Mai Shiraogawa.
In this series, AdNews spotlights young talent in the Australian media, marketing and advertising sector. This time it's Insighten's business consultant Mai Shiraogawa
Time in current role / time at the company
I’ve been with Insighten for just over a year. I started on a part-time basis before stepping into my current full-time role as a Business Consultant.
How long have you been in the industry?
I’ve been in the industry for over seven years, working across marketing, strategy and data.
How did you get here? Was this always the plan?
Not even a little bit!
I studied materials engineering at university, which feels like a completely different life now. But the problem-solving and analytical thinking I built there has stuck with me in ways I didn't expect, such as how I approach a data problem, how I structure a strategy and how I try to ask the right questions before jumping to solutions.
After university, I worked in operations and process improvement before moving to digital and eCommerce. It was moving into the digital space that I fell in love with the data and technology side of marketing, which led me to my current role at Insigthen.
Who is your right-hand person / who guides you day to day?
Gagan, our Director, and Ken, our technical consultant. Between the two of them, I'm constantly learning. Gagan pushes me to think about the bigger picture and what clients actually need and Ken is the go-to person for any technical challenges or questions. What I really appreciate is that our professional relationship never feels one-directional. We think out loud together, challenge each other's perspectives, and work through problems collaboratively. We’re a small but mighty team.
What's the best thing about the industry you work in?
I love the variety of work I’m involved in. Every client has a different set of challenges, different data maturity and different internal dynamics.
Whilst you're never really solving the same problem twice, there's usually a common thread; in that most teams are sitting on more data than they know what to do with and my job is to help them figure out what data is useful. That process of working through it together and finding clarity in the data is the part I enjoy most.
And the biggest challenge?
The gap between what people expect data and MarTech to do and what's actually possible with the foundations they have.
There's so much excitement right now around AI, and personalisation. For both of those things to work and be effective, however, the data they leverage needs to be clean, accurate, and most importantly, consented. If it’s not, you won’t deliver results, and you risk losing your customers' trust.
A big part of my job is having honest conversations with clients about where to start before getting into where they want to go.
Whose job have you set your sights on in the future?
Rather than gaining a specific title, I’m more interested in working with forward-thinking, data-driven brands.
I want to work with brands that want to leverage data insights more as part of their marketing strategy, but perhaps don’t have the internal capabilities. I want to help brands build a data-driven strategy to achieve their business goals.
Where do you turn for inspiration?
A lot of my inspiration comes from the people around me. Sydney has such an active data, marketing and tech community and there's almost always something on, whether that’s a panel, a workshop or a meetup. I try to attend as many events as I can because the conversations that happen in those rooms are usually where I learn the most.
My network keeps me thinking too. Some of my best ideas have come out of casual conversations with people working through similar problems, but many have approached it from a different angle. I also try to stay across the news and industry newsletters as they provide a lot of interesting content.
Tell us one thing people at work don't know about you?
I love salsa (the dance, not the food)! I've been doing it for a while now and even after a long day, it never fails to give me an energy boost and a mental refresh. It’s the perfect way to switch off.
In five years' time I'll be:
Hopefully, I’ll still be supporting marketing teams to make sense of their data. Beyond that, who knows exactly, but I'd love to have grown into someone people think of when they have a tricky data or MarTech problem they can't quite crack. And definitely still dancing.
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