Hightouch’s Ian Maier on Turning First-Party Data Into Advertising Intelligence

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Welcome to the AdTechGodPod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it.

I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to another episode of the AdTechGodPod, where we speak to the product and go-to-market leaders of our industry. Today I have Ian Maier, he's the general manager of AdTech at Hightouch. He leads the company's advertising business across product, marketing, and go-to-market. But what's really interesting about Ian is that he didn't come into the industry purely through like the infrastructure side or the tech side of advertising. He really started as a marketer. So being a marketer, being a practitioner, he has a really great perception and view of the overall industry and how you could utilize various metrics, data points to improve marketing overall. Full disclosure, we work closely with the Hightouch team. They are an advertiser and I'm really excited to have Ian with me today. So Ian, thanks for joining me.

Ian Maier (1:00)

Thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

SPEAKER_1 (1:02)

Same here, great pre-chat and I was looking at your profile earlier and then have the introduction that I write out for everyone and you do a lot at Hightouch. So being able to lead product and go to market, which are two full roles.

So being able to capture like all of that together into one role is pretty amazing. So thanks for joining me. I'm looking forward to hearing more.

Ian Maier (1:21)

Thanks, it's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_1 (1:23)

Okay, so I want you to take us back. How did you actually get into the industry? I know you did some, you were a marketer, you're an advertising practitioner.

How did you get into AdTech and what got you to where you're at today with Hightouch?

Ian Maier (1:35)

So I started as a practitioner. One of my first jobs out of college was, I really started as like the right-hand person to the founder of a two-person agency called Ecommerce Influence, who was, they had this really popular podcast on e-commerce marketing and were working with e-commerce scale-ups to build out both their email marketing and their performance advertising programs. So that's really where I cut my teeth and I got to know the industry really well.

Running life-cycle campaigns through Klaviyo, we were probably one of the first companies out there using Klaviyo, and they were just in their infancy and running mostly meta and Google campaigns. From there, I found my way, I was in LA at the time, I found my way to Silicon Valley, to San Francisco, had a lot of good friends there and I'm a people person, I like to be around my friends, so I found my way over there and found my way into tech, and really first working with software companies to help them grow their business as a performance marketer primarily.

Through that journey, I found my way to this company, Clearbit, which specialized in B2B data, data enrichment, identity data, and we have built this product called Clearbit Advertising, which was effectively a media network or an advertising platform where you could get what we called LinkedIn-style targeting on Facebook and other platforms like it. We had this really rich B2B dataset, we could build these prospect audiences for you, so you could target the buying decision-makers at a B2B company. That was really where I started to make this transition and pivot into a mix of product and go-to-market. I took over that product line and grew that product from a few hundred thousand to many millions of dollars in revenue, and that's when I started to play that dual role of product and go-to-market. I've just been really fortunate along the way and really fortunate that I get to be in AdTech, because I think that the thing that always drew me to both the practice and the product is just how complex and interesting it is, both in terms of all of the data points that have to move around and all the decisions that have to be made to drive really high-performance advertising, and on the other side, all of the really delightful and connected decisions that you have to make in the creative process, to actually connect with a person, to change their hearts and minds, so that marriage of really complex data and technical problems and creative problems is probably what has kept me in here and kept me really interested for a long time.

SPEAKER_1 (4:26)

Yeah. From an outside perspective, a lot of times we look at data and the value that's there to drive performance or outcomes or insights, but you touched up on the fact of how are you impacting people's hearts and their minds? How are you creating the right environment, the right targeting, the right frequency, the right audience segments to actually drive product purchase or intent to purchase? And I think it's something that we often overlook because we get so dragged into this data, data, data, data, data, where sometimes you need to step back and take a look at like, how is the data playing a role in the type of creative you need to serve? And how is that creative impacting the end user to convert? I mean, that's everybody's end goal. It's like, how do you get them to buy? How do you get them to walk in?