Senda Ben Abdallah - The state of streaming ads | E87

Speaker A: Hello, listeners, and welcome to the latest episode of the Mavvertising M podcast. A podcast that explores the intersection of creativity, content, tech, advertising, all of the things that you care about. Today we have a special guest. We have Senda Ben Abdallah. She is the head of product marketing at Vibe Co. They just had some big news I'm sure you'll hear about. They're the self serve CTV ad platform that's essentially trying to be for streaming TV what Google is for search. And before Vibe, Senda built her career on B2B and enterprise tech. Uh, she's also a podcast host, which we're going to talk a little bit about. But she's a super impressive marketer. Her thoughts online are really smart. She's obviously built an amazing brand at Vibe with all the success that they've had. So we're very lucky to have her on the show. Senda, welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Well, Adam, thank you so much. I was not expecting such a hyped up intro, but I love it so much. Thank you. And I'm so happy to be here.

Speaker A: Thank you. And thanks for spending the time joining us. I know you're super busy. You guys also do such amazing marketing. I'm personally a fan of Vibes marketing. I get your CTV ads, um, and I also get your Facebook ads for marketing, which is such good targeting because I'm a VP of marketing and you're obviously wanting to go after, you know, someone like myself. So I think you guys do great work. Um, but let's start with a different topic. Let's start, start with podcasting. Um, you're a podcast host in addition to being a marketer, and I love having podcast hosts on the show. And one of the reasons why is getting to host a podcast. I get to talk to really interesting people and it's kind of like a cheat code to learn from other people because, like, selfishly, I write down the questions that I want to learn, but I ask every podcast host this question. Um, who has been your favorite guest and why were they your favorite guest and, or, or even just like some of the qualities of your favorite guests, uh, that marketers could sort of learn from.

Speaker B: Uh, oh my God, this is, it's like asking someone if they prefer their mom or their dad. Like, I don't really like this, this question. Um, I've had over, I think, 68 guests. Um, so this is tough. But one, one is standing out. And this is because I'm, um, I'm a fan of his. His name is Thomas Erickson. He wrote a book called Surrounded by Idiots, uh, which is one of my favorite books. It's a best selling book. And I emailed him after reading his book over Christmas and I was like, hey, I'm a fan. I'd love to interview you on my podcast. And surprisingly, he replied. He replied like one day after I sent the email, which, uh, boosted my confidence a lot. And I had a chance to interview him about his book, which essentially assesses like personality types, which is something I'm very curious and interested in. Um, and so, yeah, I was very impressed to have him on the show. He's extremely inspiring and he's just amazing, uh, such a thought leader and I think anyone should read the book, by the way. Did you read it, Adam? Do you know it?

Speaker A: Um, I've heard of it. I haven't read it yet, but I'll have to add it to my list. And I think, you know, everyone who's who I've emailed and asked to come on the show has said yes, which has been like, pretty refreshing that people are willing to go on because, because we're not. You know, both our shows were not like hosting the Joe Rogan Experience or, you know, Call Me Daddy or any of these big podcasts. Like, we have like a niche audience of like a few thousand marketing nerds that like really care about creativity. But I, I find as well that when you reach out to people, they say yes because they kind of like reaching like the smaller, passionate audiences. And it's probably a lot more fun because it's not like something from this show is going to get clipped nefariously and put in the media. So it's a lot lower pressure to do.

Speaker B: I completely agree. I mean, here I am.

Speaker A: Well, so I want to talk about your marketing career because it's been pretty impressive. Um, you've done a great job. I feel like moving from, I think you're at Microsoft and Cisco into, uh, some quirky tech startups and now obviously at a winning, um, Martech firm. Um, do you want to talk a little bit about, I guess, the through line of how through all this work you now think about marketing and just the work that we all do and all of our listeners do during the day, like philosophically, however you want to talk about. I know it's a broad question.

Speaker B: Yeah, it's a broad question which I'd love to start answering by giving more context to the listeners on my background. You did mention I started working in tech after graduating from, um, a business degree. Actually, it was business and it but mostly focusing on business. And I knew right away that I wanted to work in the tech industry just because it moves so fast and there's so much to learn. And so my first big like career move was going to San Jose in California, so Silicon Valley, spending one year working with Cisco, which is a huge company, like number one corporate company in the U.S. um, and I quickly learned that I love tech, but I was just overwhelmed by the lack of impact that I was having in such a big organization where decisions take so long to be made and every idea you have will probably die after a few months because it didn't get implemented on time. And so I was getting really, really frustrated. And after kind of facing that frustration for a while, I decided to just go for the startup experience. And I've been working with startups ever since. Um, so my first experience was with a B2B SaaS that had just raised their Series A and I joined them as they were raising their Series B. So I was kind of like in that, okay, we're a startup but moving to scale up vibe, I built the product marketing function. Um, and that's really when I realized, okay, this is what I want to be doing forever. Like product marketing is such an interesting field because you get to work with sales, customer success, uh, marketing, product engineering and you're really the center and the glue of all these departments. And um, I got really energized by the role and decided to keep doing that afterwards. So my first experience was a B2B SaaS. Um, after that I joined another startup which similarly had just uh, raised their pre seed round and they were moving, they were raising their Series A round, joined them as the first marketer, built a product marketing function and it just became a pattern after that. Um, and I think that the second startup was interesting because it was a uh, completely unknown industry to me. It was construction tech. Very old fashioned and very um, technically complex. So I had to learn a lot about what engineers and architects love to do. It's essentially a 3D visualization platform that uh, brings together engineers, architects to work on different tools. And being part of that ecosystem was also very energizing. But I also realized that okay, this is fun but I think I need to be working in a um, company that serves my like people like me. So marketers and product that I truly understand because I think to be a great product marketer you need to love the product you, you're promoting and you're working for. And so um, that's when this, this was in London. So I was in the UK and then I got a message from Arthur, CEO at Vibe on LinkedIn, who's like, hey, we're looking for a founding product marketer. Are you interested? We're building the team in New York. I'm like, this sounds great. I want to change my life entirely, so let's go. And that's when I joined Vibe. So it's been a year and a half now. Joined as the first kind of pmm. Um, also quickly built the function, mostly serving the sales team through sales enablement, uh, by creating the pitch decks and the one pagers and all the assets to help our sales team. And then hired an incredible designer who's been playing a huge role in all the marketing that you see, um, across, like, billboards, out of home campaigns. And that's when I saw that product marketing is amazing, but there's so much more to marketing that I could be doing. Um, and building brand awareness is, was definitely something that I learned with Vibe. Working with someone like Arthur, who's so passionate about marketing and really understands the function, I think made my role even more energizing and, and exciting, especially for someone who moved from the UK to New York. So first, you know, marketing in the US is a different game. Uh, there's not a lot of rules like in the UK with GDPR and all the privacy concerns. So here it's basically a playground, especially in New York City, where everywhere you walk there's billboards and campaigns of everything. Um, so I think it's been, um, a pretty stimulating journey.

Speaker A: And I was going to say, um, you started to touch on this, that you built the PMM function from scratch at Vibe. And I'm curious, could you part any words of wisdom for, say, a young marketer in your shoes at a, ah, similar startup where they're coming into nothing, right? They're coming into the founder. They may be really technical, not, uh, really understand marketing. What do you, what do you recommend for that person for building that function from scratch that you learned along the way because you've done so well. It's like, obviously you look at the brand from the outside as another marketer and everything is just like, just very, um, visually consistent. The brand message is good. You guys are kind of everywhere like, like some words of wisdom of how you got the team to this point

Speaker B: to be very transparent. There's one word that comes to my mind and it's alignment. I think for me, the first thing I understood was how passionate Arthur was about marketing and how he was like the Source of truth of what marketing should look like and his vision for the brand. And just having that constant, um, point of communication with him, making sure. Like, my first month at Vibe, I had dailies with Arthur, like every day. We would even meet for 5, 10 minutes to make sure. Okay, this is where my head's at. What are you thinking? Um, I was working on the website and so our messaging was, was key. Like our new positioning, we were shifting from serving SMBs to mid market and enterprise customers. And so having him involved in conversations and then also talking to the sales leaders, customer success leaders, and making sure that we were all aligning on our message was the number one rule, like any marketer. And I don't think it's only, uh, applicable to product marketing. I think any marketer should have that alignment because if you align with the strategy and the vision, everything else will just flow super smoothly and well. And that's what happened at Vibe because we started with the website. So it's literally, you can't really make mistakes on misalignment with a website because everyone will see it. And it's the first touch point for customers, partners, um, internal stakeholders as well. And so I'd say my biggest advice to you as a young marketer is making sure you understand the strategic vision of your leaders and the people that are really essentially leading the way for the vision and the strategy of the, of the business and then spreading that across other departments and bringing that alignment through your work. Whether it's, as you said, the consistency of our brand. It took us a lot of time to get here, Adam. Like, we had a lot of different visions and opinions, and sometimes you have to suck it up a bit and just agree that not everyone's going to align on everything. But finding, like, I, I would call it, the strategic alignment is what's gonna help you as a product marketer or marketer.

Speaker A: I love that. And I think you said something that was really insightful for young marketers, especially at a smaller company is, however, you can make sure you get a lot of facetime with the founders. Because I think the marketing of Vibe comes through so well. Because his passion comes through you. It's obvious. Um, through all of the brand work that you guys do. Um, so let's Talk about streaming TV. Um, streaming just crossed 45% of all US TV viewers. Um, more than cable and broadcast combined, which is awesome, I'm sure. Um, you guys have your own stats. That's just one that I pulled for this show when I was doing research. Um, does that feel like a tipping point to you or has the industry been slow to catch up to what consumers and what you all have already figured out?

Speaker B: To be honest with you, I think since I joined the company, every time I have, as I said, I work on these pitch decks and all these content, uh, assets and every time that metric keeps increasing and we're able to, to ship a lot of playbooks around the state of the industry and how it's growing and how not only it's growing but it's also showing results that when I first joined Vibe, I didn't really understand what CTV was. I wasn't really aware of the industry as a marketer myself. And so it's been an educational journey for me and I, I truly see the results through just being uh, in conversation with our customers and hearing how they've been driving ROAS growth and they've been seeing uh, their sales increase and their brand awareness, um, increase thanks to tv. Because TV is essentially a channel that not a lot of growth leaders and marketers know exist as, you know, a performance channel. Um, and I think a good way for us to explain that to marketers is saying think of Vibe as the meta for CTV basically. So when you compare it to tools that performance marketers are very familiar with, it makes sense. And I think it also validates the stat that you just shared. It's like, okay, it's not just growing because people are watching ctv. It's also growing because brands are leveraging it as a channel and seeing those results for both the customers, um, like B2B and B2C which I think is, is an incredible product to be working for and with.

Speaker A: Yeah, I, I personally find that ctv, CTV ads are one of the only ad, uh, formats left. I actually see the whole ah, ad. You know, I Pay to have YouTube Premium, so I don't see ads there. I'm like totally ad lined to scrolling online. Um, I think it's a great format and especially if like I always wanted my TV ads to be more targeted and not just be, you know, the same, you know, Geico and large Insurance company ads. Although I love some of those too. Some of them are really fun. But I really like that I actually get like Martech ads now brought to you by your uh, platform. And it's like, this is so cool that I'm actually getting ads that matter to me that are interesting to me on uh, the large screen. I think, um, it's, it's totally a game changer and every marketer should do like, invest in some really great creative and put it through a platform, put it through your platform. And um, I think it's an underrated way to reach people especially because the targeting now can be very good. Right. Do you want to talk a lot, a little bit more about. Give me the platform overview for someone just getting into ctv. So um, the creative upload, the targeting and the analytics and you know, whatever else you want to take me through.

Speaker B: Of course. Yeah. So it's. So as you've kind of already hinted to that but Vibe is self serve. It takes and we've measured this takes less than five minutes to launch your first campaign on Vibe. Um, you could be uh, an SMB startup that just started a business. You can be a larger business that's dealing with thousands of customers. It doesn't really matter. You, there's no minimums. Uh, you can start with as low as $50 a day let's say. And the first thing you will be asked to do is choose your goal, uh, your campaign goal as a business. So whether you're looking to drive awareness, sales leads, um, or use acquisition, we work with a lot of apps uh, as well. And so once you've picked a goal you are prompted to choose your targeting. And that's where I think our product really stands out because it's so easy to either leverage existing data that you have in your CRM. As a marketer we all use a bunch of CRMs. And so Vibe today integrates with over 40 measurement um, and audience partners. And a great use case is HubSpot. Let's say you have a huge list of customers on HubSpot and you want to retarget them on TV. You can simply upload your list and then Vibe will do that matching for you and make sure that the, the ad you're launching and your product will be in front of your customer and your target audience. And so let's say you have a customer that's been on your website but never bought a product. Well, you can retarget them on TV instead of um, a boring Instagram ad. And that's where I think uh, the value really comes together. So targeting, either you have your CRM, um, you can do that or Vibe can also recommend some targeting options based on your website domain and your, your industry and your audience. Um, our targeting options have mark, um, in market audiences, so interests of your customers, their demographics, their location, um, and that's where we talk about like hyper targeting because you can really make sure that it, your ad will serve your buyers, uh, and not just your viewers. And after that comes, um, our distribution. So the channels that you can use the ad for. And that's where we talk about over 500 platforms we integrate with, including Disney, ESPN and more. You can choose to be on all of them or you can just select a few. Like for example, we've seen customers only do live sports campaigns on live sports channels. Um, and finally as you mentioned, there's obviously you're creative, uh, which you either have already prepared or our team can help you with um, ad creative production as well. After you've launched a campaign. That's when you have your dashboarding and your reporting, which is very straightforward. Um, you can either look at a bunch of insights around your demographics, which ones are getting the most impressions. Um, thanks to our integration with Shopify, if you're an E commerce business, we can see where your sales are and what kind of uh, impact you've had there. Um, and you have a bunch of KPIs you can look at depending on the business goal you've selected. Just one last thing about measurement which is really important. We recently, and this has been a huge marketing initiative as well, we've been doing a lot of partnership marketing, uh, by integrating with measurement partners that are very super reliable and well known in our space to have that third party measurement, uh, offering that is also verified data that you can look at. So it's not just Vibe, it's Vibe and a measurement partner if you're integrated with them. Um, so that's pretty much the overview of Vibe.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think I saw um, an ad with one of your measurement partners talking, which was I, I think a really nice piece of creative for B2B. Um, so I want to talk a little bit about your, and I love the overview of the platform. I think you guys solve a really hard problem. Especially it's, it's almost more, it's interesting for everyone but it's almost even more interesting for a smaller company that they can dip their toe into this fairly cheap, get results and then scale up. Uh, which um, admittedly on the out of home side we're a lot more expensive to start a campaign. Um, but you know, for, for tv, you know, like the Internet, you can kind, it's cool that you guys make it like the Internet that you can sort of start as small as you want and obviously scale it up when you get results. So I love that.

Speaker B: Um, sorry Adam, I just have to say this, but I think another important thing with Vibe is and I have to give them a huge shout Out. Our customer success team are incredible. Uh, whether it's the technical account managers or the CSMs customer success managers, they are fighting for customers to get the results that they should be seeing. So we provide that support as well. You're not just by yourself. You have someone helping you, consulting you on your campaigns, making sure that you're always optimizing and giving you recommendations. Because as, uh, any performance marketer, when you start trying with a new tool and testing things, you need that support and you need to, to get that guidance. And so I think for us, even though we do have the AI agents and the MCP and AI recommendations, we also have an amazing team that is, um, extremely great at what they do and consulting customers on their performance.

Speaker A: That's great for, especially for helping companies that are new at this.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: So you're. I want to talk a little bit about Vibes marketing because it's really good and I think you do such a great job. Um, you know, I, I love the, you talked about how uh, you were consistent with messaging online and on out of home and your TV ads and you've like integrated really well. Um, is there when, when you're making your marketing plan? Because I, I love that you think online and offline like you, you guys all think holistically. You're not just running like search ads and you're actually dogfooding your product. Um, is, are you guys, um, sitting down once a year to spec everything out? Are you kind of more agile and are like, you know, we know all the channels we want to be on and we kind of dial them up and dial them down. Tell me a little bit about how you run your meta marketing. It's always interesting for other marketers here. You don't have to give me specific details of like dollar spend or anything, but just like just how you think about your marketing.

Speaker B: Yeah, of course. Um, I think to help with the sensor, it's important to explain a bit like how historically Vibe has been operating. So when I first joined, we had a marketing team of three people and a growth team of around eight or nine people. And the growth team was in charge of uh, the paid ads. So anything you see on meta, um, LinkedIn, YouTube, that's them, uh, $2 million a month, which is huge. And the point is to test as, as many concepts as possible and seeing what works, what doesn't. And we also of course allocate ah, spend to Vibe. So that's where we're testing all these different platforms and we're, we're Doing our own analysis in house to seeing what works and what doesn't on what, which platform. And the marketing team is in charge of the positioning, the messaging, distributing content, the video ads, uh, that you, you see, we work with an amazing agency for that. And so we produce all these content to feed into our paid media engine. And today, actually very recently, we've merged the two. So now more than ever, we're working really, really closely with our growth, that is our marketing team, to make sure that every time there's, let's say, a product launch or a big campaign we're working on, they know beforehand and they can already start prepping, uh, the audience that we need to have ready. Let's say we're launching, um, which is actually real. We've launched, um, a, ah, Clay integration. So let's make sure we have the clay audience ready in LinkedIn and Meta so that we can push those creatives. And we have these weekly planning sessions for creatives that go on meta and LinkedIn. Um, so that's anything from like static assets to video assets. We're now working a lot with creators as well to help us with scaling our production. Because you probably know this, or anyone listening to this knows this. It takes a lot of time to come up with concepts that work. And so we're now making sure that we have a lot of volume so we can test. Every week we test at least 20 concepts on all the platforms that I mentioned. Um, and on top of this, we also do out of Home, which has been probably the craziest initiative of this year. Um, we decided to go all in on out of Home because we, it was actually the only channel we haven't tested yet. And we wanted to build more brand awareness, so we had that goal. And we didn't really think of out of Home as a conversion play, but rather an awareness play. And that's why we decided to go all in. And every single creative we've pushed on out of Home was also distributed on our paid media. So we're, as you said, we have this holistic view and we make sure that it's consistent. We have these campaigns that are running and it takes time to make sure that not only we're pushing new creatives, but we're also maintaining what's working and killing what's not working. So it's an entire like, engine of, of testing and learning. And Adam, we are extremely agile. We're not like, we don't have very strong like, review sessions or anything. If something's not working, it's uh, there's no, like 10 minutes of overthinking. It's instant, it's done, it's killed, we move on. And I think that spirit at Vibe is what makes us so, like, hungry to, to learn and to win in marketing. Um, and I'm very happy that you like it because you keep complimenting it, so it seems that it's working.

Speaker A: Yeah, we're big fancy your marketing. We have, uh, a Slack channel internally at Adquick where we share companies that we like and then we also share companies where we're like, they could probably do better. Obviously. We're, we're an ad tech though, so I'm like, I'm not telling companies like, what creative to put on their out of home, but, you know, we're marketers, so we like to share things that, that we like and like. Your size matters. Out of home campaign is memorable if obviously, um, I can, I can remember it right now on the podcast. And you guys are doing it right to have short campaigns. It's funny, though, some marketers do things to break rules. Like there was a campaign from Lyft years back where they put like, a wall of text on a billboard in LA that you could actually read if you were stuck in traffic as, like, kind of a joke. Um, you know, because you're on a list so you can see this billboard anyway. People do. You can break rules too. So, Senda, um, I want to ask you one final question, and I think this is when you'll be particularly, um, adept at answering. I asked all my guests, though, um, for young marketers entering the field, what advice would you give them to have a thriving career? Um, especially one with increasing AI, increasing automation, increasing chaos in the business world. Um, what do you tell young people?

Speaker B: So I'll answer this, um, with the assumption that you're already using AI, because if you're not, um, I don't want to give you the advice of you need to learn AI tools, because I'm assuming you're already in the wave of AI and, um, as you should be, and we don't really have a choice. So I'd say my biggest advice is making sure that you're actually not optimizing for money too soon in your career. And the reason why I say this is I had to make a decision early in my career to either keep going with the comfort zone of, like, you know, the, the big corporate and have like, the, the safe. The safe route, or join a startup that, you know, you don't know if it's gonna do super well or, or die in the next two weeks. But the learnings you get from doing that and not really thinking of earning, just having that safety net early on in your career will help you learn much, much, much, much faster. And I think today with combined with AI, your learning curve is like, incredibly exciting. And you can learn so much in such a short amount of time that I would encourage you to put yourself in risky positions. Because if it pays out well, you'll be very glad you made that decision. And if not, you can always revert back. It's okay. So that's my advice, which has nothing to do with marketing. It's more of a what to choose and. And when, I guess.

Speaker A: I love that advice. I was actually given similar advice when I moved to Silicon Valley. Well, not advice, just, um, a quote from a venture capitalist friend I met when I first moved there. He, he said, you're either learning or you're earning or you're learning. And he actually meant that slightly differently because he meant you're at a startup and it fails and you learn or, and you learn or it wins and you earn. And so is it similar to what you just said, though? Um, you know, you definitely. I like the idea of taking risks when you're young in your career and, um, you know, they can work out or not, but, um, it's, it's definitely where, where you grow the most, um, versus Adam.

Speaker B: Are you saying that I think like a vc?

Speaker A: I think you do. You know, thinking and bets is. Is basically what it is.

Speaker B: Did I just change career?

Speaker A: I, I think I could see you doing venture capital one day and maybe you will. A lot of it's a great place for marketers because a lot of venture capitalists don't think like marketers. And there's so many interesting things happening in media right now in media and marketing that you would have a unique eye for it. Well, send it. This has been great. Um, you, you're so interesting. Uh, where can people find you to connect online and also how should they get started with Vibe?

Speaker B: Well, thank you so much, adam. Very easy. LinkedIn is your best bet. Uh, Senda Ben Abdallah, that's me on LinkedIn. And my, uh, cover image is one of our billboards, so it's going to be easy to find me. And for Vibe, Vibe co. Just log in, create an account. You don't need anything else. You just need a work email. Not even, actually even a personal email works. So join us. Try ctv. It works awesome.

Speaker A: And we'll put some links to connect with Senda, uh, and Vibe in the show notes. Thank you, everyone, for listening, and we'll see you on the show next week.