Marc Hale is the Head of APAC at Liftoff where he oversees partnerships with mobile app advertisers and agencies across the region.
“We offer CPA-optimized mobile app install and retargeting campaigns to performance marketers looking to acquire and re-engage high-value users for their mobile apps,” said Marc. “Mobile ad tech is a dynamic and rapidly changing industry, and over the last 10 years I’ve been fortunate to have worked at some key players at the forefront of those changes. With its data-driven approach to user acquisition and retargeting campaigns, Liftoff particularly interested me.”
“Through my industry connections, I was introduced to the management team at Liftoff, and was very impressed with how quickly they had established themselves within the industry” he added. “Every day, I get to work with the amazing team at Liftoff – some of the smartest and most passionate people in the industry.”
“I’ve had the pleasure of working at both early stage start-ups and public companies throughout my career which has given me a balanced perspective in my approach to business. With the right mix of start-up hustle and organizational structure, our team is proving to be very successful as we expand across the globe,” he said. “My experiences have required me to conduct business with partners from incredibly different cultures and regions across the globe. This has positioned me well to build the business in APAC, which can be quite fragmented when you consider the variation in cultural nuances and business etiquette around the region.”
SCALING GROWTH IN APAC
Liftoff quickly established a successful business in the Americas and EMEA with their data-driven performance marketing. Customers soon began to request their services in other international regions. While growth has been very rapid for their Singapore-based team, the opportunity represented by the APAC market is enormous. Marc feels as though they’ve only just started scratching the surface.
“We’ve taken a consultative approach with prospects in the region to share knowledge around how to leverage programmatic platforms, machine learning, and dynamic ads to improve their strategic mobile marketing initiatives,” said Marc. “Customer endorsements have also helped open doors with prospective partners looking to enhance their efforts.”
“Most importantly, once live, the product performance has proven itself,” he added.
A MORE PERSONALIZED AD EXPERIENCE
One of Liftoff’s specialties is their ability to deliver personalized ads, also known as Dynamic Ads, that regularly outperform standard ads. “Dynamic Ads are mobile ads that are generated programmatically right before they’re served to a user,” said Marc. “This allows us to personalize ad creative based on the user’s device, location, gender, installed apps, app usage history, and many other characteristics.”
“Dynamic Ads are useful because they allow you to deliver personalized ad experiences at scale. They are also helpful for testing key UX variables, such as the layout of the creative, the copy, image selection, aesthetics, etc., across thousands of live creatives,” he added. “To make the most of our Dynamic Ads, be prepared to bring a lot of raw assets into the creative process, so they can be ingested to create personalized ads. Then you can work with a partner like Liftoff who has the tech to optimize asset selection using large datasets to deliver a compelling, personalized user experience that truly drives user acquisition and revenue for your app.”
Key technologies for programmatic creative include machine learning, high-velocity AB testing infrastructure, templating, and recommendation engines. Marc also notes it works great for branding. “Better, more relevant creatives = more relevant user experience, better conversion rates, and a better interaction with the brand.”
FROM SUPPLY CHAIN TO SALES
Marc says that he was lucky to fall into a career that he enjoyed at an early age. He said he spent a few years as a Supply Chain Management consultant, gaining a desire to try his hand at sales.
“I had a few friends at the time who were in Digital Ad Sales and seemed to love their jobs. I did more research on the industry, decided I wanted to give it a go, and talked to as many people I could until someone gave me an interview,” said Marc. “I started as an Inside Sales Account Executive, and loved it so much that I’ve been in Ad Tech ever since.”
“Early on in my ad tech career, I was the second sales hire at Flurry Analytics, one of the first mobile app analytics providers in the market. We built an ad network that leveraged behavioral data to target new users for mobile apps on a cost-per-install (CPI) basis, and I ended up calling on many gaming advertisers,” noted Marc. “The best part was the ability to play mobile games as research for work! The people I met throughout the industry had unique perspectives that I’d never come across before in my career.”
THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE
In his personal life, Marc loves to travel - he has visited 53 countries across six continents. He’s an avid snowboarder and lives “for waist-deep powder days.”
“It’s hard to imagine not being in this industry… but if I had to pick, I would be a professional snowboarder or travel writer. Self-driving automobiles are particularly intriguing to me as well” Marc said, adding that as a child, “I always wanted to be a pilot. My dad was a corporate pilot and half of my family lived on the other side of the world so I spent a lot of time on airplanes (and loved it).”
When it comes to his actual career, Marc said it was difficult to point to a singular moment he is most proud of. “All my experiences, good and bad, set the foundation and have been building blocks for where I am today,” Marc noted. “I’m proud Liftoff has given me the opportunity to lead the charge into APAC with an incredibly supportive and dedicated team - a team that I love to work with.”
Looking forward to the future of gaming, Marc sees VR/AR as the next big trend. “Once the headsets are widely adopted and easily available for mobile phones, the gaming experience will be drastically different,” he predicted. “This will also increase the canvas for innovative new ad units for marketers.”
“As Heraclitus said, ‘the only thing that is constant is change.’ To drive business forward, you must be willing to innovate and embrace change as it comes at you. At Liftoff, we’re constantly looking to connect the dots and identify trends that can improve our products and services for mobile app marketers. We’ve leveraged a number of new technologies that have allowed us to bring a differentiated product to market for our partners including dynamic ads, lookalike targeting, and re-engagement.”
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