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Episode
Welcome to How Agencies Thrive
About This Episode
Add Vitaly Pecherskiy, Co-Founder and COO of StackAdapt, explains the journey of making How Agencies Thrive podcast and who you can expect to hear in future episodes.
Vitaly Pecherskiy | COO, StackAdapt
Transcript
Episode Introduction (00:00:00)
I’m curious to know what industry leading marketers are looking to achieve and the ever evolving digital landscape to How Agencies Thrive podcast by StackAdapt is dedicated to helping the new breed of forward thinking savvy, lean and mean marketers win in the rapidly evolving digital landscape. Time to thrive.
Vitaly (00:00:32)
Hello, and welcome to How Agencies Thrive podcast. My name is Vitaly, co-founder of StackAdapt. And I’ll be your host for this podcast. This episode is episode zero. And as we started calling it internally, the origin episode, here is where I will tell you why this podcast exists. And who is it made for. So we we’ve been thinking about this podcast for easily over a year. But we finally decided to launch it when I started working with my good friend Jay over at Podcast Your Brand agency. So they were instrumental in helping us get getting this podcast to market. But even though we we got a lot of help from them, the amount of work that went into making this podcast was still very substantial. So I’m very happy with the way it came out. And I really do hope that you will get value out of it too. Ultimately, the reason why we wanted to make this podcast is because the theme of this podcast is very closely aligned with our company’s mission, which is to help agencies thrive. And this is why this podcast exists. Right now at StackAdapt. Hundreds of agencies and brands use their product to achieve their marketing objectives, be that content distribution, or lead generation or driving sales, we’ve grown to work with all major supply and data partners. So we can truly support our customers across any channel be that native or display advertising connected TV or digital video. And I feel incredibly fortunate about where we got to in the last six years because we have evolved from a single point solution to something that agencies and marketing teams within brands can truly build their entire paid media strategy on top of. But looking back, it wasn’t always like that. I remember, you know, the early days of the company, we were very obsessed with reading growth hacking strategies. And like many companies tried to try to build something like, like a Dropbox model where you had clients come in, they sign up, put their credit card down, if they want to get some free storage. In the case of Dropbox, they invited their friends. So it was very viral in distribution model. And this, this sounds amazing. But I think it was also fairly deceptive because all the case studies that you read about the successes, they’re really outliers. And for most companies, that doesn’t work. And we were one of those companies and we were wrong about how we can get to market. I remember the moment it hit me that we’re doing something wrong was when we had an an email from one of our users who turned out to be an elderly lady who was running a small cupcake shop in Bulgaria asking for help. And as much as I would love to be able to help her, I realized it would be incredibly difficult for us to scale our business on customers like that, because they’re simply too early in their growth. So to me, you know, I think of advertising more like adding gasoline to the fire. For small companies, there are just so many things that they need to nail like supply chain product quality business operations, well before they start investing in advertising, so So we as a company, we chose to focus on really building enterprise grade software that would solve complex problems for larger businesses. However, it still took us another two years to real to realize that how you software is incredibly important. Take for example a CRM like Salesforce, it’s useless if you don’t, if you don’t have any sales process or input emails, of your contacts with mistakes. And the same thing goes for advertising software. You can have access to the most sophisticated software in the market, but how you use it matters a lot. And and that’s why over the last year, we’ve been putting so much emphasis on building out our our solutions and analytics teams, working with our customers to help them strategize better, investing in our product marketing, and most importantly, education of our customers. And this podcast is the extension of this effort. The reason this podcast exists is because we want to give more tools to our customers to be successful. While this podcast is called How Agencies Thrive It’s really suitable for both brands and agencies. So whether you’re a marketer, the large, mature fortune 500 brand, or you work at a medium sized agency, this podcast is for you. Many of our customers are internal champions of programmatic technology, and they’re very data driven. They are innovators. And if this describes you, then you should definitely keep listening. If you’re someone who doesn’t believe that digital will be the dominant advertising channel in the future, and if you’re okay with that status quo, you’re not hungry for knowledge, then this podcast is probably not for you. It actually took me a few times to record this episode, because I really wanted to make it clear, who would find this podcast hyper valuable, because I believe that career growth really comes down to the knowledge and unique insights that sometimes randomly you come across. I was incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon certain knowledge at the right times of my career. But you know, when I was starting, I was also incredibly lost. My career began when I moved to Toronto about 10 years ago from Ottawa when I was where I went to university to study finance. And I was looking for a job in investment banking, when I moved to Toronto, so I was frantically applying to a ton of jobs online, and nobody was getting back to me. So about two weeks into my job search, I thought, this is just not working fast enough. So what I did is I started going to office buildings downtown, and I just rode elevators. And every time I saw a respectable person walking into the elevator, I was I was wearing a suit, I had my stack of resumes, my business cards, I would walk into the elevator with them, give them an elevator pitch as to why they should consider hiring me for any job, for that matter. So definitely sounds very crazy looking back. But one day, I stumbled into a small office of a startup that was advertising their job of an account manager. And I asked to speak to their CEO who was obviously very surprised to see some random guy walk into their office asking for a job. I told him, I know nothing about advertising, but I’m willing to work 24/7. I had no friends, no girlfriend, I just moved to the city, I was ready to work 24/7. He was impressed enough by my hunger at the very least. So he gave me a document. It was like a five page document with all kinds of terminology that I’ve never heard of before CPM, CTR, CPA, many different companies I needed to research. And he basically told me, let’s see how much you can learn over the weekend. And he invited me back on Monday. I had one class in university on marketing. And I remember absolutely nothing at that point, even after graduating, and I was trying to get advertising degree in two days. So on Monday, I came in, I sat down with him, and I guess I did well enough for him to offer me a job. And on Tuesday, Tuesday morning, I brought my own laptop. And we we started started working. So I joined this ad tech startup. And they happened to be one of the early partners of Facebook. They had an API integration, the timing couldn’t have been better. This was right before Facebook really blew up. And I couldn’t believe the job was was real. I was mostly promoting games, we had a chance to play them even develop some tiny banners to promote them on Facebook. So the the idea back then it was pretty simple. You know, we were, we were helping customers optimize their paid media strategy on or paid media acquisition on Facebook, by optimizing keywords and images to drive conversion rates up. So every single day, we experimented with 1000s of ads to make our campaigns perform. And if you remember, back in 2011, daily deals, websites were really popular. So we had one of the one of them as our client, we experimented a ton for them. I still remember great images that worked. So one of them was a woman eating this gigantic taco, which is actually a pizza folded in half with a lot of toppings. There was this image of a house that looked like it’s upside down, but it’s actually normal house inside and also an enormous waterslide. So it was really fun to see what ..what type of images people resonate with online.
Vitaly (00:09:34)
Once this startup got acquired later that year, I went on to pursue my next opportunity and I joined a big holdco. I joined their trading desk as one of the first people in Canada and I was put on some large really large accounts of fortune 500 accounts, which was really different from the types of companies we worked with before, which were digital only companies they only did digital advertising And, and now I was exposed to these really large companies that did a lot of traditional advertising, they did digital. And for me, it was a big transition. And there’s a lot of things I learned at that time. So first of all, most of these brands were really new to digital advertising. And they’re still doing it as an afterthought. Second, I realized that I barely knew anything outside of digital. So my formal education in finance, me getting my first experience in digital only advertising. I came in, I had to learn a lot from my colleagues. But I also realized that I had, I could bring a lot a lot to the table because I started with, over and over and investing in my digital knowledge, I knew that there’s a lot of opportunities for brands to do their digital better. And I knew back in 2013, when I met my co-founders, Ildar and Yang, that digital will only continue accelerating. Over the last seven years, the market has evolved dramatically. It went from big focus on mobile native to focus on privacy, data, connected TV, and it will probably continue to evolve into something else. But one thing is for sure, and something that we still see consistently is that many brands still struggle with nailing their digital strategy. For us, we knew that there’s a, there was a clear need for a new age software that leverages automation, technologies, like machine learning to drive results. And that’s ultimately how we get started, I think there’s likely never going to be a silver bullet, or a magic button that you press, and they will just make advertising work. There’s just so many moving pieces within each business. In order for them to be successful online, there is the brand and how it’s perceived in the market talent that you have on your team, technologies you use, timing of your marketing initiatives, and so much more. And that’s why software is not the only thing that we do when it comes to enabling our clients. A big part of our mission is education, and empowerment of our clients with knowledge. When we work with our customers, or think about products we really want to need to build, I tried to think of it through the lens of what can we do to help our customers get promoted. With this podcast, we really hope to bring forward ideas, people, companies that we think are doing incredible work in the space and help share their knowledge and know-how with our listeners. So hopefully, we can help accelerate your career growth. And with that, I really want to say thank you for taking the time out of your busy day, and choosing to listen to our podcast. And I’ll see you next time.
Episode Outro (00:12:49)
Thank you very much for tuning into this episode today. If you like what you heard, it would mean the world to us. If you do these three things. Subscribe to the show and leave us a review. If you’re listening to this and know someone who would find this episode valuable. Please share it with them. And finally, please share it on LinkedIn. If you have questions or feedback or would love to learn how agencies or brands work with StackAdapt, find at www.stackadapt.com. Thanks for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
