Gina Race is a marketing and ops leader and Head of Operations at Jordan Digital Marketing, with over a decade of experience in digital marketing and business operations. We spoke with Gina on her leadership background, ethical issues in digital marketing, and how leaders and employees can maintain integrity while striving for business success.
Talk a bit about yourself and your background
I’ve been in the marketing industry since 2011. I’ve had experience in-house, at agencies, and consulting. Starting my career in-house allowed me to gain a lot of knowledge and experience in a breadth of marketing areas. Moving into agency work, I was able to deep-dive and focus specifically on paid advertising and work with a lot of different types of companies.
I started managing early in my career, and along the way I have always worked on additional projects like creating processes and improving efficiency. In the more recent years, I’ve shifted away from the day-to-day client work to focus on the operational work to grow the agency and keep it running smoothly.
How have you worked with Jmac and/or John?
JDM has been working with JMac for about a year. They have helped many of our teammates get article placements on different marketing sites like MediaPost, Advertising Week, BuiltIn, and Performance Marketing World, to name a few.
What are some ethical challenges you've encountered in digital marketing, and how have you addressed them?
There can be a lot of pressure for marketers to fudge numbers or make results look better than they are. I’ve even seen agencies blatantly try to attribute more credit to campaigns than they’ve earned. Companies can be quick to cut budget—or you–if the results aren’t extremely obvious, which can lead to this pressure. The story behind the numbers and educating the stakeholders in how things work are both important parts to the equation.
When it comes to reporting, I always err on the side of being more conservative. That often looks something like this: “We know at least 100 conversions came from this campaign for sure, and likely it could be higher. Cost per conversion is $50, but likely it’s even lower than that.” Digital marketing is a gray area when it comes to reporting. There are often lots of touch points that go into a conversion, and not all of them can be attributed. Very rarely does just one touch point equal a conversion.
Promising results is another common issue in the agency world. We will never promise clients specific results, and if we feel their goals or expectations are unrealistic, we will let them know. It’s better to be transparent and let them know that we won’t be a good fit to help them achieve those goals rather than pretending to fake it just to take their money for a short period of time.
Ownership mentality is a big one for us, which means we strive to spend money like it’s our own. We always make recommendations in the best interest of the client, not ourselves. We would never suggest spending more money if it doesn’t make sense for the client, even if it would mean more money for us. On the flip side, it’s just as important to recommend reducing spend if something isn’t working or if we can get conversions more efficiently. This is a big piece of our promise to be a great partner, and it makes good business sense for us as well – happy clients stay with us longer, which is healthy for both parties.
In what ways do you see ethics evolving in the digital marketing industry, and how is your agency preparing for these changes?
One of the current big ones is the changes in privacy when it comes to advertising and targeting. Users are more educated and are more concerned with protecting their privacy and information than ever, which advertisers are ethically (and legally) required to respect. Incremental changes have been happening in this space for years, but more impactful ones are happening now.
While Google announced the upcoming removal of cookies in Chrome (and recently reversed course on that announcement), companies still need to make changes to stay ahead of this trend. Google’s latest announcement still leaves plenty of immediate work for brands and agencies, since other browsers like Firefox have already made the change.
Moving tracking from cookies to 1st-party data and making sure data is anonymized is crucial to future-proofing measurement. Here’s a brief overview of what moving into cookie-less measurement looks like for marketers and what we’ve been implementing for our clients.
What advice would you give to leaders and/or employees on maintaining ethical integrity while striving for business success?
At a very basic level, ad copy and content is important. If you want your customers to trust you and retain a loyal following, do not try to cut corners or get quick wins by publishing ads that are misleading, deceptive, or don’t align with company values. That also applies to where your ads are shown. We’ve seen complaints when brand ads have appeared on sites or YouTube channels that are known to promote hate (for example). Make sure you check ad placements and have safety settings configured properly, especially if you run display campaigns through a large network like Google.
From an agency perspective, I’d boil it down to treating client accounts as if they were your own and practicing true business partnership. That means open communication, owning up to mistakes, and proactively fixing them. It means optimizing for real metrics that drive growth, not vanity metrics. It means knowing the ad platform policies, keeping clients informed, and playing by the rules to avoid getting flagged or shut down. It also means continuing to support a client 100% after they’ve put in notice. This is an important step in our process –including a complete offboarding process to make sure the client has everything they need to move forward. Being a true partner every step of the way has led to many of our old clients coming back to us over the years.
As a business leader, these are all important things to look out for and pay attention to when working with agencies, as well as in-house employees. It’s always a good idea to work with partners who share your same values.
