Staying Agile with Automation - Maria Fossarello (BlaBlaCar)

Maria Fossarello, based in Paris, is head of paid channels at BlaBlaCar, a leading long-distance carpooling app with over 18 million users in 23 countries. 

Questions Maria Answered in this Episode:

• What do you attribute BlaBlaCar’s success in marketing to?
• What were the first things you were looking to automate?
• How do your core KPIs translate from one platform to another? Do you apply the same acquisition metrics to search and Facebook, or do they have different KPIs associated with each? And if so, does an automated budget allocation tool take that into account?
• When weighing the potential value of automation, do you consider the reduced workload and need to hire fewer people? 

Timestamp:

• 9:01 Agility and innovation in marketing
• 10:17 Innovation at BlaBlaCar
• 12:40 Automating search engine advertising campaigns
• 15:14 Automating budget allocation
• 18:45 An incremental attribution approach of KPIs across channels
• 20:45 The effect of automation on employee workloads

Quotes:

(9:09-9:22) “I learn everything on the ground because the online marketing framework and practice actually evolves so quickly that there’s not even much to learn in school because everything is going to be updated and outdated in a month’s time.” 

(18:45-19:05) “What is really the move that we want to make, which we think is the move that will be more significant, is to actually move to an incrementality type of attribution where you’re able actually to consider what is the incremental contribution of each channel; and that way, you would be able to consider all the channels the same way.”

(20:53-20:59) “Using automation allows you to unleash a huge amount of new strategic tasks.” 

Mentioned In This Episode:

BlaBlaCar