Fernando Saiz Camarero

CMO (Chief Marketing Officer)

Interview

Our Chief Marketing Officer always says that being Fernando is very tough. So let’s get to know him, his vision of the industry, and our brand to meet the business objectives.

Question: How did you get into the programmatic industry?

Answer: In the mid-2000s, I developed my own SDK to monetize my desktop applications. For more than 10 years I was out of the advertising industry and in 2015 I joined an agency as a performance manager, where I ran and optimized advertising budgets of over $100k per month buying media in different channels across all continents. It was in 2018 when I joined the Tappx marketing team.

Q: What is the best part of being a CMO?

A: No daily routines. Since joining Tappx every day has been different, challenging, and stimulating. You can not get bored. Every 6 months is like being in a whole new project. The last one is a revamp of the brand architecture.

Q: Could you list some leadership tips? And how to prove the importance of marketing and branding in such a high-tech industry?

A: Usually, in business, we do things that show results in the short term. We expect immediate rewards, so we take decisions taking into consideration cost-effectiveness. Usually, those decisions are expensive in the long term. An example of this is sales activation, it’s easy to persuade anyone to spend their budget on tactics that activate sales in the short-term, but the important thing is brand building. Brands are the long-term bumpers, and apart from that, it expands sales incrementally.

Q: What skills do you look for in the people for your team?

A: I usually focus the job interviews not on the candidate but on everything we do. I just want to ensure that team members can work on a wide variety of projects in an uncertain environment and that they feel comfortable with unfamiliar and multifaceted problems.

Q: How do you motivate your team to achieve the best results (apart from playing ping pong after a long meeting)?

A: A few weeks ago we had a conversation, it doesn’t matter if nobody cares about the work we are doing, we do the work in the best and most cost-effective possible way, not for others, but to impress ourselves. We work better every day in order to get better ourselves. In my opinion, the most motivating thing is building ourselves, our careers, our capabilities, and our skills, for the long term.

Q: Tell us about a successful result achieved as a team and how did you get it.

A: We have seen great results in many different fields, including party organization and search engine optimization, all successful projects were intensive in creativity. We reach them by finding new ways of doing things. That’s why we look for people comfortable in uncertain environments with unfamiliar and multifaceted problems.

Q: What do you expect from the future of the industry? What needs to be improved and how marketing can help to achieve it?

A: The most important challenge is aligning technology and media with the public interest. I see marketing teams as real transformers that can set up a real perspective of human needs instead of focusing only on users that receive a specific consumption value.

Q: Do you have any idea how many emails you send per day? Are they more or less than the anecdotes you tell about your home city?

A: I don’t know how many emails I send, what I know is that I’m heading the ranking of sent messages in Slack (more than 200k!). And yes, you are acute, that is connected with the idea of telling anecdotes from my hometown. When you came from a place where the second spoken language in the world was born, the first Europeans were founded and pushed the development of the current globalization, you need to find time to explain to the rest of the world how it works. 😆😂 Apart from that, I wrote so many messages because I split one paragraph into multiple messages :-(.

Q: What is the app you use the most in your daily life?

A: Whatsapp.

Q: What is the first thing you do when you get home and disconnect from work?

A: I can say my profession is my passion, I really enjoy it. But something I also love is the sweetness of doing nothing. Nada. Dolce far niente. Having a rest is an important part of the work cycle. I like to do things that do not require cerebral activity.

Q: What would you do if you won the lottery?

A: Finally an easy question! I would erase the balance and start again. Dreaming is the best part… I would spend all my money on bootstrapping an EdTech business. Investing in education apart from being meaningful, and fulfilling. It is the best instrument to close the gap.