Jason John is Chief Marketing Officer, Digital for Publishers Clearing House, a role in which he is responsible for the development and execution of overall marketing and digital strategy.
We caught up with Jason to ask for his views on digital marketing, the skills needed for success, and his tips for others…
Broadly speaking, what are your key business goals? And what are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?
Our key business goal is to offer a free to play chance to win opportunity to our members. As a media and entertainment brand, we need to offer a great member experience to drive adoption and retention. Retention rates are a key metric for us.
What is the biggest challenge in your role?
Keeping up with the ever changing world of technology. It really requires an amazing team that is innovative, flexible, analytical, and listens to customer feedback.
The fast shift to mobile has really made us rethink our gaming strategy for instance. We are now the fifth largest mobile gaming publisher in the U.S.
How is the function of marketing evolving within your organization?
The evolution has been thinking holistically about customer communication.
Instead of thinking about Email marketing, we are thinking about the customer and the messaging they are seeing across several channels like email, push notifications, Facebook, onsite, Etc.
Which tools or software do you find most useful in your role?
For better or worse, excel is still embedded in my daily life.
What do you see as the most significant trends in digital marketing over the coming years?
I feel we have many of the parts, but bringing together customer lifecycle messaging in a personalized and automated way, while keeping the message on brand vs feeling computer driven, will be the focal point for the next couple (Read more...) years.
For instance if you fall into a decelerating buyer segment, it will trigger cohesive cross channel communications, which may or may not contain different promotions/incentives depending on value calculations.
What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?
Ability to understand the customer journey and rally teams around making that the best experience possible.
Tell us about a typical working day…
I tend to get as much face to face time with as many folks as possible during the day.
Trying to understand what hurdles exist in the organization where we have opportunity…and then breaking them down!
Do you have any advice for people who want to work in the digital industry?
It is a fun and fast pace environment. And although the science side of it (analytics, ROI, etc) has certainly been getting the most attention, there is still a large “art” component that allows you to get creative and try new things. Balancing the two is a lot of fun.
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