This week’s Under the Hood is with Lotame’s Sales Engineer, Mark Sanders. Mark plays a vital role in both the Sales and Engineering efforts here at Lotame, and has proven to be one of the most CREATIVE mindsets at Lotame. Let’s learn a little bit more about Mark and his role at Lotame.
What do you do at Lotame?
I’m a Sales Engineer covering the left hand side of the United States. I work in a pre-sales and post-sales capacity with our smart, funny, and talented members of Sales, Customer Success, Support and Product teams. I help join the dots from a technology and strategic point of view for teams at agencies, publishers and brands. I like to think that I make complex topics understandable and solutions relatable. If I can come up with a fun and colorful metaphor to explain an abstract issue and you get it—then I’ve done my job.
What did you do prior to joining Lotame?
I was at Teradata as a Solutions Consultant and before that I was in the ad agency business for the previous fifteen years. Mostly WPP shops here in the Bay Area before being a partner in my own boutique—a full service company in the Mission District of San Francisco. Our office was an old mayonnaise factory.
Where did you learn all your video/creative skills?
My degree was in Fine Art. I made movies. I started out on the agency side as an animator before becoming a developer. I also had my own podcast for a while recently. So much of what we do as knowledge workers these days is to take advantage of the best tools of communication and expression.
How does working at Lotame compare to your previous roles?
My Lotame colleagues are far taller, better dressed and better looking than anyone else I’ve ever worked with.
What do you like best about working at Lotame?
I get to meet and work with some of my favorite companies. I often feel a little starstruck. And Lotame is really making a difference in the industry. It’s a real thrill to work with the technology that we’re responsible for developing and finding new and even more revolutionary applications for it.
You have been super engrained in the competitive intel process here at Lotame, can you speak to the importance of knowing what our competitors have to offer?
It’s crucial to have empathy in the process of understanding how and why people make decisions. How people relate to products and services and what their agendas are. It’s equally important to have a grasp of the demands that people are under and how other providers have created their solutions to help meet those needs.
What piece of advice would you give someone new to the Marketing Technology industry?
Learn broadly. Read widely. When Steve Jobs dropped out of college he still snuck in and attended lectures on typography. It seems natural today that personal digital technology and thoughtful design are both part of the same conversation but for people soldering transistors in the seventies knowing what a serif does wasn’t part of your world vision. Interestingly many academics now see the rise of silicon valley as rooted in the culture of west coast 1960’s Summer of Love. It’s all about the connections. The creativity. And the humbleness to allow yourself to learn from someone else’s point of view. When it comes to marketing in general, whether it’s your product or a product in that industry it’s all about learning and making ideas your own.
Lotame is the leading independent DMP in the industry. Can you explain the importance of this?
I’ve been in the business since the end of the last century and things change. The role of Lotame’s DMP is to understand the necessary and continual change and have a point of view. In the same way that Starbucks is an operations company that happens to sell coffee, Lotame offers an approach not just a DMP. A powerful and uniquely relevant technological framework to support smart and effective digital marketing drawing from experience that only we have. No one else can service the needs of the publisher as well as company that has such deep understanding of the needs of an agency. No one can give the agency what it needs without the keen insight of working with Brands. The open, transparent and value driven solution is what customers want and need as the environment continues to change.
Where do you see Lotame in the next few years?
I can see Lotame on the cutting edge of the latest technology and consistently and rhythmically delivering value for customers in tried and true areas of business that the current industry is built on.
Tell us something we don’t already know about you.
So much, so much. I used to work as a juggler as a teenager in England. Fire, knives, bowling balls.
What do you do when you’re not working?
Spending time with my equally creative daughter. Building elaborate Halloween costumes. Trying, still somewhat unsuccessfully, to write my first novel. Recreational coding. Drinking too much coffee. Napping.