Today, we’re speaking to digital account executive, Tom Salter, who joined MI at the end of last year. Our conversation sees Tom tell us why you shouldn’t put pressure on yourself to make everything perfect straight away and shares the reasons he looks to both his personal and professional life for role models.
What led you to a career in media?
I graduated from university and started working as a Teaching Assistant at a local secondary school. I really enjoyed my time there and met some amazing people, but after a year I knew that I didn’t want to go into teaching. I started thinking about what I wanted to do next and got chatting with one of my colleagues, whose husband worked as a creative director at a marketing agency in London. In her words, her husband was crazy, intense & deeply passionate about his work and she thought my calm, rational approach to problem-solving would complement his energy. She suggested I look at client-facing roles within the industry, so I started researching different types of marketing and gravitated towards the digital space.
Soon after, I joined an AdTech startup called Glui (formerly Playrcart), whose technology allows users to perform an action (like a purchase, or donation) within a digital ad without leaving the page they’re browsing. I joined the business as a Sales Executive and, after a few months of cold emailing and familiarising myself with the tech, I started working more closely with media partners and independent agencies to launch marketing campaigns using Playrcart’s technology. I really enjoyed working with the indie agencies and it gave me the desire to work in a similar environment in the future.
Unfortunately, my role at Playrcart was made redundant due to the company facing challenging circumstances, so I moved to Epsilon where I worked on the business’ on-site marketing service. However, my interest remained in digital marketing, and I wanted to experience agency life which is what led me to my role as a digital account executive at MI!
What does a typical day look like for you?
Every week starts with pacing, going into each engine and making sure our spend levels align with the budgets in our plan. I spend a lot of time building campaigns across Google, Meta and LinkedIn. Another key part of my role is pulling and feeding back performance reports to clients. In these reports, we focus our analysis on top-performing channels and audiences (suggesting areas for budget optimisation), as well as creative analysis, to help identify which ads are resonating with users so that similar, high-performing content can be produced.
I have a lot of day-to-day contact with clients, handling specific requests as they come in and ensuring they’re actioned efficiently. This includes everything from sharing more detailed performance updates, to coordinating changes to our clients’ reporting dashboards with the help of our data team. If there’s anything we need to do to improve our clients’ reporting dashboard, such as enhancing it with a new report or including a new conversion metric, I’ll work closely with our data team to map out and complete that project, sharing the final version with the client for feedback.
