MarTech Edge Interview with Marissa Bernstein, VP of Marketing, Vistar Media

Please share the journey that shaped your career and landed you in the current role of VP of Marketing at Vistar Media.

I started my career in the media industry, working for several years at Vox Media on sales, marketing & development, followed by Forbes on the brand marketing side. However, I was presented with the opportunity to join a booming startup and found myself pivoting to the world of adtech after recognizing the unique career opportunities that came with Vistar Media.

I made the official leap to Vistar in early 2018 as a senior manager of marketing, specifically focusing on the demand side of the business. It’s been a remarkable journey, to say the least, helping Vistar grow from an early-stage startup to the thriving global organization of more than 200+ employees it is today. While I started by leading all demand sales initiatives for the marketing team, my role quickly evolved to encompass driving a holistic marketing strategy for all of North America, covering both demand and supply needs for our two largest markets.

I’ve embraced being a jack of all trades over the course of my Vistar career—from overseeing client education, sales enablement, events, PR, product marketing, content marketing, and more—and it’s been an honor witnessing firsthand the transformation Vistar has had on the wider adtech, marketing, and digital signage ecosystems.

How is Vistar Media’s holistic suite of programmatic ad solutions enabling brands to excel at Digital Out of Home (DOOH) media?

The addition of programmatic technology definitively brought the centuries-old out-of-home (OOH) industry into the modern age of digital advertising. Vistar Media’s programmatic DOOH tech stack has created a marketplace where media owners can readily make their out-of-home inventory available, and advertisers can seamlessly purchase those spots at auction. Today, an ever-growing percentage of DOOH media is bought and sold programmatically—the benefits are endless, including streamlining workflows, vastly expanding audience scale for advertisers, and, likewise, driving proven results for brands while reducing the work media owners have to do to sell their supply.

Vistar allows marketers to seamlessly extend many of their existing digital targeting and measurement strategies into a physical ad medium while more efficiently and effectively reaching their target consumers in the real world. It’s exciting to see how rapidly we’ve been able to help bridge the online and offline advertising worlds and bring meaningful and measurable results to brands and agencies across the globe.

How profound would the impact of cookie deprecation be on ad targeting, and what would be the way-outs of this crisis?

Cookie deprecation has been a huge conversation across the digital advertising industry for a few years now. However, the loss of cookies won’t negatively impact the DOOH channel, giving yet another leg up to marketers when being forced to reevaluate their media mixes.

DOOH doesn’t operate on the same targeting logic as the online world does. Instead, Vistar Media, for instance, uses passive location data to target consumers in aggregate. DOOH, unlike online advertising, is a one-to-many medium, meaning it’s focused on reaching groups of people at a time and does not rely on tracking down individuals—making it an extremely privacy-safe medium for advertisers to lean into. DOOH’s detachment from the traditional infrastructure of digital advertising makes it a strong choice for omnichannel marketers tasked with finding varied yet still effective methods to reach consumers.

Can B2B brands leverage DOOH advertising to the same extent as B2C companies? If not, what can be done to root out the hurdles?

B2B companies can absolutely leverage all that DOOH has to offer, including its unique audience targeting capabilities, advanced measurement solutions, dynamic creative options, and more. In fact, DOOH’s data-driven capabilities make it an excellent vehicle for B2B brands to reach a more niche business-focused audience. Whether that’s activating high-impact digital inventory around contextually relevant locations such as office buildings and airports or utilizing data-driven audiences to seamlessly reach C-level executives and business decision-makers, DOOH presents B2B organizations with a multitude of opportunities to get a relevant message in front of the right people at the right time (and drive their desired results).

Being a marketing professional in an adtech firm, what’s your take on organic vs. paid media?

First and foremost, marketers should always start with what goals they want to achieve to determine what their messaging and media strategy should be, which sometimes calls for organic and sometimes paid, but often both. Organic and paid media both serve as worthwhile levers to pull in the part art, part science of getting a brand’s message in front of target audiences.

Organic media is important, whether in the form of social content, owned blog content, or company-operated newsletters because it helps marketers educate their audience, reinforce their products/services, and connect with prospects or current clients directly, all without a hefty price tag. Organic marketing tactics serve as an extension of a brand’s messaging and market point-of-view, which have the power to influence individuals and organizations at large. Organic media also serves as a method to be consultative, raise awareness and consideration, and garner additional share-of-voice in the market.

Paid media is also an important component of a marketer’s media mix, especially when looking to get in front of new audiences. Paid media can expose a company to new prospects or industry verticals and allows a brand to think outside the box and get more creative with how they are getting their messaging out in the market. Marketers can also use paid media to capture new contacts and then engage individuals who have expressed interest in their work through organic tactics—reducing the amount of overall budget spend.

What are the marketing codes you live by to ensure achieving your objectives in the face of today’s cut-throat competition?

As a marketer in the advertising technology industry specifically, I’m faced with some unique challenges to address: 1) convincing advertisers why digital out-of-home is a smart media buy and just how the channel can deliver results across core client KPIs, 2) while also educating media owners on why programmatic DOOH is a smart investment for their business, and how Vistar can help monetize their networks and drive additional revenue for them. With that, three marketing codes I consistently live by include:

1. Revolve around the customer: In this field (and honestly, in any), to be a good marketer, it’s important to truly master and understand the different customer sets that matter to a business and its objectives. What motivates your key decision-makers and influences their behaviors? What are their pain points, and how can that impact how a marketer should reach them? What messages will they be most receptive to? All of these are essential questions to always keep in mind when determining a marketing strategy for each specific customer. Really take the time to learn about your customers—DON’T make assumptions!
2. Remain data-driven: It’s equally important to focus on results and have a data-driven mindset. Use historical data to make decisions, and take the time to evaluate the performance of each initiative. Use a test-and-learn approach, be analytical, and try to challenge the status quo. It’s through this approach, and often in the small details, that will help you uncover the insights that will best inform future strategies and maximize your results.  
3. Stay curious: As a marketer, it’s critical for me to remain curious, ask questions, and keep up with what the competition is doing. If I’m not constantly learning, I’ll get bored—and that’s one of the reasons I love working in a rapidly evolving industry (there’s always something new to dive into!). I’m constantly educating myself on the new technologies and strategies that are being introduced, and I always push myself to identify and test new tactics. I encourage my team to adopt this approach and always look for these qualities in new hires as well.

When should we expect Vistar Media to introduce 3D DOOH solutions in its product suite?

At Vistar, we’re always eyeing the next trend to ensure we’re meeting the unique needs of advertisers and brands today—and staying ahead of the curve. Vistar is already actively working with creative agencies to bring 3D-like anamorphic creatives to life. Instead of just focusing on one-off single-unit 3D executions, we’re prioritizing our focus on how we can bring similar impactful creative experiences to all DOOH formats that accept animated and video assets. We believe in the power of programmatic technology and the scale it helps advertisers achieve.

What transformative innovations do you foresee happening in the adtech space over the next decade?

I think advertisers will continue to prioritize one-to-many channels like DOOH more than ever over the next decade as they are forced to reevaluate privacy-safe channels that effectively get the right message in front of the right consumers. We will also see greater adoption of omnichannel marketing and diversity in the media mix as the gap between the online and offline worlds continues to lessen. Incorporating DOOH into a larger multi-channel strategy allows brands to reach their target audience at multiple touchpoints while creating a cohesive brand message and strategy across all mediums.

Additionally, I believe we will continue to see an emphasis on creative capabilities, including dynamic creative, across the entire adtech ecosystem. Each year, advertising becomes more cluttered than the last, making it even more important to reprioritize and refresh creative messaging to truly stand out. Over the next few years, I’m confident we’ll continue to see bigger, bolder, and splashier advertising campaigns that push the bounds of creative executions.

Finally, I anticipate the adtech space, and especially DOOH, seeing a continued focus on industry standards and benchmarks across inventory, measurement, and campaign success. For example, Vistar recently introduced Vistar Verify—a first-of-its-kind program that aims to ensure the programmatic OOH marketplace maintains the highest standards of inventory quality. This move will hopefully drive even more advertisers to the programmatic channel, and as the space continues to grow, I think DOOH will have to consistently reevaluate its best practices, standards, and benchmarks to ensure a level-playing field and maximized success for both advertisers and media owners.