Sydney founded startup Employment Hero has hired former AdRoll JAPAC marketer Cat Prestipino as its first CMO.
The move follows the cloud-based HR, payroll and benefits platform scooping an $8 million cash boost, thanks to Series B funding round from Seek, OneVentures, AMP and AirTree Ventures.
Launched by former HR lawyer Aussie Ben Thompson in 2013, the firm took home $4.5 million Series A funding in 2016. It services more than 1,500 employers and 80,000 employees and integrates with accounting and payroll platforms including Xero, MYOB, Intuit QuickBooksOnline and Keypay.
Investors say the business is demonstrating significant growth and by hiring a lead marketer it no doubt shows it has big plans to ramp up awareness.
Prestipino left AdRoll in December in a wave of shock redundancies at the ad tech business, along with other senior leadership, including boss Ben Sharp. Both her and Sharp are well-known in the ad tech circuit and many expected Prestipino to reappear within the ad tech space.
See: Ben Sharp joins ADMA as managing director.
Speaking to AdNews, Prestipino says: "While I was in ad tech, my role was still very much about marketing the brand. When I look for new opportunities, I've always looked for brands solving a real problem and their culture.
"As well as being inspired by Employment Hero's vision for the world, I fell in love with the culture. To me, culture is really important because you can teach someone how to do a job but you can't teach them how to be passionate about the company vision and their role. When you walk into Employment Hero, you can feel the energy of the team bouncing off the walls."
Despite leaving the ad tech world, in which herself and AdRoll's Sharp were big advocates in educating the industry, Prestipino says she will still "very much be on the adland circuit".
Having always been an advocate of using programmatic advertising to help businesses grow, Prestipino says she'll be using everything she's learnt in programmatic advertising to help Employment Hero.
"I'm also very invested in education. The role of marketer is changing," she says.
"We're starting to see more businesses consider their marketing an investment rather than a cost centre and marketers pushing through to the C-suite. I still want to continue with sharing best practice and helping other marketers develop their skill sets."
Product has grown quicker than the brand
Prestipino says Employment Hero has been through a big period of growth, but as happens with startups, this has meant that the product and the pitch have grown quicker than brand.
"The first priority will be to bring the brand along that journey and represent the truly awesome work that is happening at Employment Hero," she says.
Prestipino adds that she has always tried to blend a B2C approach to B2B marketing and her new role will see her do both - with the key in either B2B or B2C marketing - being to make the customer experience as intuitive as possible.
On advice to others jumping out of one sector as a marketer into another, Prestipino says it's important "not to be limited by your industry".
"At its core, marketing is about understanding who your brand is and bringing that to life in a way that is relevant for your target customers," she explains.
"If you're able to do that successfully, then you'll be able to apply that across multiple brands and industries and, you never know, you might bring something fresh and different to your new role."
Employment Hero's brand snapshot:
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