Rachel Kerr is the Senior Marketing Manager at Jmac client M&C Saatchi Performance, a performance marketing agency delivering world-class digital services. Coming from a background in public relations, Rachel excels at delivering new business to the agency and has a keen understanding of what makes marketing campaigns successful across a variety of channels.

We spoke with Rachel on her background, working with Jmac, career wins, and exciting new trends in the performance marketing space.

Talk a bit about yourself and your background

I have been at M&C Saatchi Performance for just over two years now. I run the American side of the marketing team, and my job is to work closely with sales development to bring new leads to the business. We do everything from traditional paid search and social, app store optimization, display and programmatic to Connected TV, managing influencer campaigns, and helping guide clients on how to ensure that their campaigns are still going to work with all the changes in privacy. 

What’s your relationship with Jmac?

We’ve worked with Jmac for six months. My background is actually in PR; I used to be a consumer journalist back in the UK. So I was very keen to test how PR would work for us, in terms of getting some key mentions in ad tech digital publications. And that’s why I wanted to bring in a specialist agency. I was actually referred to Jmac through another one of their clients, and we’ve been really pleased with everything they’ve done for us so far. John is very nice and the team is lovely. They’re really good at what they do: press relationships, building a contact list, understanding what each member of the press is really looking for. 

What career accomplishment are you most proud of?

We won the silver award at the recent Campaign USA awards for the Media Team category. I was pretty proud of that, because I tried to enter the year before and we hadn’t even gotten shortlisted.

What are some of the most notable trends you’re seeing in the performance marketing space?

We’re seeing a lot of changes in how customers’ privacy is dealt with in the ad tech landscape, largely because of Apple tracking changes. That has caused quite a lot of change within what we do specifically, especially as we have a heritage in mobile. This is interesting, for the agency, because it allows us to showcase our expertise and how we help clients navigate those changes, and has ensured that we as a business have looked elsewhere for new ways that we can help clients. 

That’s why Connected TV, for example, has become a bigger part of the service that we offer. Everyone knows that you don’t isolate what you’re doing on your TV from what you’re doing on your phone—people sit there with phone in hand as they’re watching. So making sure that you’re talking to people at the right time on the device they’re using is really important. And the division that we’ve set up to manage Connected TV knows the landscape extremely well, so that’s proven to be extremely successful. 

Everyone talks a lot about influencers, and I think what we do in that space is quite interesting. We very carefully select influencers according to each campaign brief—and we’ve worked with quite niche clients that have a very loyal following, so picking the right influencers is important. Then, we ensure that the most successful content becomes paid activity as well. And that seems to bring in a lot more followers and app installs.

Do you have predictions for where performance marketing is headed?

I think it will become even more important for brands and advertisers to understand what’s working for them. Because changes in privacy are making it harder to measure and track where your ads are actually being placed, it’s going to become increasingly important to understand data and analytics. This is great for us, because we’ve built up a new team to help with media mix models, understanding incrementality, and potentially moving away from attribution models which don’t relate any longer because of the restrictions in tracking. In general, the changes in the economy mean that people will have to think on their feet quite quickly, and budgets are moving around quite a lot. Understanding what your advertising dollars are delivering back to the bottom line is going to become even more important as we go through the year. 

I also think Connected TV is going to continue to grow. It will chip away at traditional linear TV, and I think the people who’ll really win are those with a digital and programmatic understanding. There seems to be a TV show catered to absolutely everybody now, so it’s going to become more and more competitive in that space. And from the advertiser point of view, therefore, understanding where your audience is going becomes so important.

Of course, then there is AI and how that is rapidly changing the way we work. Our ‘tagline’ is we are ‘The minds behind the machines’, which fits well in the AI landscape as you have to have people at the heart of what you do, even when working with some of these new technologies. Data is essential to modern marketing, and only gets better with people to interpret it.