Greg Wester is CMO at Mobile Posse and a 20+ year veteran of interactive
marketing and advertising.
Having worked in business development, corporate strategy, campaign optimization, research, and advertising sales, let’s find out what Wester’s current role involves.
(Remember, if you want to advance your career, take a look at Econsultancy’s training offering)
Please describe your job: What do you do?
I’m the chief marketing officer of a mobile media technology company – but that sounds way too boring. Through thought leadership and thoughtful marketing, my team is leading the mobile industry’s understanding and evolution of how smartphones can create smarter content discovery . . . and how Mobile Posse can help, of course.
Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?
Organizationally, I sit under our Chief Executive Officer. Geographically, I’m about 240 miles due northeast of him. That makes for lots of video conferencing and Amtrak.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Like all media, business media is saturated, too. To cut through requires a combination of left brain and right brain skills. You can build a team that’s complementary in this regard, but my belief is that real effectiveness in this role requires bringing both to the table. Being a “morning” person helps, too. Being able to knock out things before the day gets started really helps control your destiny in the startup world.
Tell us about a typical working day…
Well. . . it starts early with email and organization. Then the days vary. Meetings with management tend to get clumped on certain days, meetings with staff on others. We’re getting more operationally prescriptive as well. What I mean by that is that is we’re defining specific and known day-by-day tasks for all of our recurring efforts.
What do you love about your job? What sucks?
We’re leading the creation of a new category – frictionless media or built-in device discovery. Creative thought leadership is a burden. Honing language to make our stories ‘Fischer-Price’ simple is a burden. There are NO metrics in this space. Defining them is a burden. Conquering all these burdens is what I love the most.
What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
Our mantra for 2019 is ‘prescriptive and programmatic.’ We’re really focused on operational excellence. I’m looking to get our monthly recurring initiatives done with less effort and on a tighter cadence. This will free up more time so our brains can be more creative.
We sell to a relatively small set of companies and targets. So my top KPIs are ‘% of Target Audience Reached’ and ‘% of Target Audience Engaged’.
What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?
Monday.com has helped our team operations and management. OmniFocus is what I use to manage my own personal goals and to-dos. Video Conferencing is obviously critical since i’m remote. My gym membership serves both cathartic and creative purposes.
How did you end up at Mobile Posse, and where might you go from here?
Both Mobile Posse and my previous firm had the same lead investor and shared board member. I wasn’t happy where I was, so I reached out to this common investor. He mentioned his other portfolio member, described Mobile Posse, and facilitated an introduction. That was close to eight
years ago. Thanks, Steve.
What companies do you admire (outside your clients) for their approach to mobile?
My analytical side really likes what Verto Analytics is doing in mobile measurement. I also had the opportunity to recently to spend some time with Bloomberg digital execs. I have to say, for such a large story, their TicToc efforts deserves some solid cred.
Do you have any advice for mobile advertisers?
Keep hiring. Invest more, and be okay with realizing that half of what or how you used mobile last year no longer makes sense.