One minute with: Sarah Lawson Johnston, MD @ Mediaocean

This week’s unmasked marketer is Sarah Lawson Johnston, MD Europe at Mediaocean, who doesn’t follow the norm, utilises enthusiasm for success and believes advertisers need to go back to school in 2015.

Find out what happens when you give marketers seven questions and one minute to explain what inspires and motivates them.

 

What do you want to be remembered for?

Making a real difference and showing that you don’t have to follow a stereotype to be successful. I’m not a subscriber to any form of gender stereotype.

 

What’s your favourite quote?

“There’s no such thing as work-life balance. There’s work, and there’s life, and there’s no balance” – Sheryl Sandberg

 

What wakes you wake up in the morning?

Enthusiasm to get things done. I’m impatient to get things moving, so I tend to wake up with my brain already starting a to-do list which I reprioritise as I get into work. I’m always trying to balance the task versus the strategy.

 

Who’s your biggest inspiration?

From a female leadership point of view, Sheryl Sandberg. She provides lots of useful, practical insights and I loved reading her book ‘Lean In’.  From a personal point of view, my children. I’d like to show them that anything is possible and that it’s not about what they can or should do – it’s about what they want to do.

 

What’s going to be big in marketing this year?

Educating advertisers in the rise of new technologies such as programmatic and automated guaranteed. Both are available and ready to be used today, but require a greater level of understanding.

 

What’s your least favourite “buzz word”?

I’m not a fan of any type of jargon and believe that buzzwords are often solely introduced to confuse the audience. Big Data is such a catchphrase ­– you spend the first 30 minutes or longer defining it before actually talking about something useful.  The new one I’ve been hearing is ‘socialising’, as in “let’s socialise it”. It’s called ‘talking’, isn’t it?

 

What was your favourite digital campaign from 2014?

It would have to be the British Airways ‘Magic of Flying’ campaign for its creative use of technology, data and digital billboards. They effectively managed to take an offline campaign with outdoor billboards and integrated it with online, generating thousands of hits and visitors.