Exchange Lab, a U.K.-based market intelligence and media trading firm, has hired digital marketing vet Paula Gignac to fill the newly created role of global chief marketing officer.
Gignac will be based out of the company’s Toronto office and will work with Canadian CEO James Aitken.
“I always admired Exchange Lab, I thought they were the most amazing platform that’s out there,” Gignac said. “What I think is winning the game these days is software as a service, and they represent the best in that.”
She told Marketing that the company does a great job of applying digital media know-how to programmatic buying, which is important in an industry where machines are making a lot of decisions. As powerful as optimization engines have gotten, she said, they still need skilled marketers to monitor optimization strategies and correct for context that analytics can’t detect.
Gignac has 17 years experience in digital marketing, including eight years as IAB Canada president and seven years leading digital for Rogers’ women’s magazines group. At the IAB she created and led courses for marketers on interactive online marketing, social media, paid search, SEO and mobile marketing. In October, she was inducted into Canada’s Marketing Hall of Legends.
With her experience designing IAB courses about programmatic buying, Gignac plans to help the company create educational packages for clients and hopes to expand programmatic adoption in Canada. In her perspective, programmatic isn’t just an opportunity to narrow ad targeting segments, but to streamline the ad buying process and free up more time to focus on the big, creative campaigns that really get consumers’ attention.
“[Exchange Lab has] a lot of expertise that we have to get out there in consumable, educational pieces that people can understand — that break down the barriers to why people haven’t been doing as much programmatic as they could be,” she said.
