Looking back on her first meeting with Andrew Robitaille in 2011, Eyereturn co-CEO Renée Hill says she knew right away she needed him on her team. He was a bright go-getter who latched on to the company’s business: programmatic buying and ad serving.
“Programmatic at that time didn’t exist, so I had to hire somebody who was going to introduce it to the Canadian agency landscape,” Hill says. Robitaille was that person. Then just 25, and Eyereturn’s first dedicated salesperson, Robitaille soaked up everything he could about the technology and turned it around into carefully crafted, easy-to-understand sales presentations for each client.
As the sales team grew, Robitaille was steadily promoted to leadership roles, eventually becoming the company’s sales director in 2014, overseeing its entire eight-figure sales quota. Over the past four years, “he started hitting and exceeding his budgets, doing things that nobody else was doing, going to markets that nobody else was thinking of in Canada, thinking about different ways to customize every presentation,” says Hill.
According to clients, Robitaille’s most impressive talent is taking complex and nuanced technology like programmatic and turning it into a real value proposition, directed at their specific marketing objectives. “He could really relate and give examples of how they were able to tackle some of the brand challenges that are out there — like transparency, like managing inventory across multiple sources,” says Elaine Li, digital marketing manager at Clorox Canada, which recently signed on to test Eyereturn’s platform.
He’s helped grow the company’s revenue by 78% since the first half of 2014 and contributed to 300% growth overall since 2011. Much of the past year’s growth came from a sales tour he did with the company’s U.S. team shortly after becoming director. On his own initiative, Robitaille spent 18 weeks in Chicago establishing relationships with 13 new international clients.
More recently, Robitaille’s expertise has been amplified to the industry at large. Last year he went on a cross-country roadshow with IAB Canada, speaking about how marketers can drive ROI—and verify it— using the right technology. He sits on the IAB’s video committee, where he’s involved in high-level conversations about how to move online video advertising forward across Canada.
