Industry Profile: Impact head of customer success and operations Matt Hunter

19 November 2019
 

Our Industry Profile takes a look at some of the professionals working across the advertising, ad tech, marketing and media sector in Australia. It aims to shed light on the varying roles and companies across the buzzing industry.

This week we speak to Impact head of customer success and operations APAC Matt Hunter.

Time at the company:
I’ve been with Impact for a total of eight years. I started on the other side of the Atlantic in the product team at our Santa Barbara office where I helped launch a new call tracking solution. After holding several other leadership positions, I transferred to the Sydney office three years ago to head up the customer success and operations team in APAC.

How would you describe what the company does?
Impact provides partnership automation software. Essentially, it’s a SaaS platform that enables brands to manage all of their partnerships in one place. We help clients discover and recruit potential partners, and then help them manage, track and pay them – this includes brand to brand partnerships, social media influencer partnerships, traditional affiliates, media partners and even charities.

What do you do day-to-day?
With local offices in Sydney, Shanghai and Singapore, a large portion of my day includes managing our customer success team across the region. A major part of my role is to ensure that our customers get the training and strategic support they need to scale and grow their partnership programmes.

Define your job in one word:
Multi-tasking.

I got into martech because:
It combined two of my loves, the internet and marketing. I actually studied marketing in college and one of my first jobs was at a local print advertising company. I was really interested in the growth of digital so I later joined an online marketing company that had set up in Santa Barbara. The rest is history - I’ve now been in the online marketing industry for nearly 21 years.

What’s the biggest challenge you face in your role?
Managing people across different time zones and localising all documentation and communication can sometimes be a challenge. Additionally, being in a regional office it’s important to constantly feedback information from the region into our global teams to ensure our local clients’ needs are addressed.

What’s the biggest industry-wide challenge you’d like to see tackled?
Attribution fraud remains an area that we collectively need to pay attention to. Whilst the industry has done a good job at weeding out incumbent bad actors, it’s an inevitable fact of life that fraudsters follow the money and the stakes in our industry are getting higher and higher; the bigger the investment, the higher the risk. There are several technology solutions in market that help marketers tackle this challenge and protect their marketing investments from fraud.

Previous industry related companies you have worked at:
I held two stints at affiliate marketing network, Commission Junction. After that I moved down to Los Angeles to join a company called eUniverse, where I helped create one of the first social media networks - mySpace!

Who has been a great mentor to you and why?
Todd Crawford. He’s a co-founder of Impact and also one of our industry’s pioneers; he’s a true legend within affiliate marketing. He took me under his wing when I first joined the industry in 1998 and now I get the honour of working with him every day.

Words of advice for someone wanting a job like yours?
Don’t underestimate the value of having worked for different companies within the marketing ecosystem. Having worked at a brand, for a tech vendor and also a publisher has given me a unique perspective on how they each interact with each other. This gives you a well-rounded understanding of the industry.

If I wasn't doing this for a living, I'd be:
Focusing on building protocols to help support and develop Web 3.0.

My mantra is:
Work smart; play smart.

My favourite advert is:
Apple’s first Macintosh ad in 1984. Back then I was a kid and big into Sci-Fi and loved that it had a George Orwell reference.

Music and TV streaming habits. What do you subscribe to?
Apple Music for music. ESPN, HBO, and Comedy Central for TV.

Tell us one thing people at work don’t know about you?
I was once featured in Entrepreneur Magazine in 2005 for having launched a fashion products e-tailer that used visual search technology. This was a game changer at the time when it came to online retail.

In five years’, time I'll be:
Fishing on my own ranch.

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