In this monthly blog series from PulsePoint, we recognize people from our customer organizations who are actively using Life to manage and execute either their brand or customers’ programmatic/addressable campaigns. In this installment, we interviewed Brian Snyder, Senior Associate, Addressable Strategy at Matterkind.
Brian is a Senior Associate of Addressable Strategy at Matterkind and has been with the company for over a year. After graduating from the University of Buffalo in 2018 with a degree in communications, Brian spent 5 years at several firms including one of the largest search engine companies, getting his feet wet in marketing and recognizing a fiery curiosity for digital advertising.
A Discussion with Brian About His Career, How He Uses Life for Programmatic Campaign Execution, and More
PulsePoint: What is your favorite part of your job?
Brian: I really enjoy the data analysis portion of it, such as finding insights through trends in data. That was pretty much the draw for me to get into addressable marketing. Data has always been a big part of my career and my life. When I was in college, I was calling color commentary for D1 teams and found myself looking at the data for trends to make better calls during the game. I have always enjoyed these little things throughout my life and it has led me to be successful in my career today.
PulsePoint: What would you say to someone who is starting off in programmatic? Do you have any tips or tricks?
Brian: Yes. A big part of programmatic or addressable is identifying an audience that is relevant to the messaging you are trying to serve. Being able to look at data and find a trend is a very important part of the job. It leads to better insights, leads to building better campaigns, and helps find better audiences that match your messaging. I would definitely point to data as one of the most important things to figure out early on in a career in addressable marketing.
PulsePoint: What have been some of your impactful moments at Matterkind?
Brian: Matterkind is great. There are a lot of opportunities here. One of the biggest for me that I’ve had success in and been able to enjoy is our case studies. We do a lot of case studies at the contextual layer for one of our pharma client’s campaigns. One study covered how video games, and gaming in general, have led to a high campaign success rate for our client. It’s an interesting contextual layer to add to those types of campaigns. I built a case study around that and I performed highly within our internal awards. Receiving that recognition early on in my career gave me the confidence that confirmed I was on the right track, and it was very rewarding.
PulsePoint: What do you like most about working with PulsePoint? Is it the partnership you have with your rep? Is it the capabilities? How does PulsePoint help you?
Brian: I work across all different channels at Matterkind including video display, CTV, and digital at home. PulsePoint is one of my favorite platforms when it comes to our video and CTV campaigns. Everything performs well. I came onto the team at the end of the third quarter last year and we’ve run these campaigns in PulsePoint since I joined. Honestly, the great thing about PulsePoint is the team there. Zack, Brett, and Becky are all great people—they are always available to help and always responsive. I really, really appreciate that about them. You can reach out and expect a fast response.
PulsePoint: What is your favorite feature or capability of the Life platform?
Brian: There are many things I appreciate about PulsePoint Life. One of the highlights is the campaign dashboard. It allows you to see insights immediately once you click on the overall campaign. You can then click on each line item to get delivery insights and different information about performance on each line item. It’s very beneficial to see everything without having to pull a report because, for us, it streamlines the process. That is the big winner I would point to for the Life platform. The dashboards are great for getting insights and for managing our campaigns. Since I’m on the platform all day, that’s great for me.
PulsePoint: What are some of your hobbies and interests outside of work?
Brian: I’m a big fan of sports. I played a lot growing up and follow pretty much all the major sports leagues—NFL, NHL, NBA, and MLB—pretty closely these days. Sports have always been a passion of mine so that’s probably my biggest hobby. I’m in 4 fantasy football leagues this year!
PulsePoint: What is the best piece of advice you ever received?
Brian: Oh, that’s a good question. I would say it is to have patience. That’s one of the things that I have always tried to work on in my life—I’m not the most patient person. However, in work and in life, especially in this field, having patience is important. When you are looking into something and trying to figure out why it’s not working, because maybe it’s just taking a little bit of time to scale up, you need to have patience just to let it work, to let the platform do its job. I needed to learn not to jump in and make changes immediately when the campaign wasn’t working right away. Patience is a big part of it. And second, not everything has to be done immediately to get it right.