This past September, Laurel Malhotra, Director of OEM Marketing Solutions at Experian and ComArtSci alumnua, sat down with Merri Jo Bales to kick off the second season of our professional development series, Level Up. They dove into what the evolution of media business has looked like during her time in the industry.
Malhotra leads client strategy and solutions for omni-channel digital marketing for brands, agencies, publishers and platforms in the auto vertical industry. She is passionate about automotive marketing planning, analytics and digital campaign measurement design.
Malhotra’s work has driven the launch of Experian Automotive’s digital marketing business as a single source, interoperable data solution for audience building, media activation, identity, and closed loop measurement providers for auto brands and their agencies.
Malhotra is also passionate about diversity, equity and inclusion for women in the advertising, AdTech, publishing, data science, marketing, and agency workplace. She started the Loyola University Webcamp for Girls that teaches girls about internet business planning and website development. She also has been a She Runs It Ambassador since 2017. Malhotra has a BS in Advertising Management from Michigan State University and a MBA from Loyola University Chicago.
The Three Key Principles
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We must now think with a digital mindset. From an online advertising perspective, it’s critical to understand where our shoppers (clients) live and make sure that’s where we’re putting out the content.
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Dive into your data. Consumer behavior and the experiences we give them from digital platforms, The consumer is generating data constantly, and we are now able to record anything the consumer is doing when they interact with our digital pages. What we're able to do is draw inferences and correlations between advertising, the consumer activity within the advertising, and then also how they’re interacting with the content to draw a picture of the consumer journey. This is how we make sure that our advertising is useful and working – which is always the goal.
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Don’t underestimate the power of job shadowing. When looking to make a career shift, this is an underused tool in the discovery process of figuring out you do and don’t like.
Additional Resources
Industry Trends
- AdExhanger: https://www.adexchanger.com/
- eMarketer: https://www.insiderintelligence.com/
- Mobile Marketing Association: https://www.mmaglobal.com
- Digiday: https://digiday.com/
- Interactive Advertising Bureau: www.iab.com
- Media Post: www.mediapost.com
- AdWeek: www.adweek.com
- LUMA Partners: www.lumapartners.com
- Chief: www.chief.com
Networking
- She Runs It: https://sherunsit.org/
- Chicago Interactive Marketing Association: CIMA- www.chicagoima.org
- Seller Crowd: www.sellercrowd.com