatic buying was about to explode. I spend weeks and months learning everything I could about this new space, its impact on digital media, and building rubrics to evaluate each marketplace solution. Without recognizing it at the time, my curiosity turned me into a Advertising Technology Consultant. I worked with and for the world’s largest advertisers helping them to vet, implement, and build data management solutions. After all the processes, templates, and teams were built, I felt I that I was no longer needed in that practice area. I started to take part in the more pure analytic analytics services helping drive and oversee new solutions in Media Mix Modeling and attribution models. Mostly, I was hiring and building teams to service the clients needs, but I was also selling the company solutions. On the backs of brilliant minds and some of the most skilled analytics practitioners in the world, we grew fast. With success coming fast, I could not shake an uneasy “what if” feeling.

“What if” can be dangerous territory. Too much focus on the past and replaying sliding-doors moments are breeding grounds for resentment. I let the resentment of not financially capitalizing on the software solution I built years before get the better of me. I thought “What if I left and started my own company, I would I be a CEO would I be rich?” Dislcaimer: I could not have built the software without the resources and brilliance of the team, but I resentment doesn’t leave much room for appreciation — while I was physically going to work, I was mentally already gone. When a few of the former analytics department heads left to build a start up, I watched from the sidelines ever-curious of what was being built. I remained curious and called a few times asking. They were pretty closed lip during those times, I kept my head up for new opportunities. When the founders called and asked that I be their first employee, I knew I had grown tired of media analytics and knew it was time to make a change.

Product Development

After seven years going to the same building everyday, I was excited for day one of my new venture. What a difference a day makes. First and most obvious was the size. I left a company of thousands of employees to a company of three people. We sat in a small office in downtown Chicago overlooking Millennium park. There were no rows of cubicles, just a single large table with space enough for 4 people and a giant white board. I was issue a MacBook (was a PC user at the time).

Instead of a calendar packed with administrative meetings. My calendar held one meeting — The daily “stand up.” It was here that I started to learn everything about Agile Sprint methodologies. I had to learn new product management software, tasks creation. I learned about backlogs, epics, stories, and tasks. I was asked to begin to learn R coding for prototyping. All the newness was more than enough to scratch the itch of curiosity. The pace of learning and building was so aggressive but was also welcomed.

The start-up ended up selling to my former employer of all places. In the waning days of the start-up, I struggled. We had a small client roster and I was failing to truly innovate. As we got new clients, my focus had to shift from the product to client service. This was the death nell for my curiosity. I will admit it — while we had a successful exit, it could not have come at a better time for me personally. To my surprise, the acqusition by our former employer did not return me to media or analytics. I we were acquired to deliver our product within a well-known creative agency.

Creative Analytics & Brand Strategy

To say I was lost inside of a creative agency is an understatement. I was on another planet. New processes, new language and terminology was coming at me fast. For 6 months, I struggled to understand if and how I could bring value to the company or my teams. Having a career where almost all my skills and required linear thinking, I was not in a world inhabited largely by non-linear thinkers. Rather than grow bored and frustrated, I let me curiosity guide me. While I was there to help round out the the data team for the agency, I started to sit myself next to our creative strategy department.

To better understand what this job was, I asked the experts. I emailed the leads of each department and asked to interview them. I spent an hour understanding the systems, processes, and outputs of their work. I looked for key inputs and outputs of their teams. I became fascinated with the concept of “selling ideas” and “creative solutions.” I was particularly interested in the process by which these ideas were created. What I learned was that while creative strategy process is unique to individuals, there are artifacts and deliverables generated throughout the process were largely the same from team to team — a strategy briefing, creative brief, creative territories. What happens between the key steps varied greatly. Some strategists rely on their knowledge of culture at large, some rely heavily on industry reporting, or certain consumer research and databases. So much of the process was implicit. I set out to try to make sense of a world that one leader described at “unicornery” by codifying the inputs to each artifact. My goal was not to build a system or tool to do the job, but rather make the inputs more readily available and digestible for the broader team and department.

I had some success in doing just that by creating an interactive knowledge bases and data processing automation. Along the way, something happened… I became somewhat of a brand strategist. I started to work with new and existing clients on positioning projects and giving input to new and existing clients on their latest campaigns and cultural forces impacting their businesses and consumers. The biggest take away though was that my curiosity forced me to operate in a non-linear world. I started to think in stories and images vs tables and charts. It challenged me as an analyst and data visualization practitioner. My ability to create thes narratives of brand, consumer, and culture using data have proven to be the greatest output of my curiosity. All blended together, these skills helped me to become a Integrator

Integration Leader

This new job is as ambitious at the title suggests. But for someone who becomes immediately bored after solving a problem, it is a hand-in-glove fit. Large advertising companies are made up of specialists. When clients need solutions that extend beyond that specialty, they need someone who can connect the right people, teams, companies, and skills. That is where I come in. If a media client is looking for better creative, I help. If a creative client is seeking to better leverage data for personalization, I am consulted. I worked with travel companies, healthcare companies, beverage manufacturers, CPG companies, and large retailers. I help with brand strategy and ad tech optimization. I help clients find practical application for AI and consult on the best practices for modern brands on social platforms. The job that I inhabit now was born out of my curiosity, but it also has solved for my boredom.

While curiosity is a contributor, there have been so many people throughout the path that gave me permission to be curious. These are stories for a different day.