Eskimi
Paul Thompson is Chief Commercial Officer at Eskimi, the "Don't Be Boring" company operating across 83 of the fastest growing digital advertising markets in Africa, MENA, CEE, Eurasia and South-East Asia. In these regions, the global capabilities of digital technologies often require localisation and customisation. They are also never boring!
With more than 30 years scaling digital advertising businesses globally — including senior roles at Yahoo, Blis and Seedtag — Paul has spent his career building commercial organisations in markets others overlook and challenging the orthodoxies and limited conventional thinking that hold the industry back. Paul, a vocal critic of the data-first and price dogma that has drained creativity from digital advertising, has a simple operating philosophy: algorithms yield average results. It's boring and expensive.
He leads a 90-person global commercial team and believes the best media strategies start with a great idea, not a targeting parameter and involve people and ideas as much as the technology.
Key Takeaways:
- Act 1: The Crime – The industry spends billions of dollars on perception rather than evidence.
- Act 2: The Mechanism – The measurement industry was built by the people who get paid to measure.
- Act 3: The Deeper Crime – The entire digital infrastructure focuses on only 5% of the opportunity.
- Act 4: The 5 Silent Alarms – Why experimentation has been optimized out of existence.
- Act 5: What Would Holmes Do? – How we have become proficient at ignoring the role of creativity.