In this interview you get to know how Askia propels revenue growth through strategic partnerships and comprehensive growth strategies.
Askia, can you share more about your role as Chief Growth Officer at DriveLine.ai and the key responsibilities associated with it?
In my role as Chief Growth Officer, I wear several hats, all focused on one critical goal: driving revenue growth and expansion. Through a multi-pronged approach that leverages strategic partnerships, comprehensive growth strategies, I am responsible for propelling DriveLine to market leadership.
My key responsibilities include the development of strategic partnerships and alliances, implementing comprehensive growth strategies, identifying and leveraging category and industry trends including new market opportunities, and the productization of our audience and location intelligence.
Beyond these key responsibilities, I also contribute to other areas which support our growth including working closely with our product and business development teams, to ensure alignment and collaboration across the organization.
With 17+ years of experience in consumer strategy, how has your journey shaped your approach to driving consumer behavior for brands?
Over the past 17+ years, my approach to consumer strategy has been profoundly reshaped a few times. My journey began in 2000 at KTLA-TV, where I dove headfirst into the bustling world of advertising sales, right as the digital advertising revolution converged with television. This early exposure to the nascent digital landscape, when monetization through consumer interaction was still largely uncharted territory, instilled in me a deep appreciation for innovation and a future-focused approach has become a defining characteristic of my strategic skill set ever since.
With almost two decades of experience navigating the ever-evolving media landscape, I have not only witnessed significant changes, but actively participated in shaping them. Through triumphs and setbacks, I have acquired a deep understanding of consumer behavior and the critical role it plays in successful media campaign outcomes. This valuable knowledge informs my strategic approach, ensuring that every campaign I develop is human-centered, data-driven, results-oriented, and impactful.
In what ways does DriveLine.ai contribute to future-proofing advertising and marketing efforts with precision and relevance?
DriveLine plays a pivotal role in helping businesses future-proof their marketing and advertising by enabling them with the ability to target and reach relevant audiences with precision.
Built on movement, our platform has three components:
- Custom audience creation. Our platform synthesizes big data and analytics to create custom visitation audiences from our 250 million mobile device universe – without the use of any personally identifiable information. Custom visitation audiences help marketers understand how their audiences engage with physical locations – allowing them to optimize their mobile advertising strategies, target more precisely and benefit from remarkable shifts in efficacy and efficiency.
- High impact audience intelligence. Highly-targeted custom audiences. Our audience intelligence solution solves the problem of diminishing audience insights and targeting capabilities, enabling businesses with the ability to target and reach the audiences most relevant to their business across connected TV, and mobile display and video advertising.
- Actionable Insights. In the wake of 2024’s cookie deprecation, DriveLine’s custom audiences can supercharge media campaign outcomes without any reliance on a pixel. By harnessing the power of DriveLine’s advanced Audience Intelligence data, marketers can gain unparalleled insights on their target consumers. These insights are used to inform and optimize audience targeting and segmentation strategy across channels.
By understanding where customers go, and have been, DriveLine sits in the unique position of delivering a comprehensive picture of consumer and target audience behavior to businesses, brands and agencies.
Can you elaborate on your future-focused approach to campaign performance and how it is applied across various client types, whether local, regional, national, or global?
Every component of advertising is related to a time period, timing and/or seasonality, making advertising campaigns intrinsically planned for the future. By focusing on the future, I help brands achieve their marketing goals in a sustainable and scalable way. By applying my future-focused approach to campaign performance, I help brands achieve success regardless of their size or location. This means focusing on long-term trends, anticipating future consumer behavior, and proactively adapting to stay ahead of the curve.
As a top web3 consultant, how do you see the intersection of culture, mobile, and digital evolving in the near future, and what implications does this have for brands?
The realm where culture, mobile technology and the digital world converge is undergoing rapid transformation propelled by changing consumer preferences. This dynamic environment presents both opportunities and challenges for brands, and understanding the key trends shaping this landscape is crucial for their future success in web3.
At the heart of the application of web3 technology is the concept of the token. There are still too few marketers lacking the knowledge base required to maximize the potential of web3 technologies. We’ve seen brands experience FOMO and prematurely launch web3 projects which fizzled out the gate. Mismanaged expectations and neglecting human-centered design were critical flaws in their approach. These shortcomings resulted in experiences that fell short of their potential and failed to resonate with consumers.
Brands wanting to thrive in the crosshairs of mobile, digital and culture will need to be proactive and adaptable. Embracing decentralization, investing in immersive technologies, becoming socially aware, building strong communities, and being open to experimentation are key strategies for success. In order to navigate for the future, brands should prioritize privacy, accessibility and inclusivity in their digital experiences, and stay informed about evolving regulations in the web3 space.
Could you share your perspective on accelerating the adoption of web3 technologies and its impact on digital campaign performance?
In order to accelerate the adoption of web3 and facilitate the future we want in web3, the advertising industry needs to take a collective step backwards. Web3 technologies present a transformative opportunity for brands to connect with audiences and enhance digital campaign performance but we need to go back and do the work of highlighting its real-world applications and demystify web3 concepts. Web3 platforms facilitate direct interaction with consumers, fostering stronger connections. From a consumer perspective, we may be closer than we think but we need to change the frame to have a clear picture. I believe simplifying user interfaces is vital for wider adoption, enhanced engagement and participation opening the door to a novel way for brands to monetize their offerings.
With experience spanning various categories such as non-profit, political, tech, CPG, beauty, pharmaceutical, and automotive, how do you adapt your strategies to fit the unique challenges and opportunities of each industry?
The future of marketing has always been exhilaratingly uncertain, and I’ve been fortunate to have been tapped to work across multiple categories. My role as strategist is to curate performance-focused strategies to solve for each client challenge. By leading with the client goal (outcome) first, I improve my ability to surprise and delight their target audience, and drive consumer behavior to achieve their campaign goals no matter their industry.
How do you stay ahead of the curve in identifying consumer trends in digital campaign performance, especially in the context of evolving web3 technologies?
Being imaginative and entrepreneurial, I have always been eager to understand and solve for the evolving needs of consumers. Consumer trends have been my bread and butter, so I relish in the challenge of staying ahead of the curve. Marketers sometimes forget the dynamic nature of consumers. Delving into user behavior and gleaning insights at the intersection of physical and digital worlds is truly fascinating to me – I am excited to be at the forefront of this long emerging trend and to have the ability to help businesses navigate reaching their target audiences in web3.
Becoming a certified metaverse expert, deepened my understanding of consumer behavior and interaction. I follow the latest developments in blockchain, NFTs, and DAOs, to understand how these immersive technologies can be leveraged to deliver a paid media outcome and how they are being used to monetize content, products and services.
As consumers continue to adopt and interact with immersive content and worlds, businesses will need to adapt their marketing and creative strategies to reach them in new ways.
What do you envision as the next big trends or challenges in the intersection of culture, mobile, and digital, and how are you preparing DriveLine.ai and its clients for these shifts?
Here are three (3) shifts, trends and challenges at the intersection of culture, mobile and digital, DriveLine is preparing our clients for:
- Having a clear audience targeting strategy. Using an insight-driven approach to audience segmentation, we encourage our clients to align their audience targeting strategy with their media campaign goals.
- Thinking ‘Mobile-First’. With the majority of internet traffic coming from mobile
devices, it’s crucial for businesses to ensure their website, digital and social content, experiences and campaigns are optimized to deliver deeply personalized experiences to mobile-first consumers.
- The prioritization of privacy-centric marketing. Looking ahead to the post-cookie ad world, one of the biggest trends will be the increasing importance of mobile devices and newfound reliance on mobile device data.
While the advertising industry preaches the importance of privacy-centric marketing, it has surprisingly failed to actively prepare businesses for the massive disruption that will be caused by Google’s cookie deprecation in 2024. This lack of proactive planning will leave many businesses vulnerable to a significant challenge in reaching their target audiences. DriveLine is uniquely positioned to capitalize on this opportunity by offering solutions tailored to our post-cookie world.
Our location intelligence serves as a robust solution for businesses and organizations looking to reach mobile-first audiences and capitalize on the mobile-first future.
Finally, what advice would you give to aspiring professionals looking to excel in the dynamic field of digital marketing and consumer strategy, especially in light of emerging technologies like web3?
Aspiring marketing professionals can thrive in the dynamic world of digital marketing and consumer strategy by embracing the power of immersive and impactful experiences. To excel, I highly recommend going beyond textbooks and diving headfirst into the latest technologies and consumer-facing innovation. Understanding where consumers are spending their time and actively tracking emerging trends is critical to ideation and strategy. Don’t be afraid to explore new technologies like web3. Whether it’s a software, platform, channel, or methodology, actively seeking opportunities to learn and understand their utility and usability will be your superpower. This proactive approach will keep you ahead of the curve and empower you to excel in this ever-changing field.
Askia Underwood
Chief Growth Officer at Driveline.ai
Currently serving as DriveLine’s Chief Growth Officer, Askia is an expert at uncovering unique consumer insights, layering in cultural touch points and identifying imaginative ways to actively drive consumer behavior. With 17+ years experience in consumer strategy, Askia leverages her experience to ideate experiential brand moments that motivate consumers to act (watch, share, buy or donate) online. Whether a brand’s audience is local, regional, national or global, this future-focused approach to campaign performance is proven and applied for every client.
Askia’s focus is innovating at the intersection of culture, mobile and digital – the space people connect, consider, and purchase online – and spans various categories including non-profit, political, tech, CPG, beauty, pharmaceutical, and automotive.
A top web3 consultant, she is often tapped to conceptualize the development of advanced format immersive, experiential content, products, and connected experiences, and passionately leans into accelerating the adoption of web3 technologies and the identification of consumer trends in digital campaign performance.
