Life At Nexxen with Vanessa Nguyen

Welcome to Life at Nexxen, a series spotlighting our employees – from their career journeys and go-to advice to the rituals and activities that make up their days here at Nexxen.

This month, we spoke with Vanessa Nguyen from our Product Marketing team. A Senior Manager, Vanessa discussed the start of her time in ad tech, day-to-day happenings and the importance of storytelling in Product Marketing.

What was your first job after graduating college?

I worked at a startup SSP in Irvine called AerServ, which was soon after acquired by InMobi. Both companies focused on the mobile app space. The very first role I had at AerServ was business development, recruiting publishers to use the SSP platform to monetize their mobile apps. I learned very quickly that it wasn’t for me and moved over to marketing, which I’ve been in for about 6 years now.

With so many years in product marketing, do you have any advice you’d share with someone looking into this kind of role?

You have to get really good at storytelling. Product marketing is so much more than go-to-market strategy and launching products. It’s important that your products solve the clients’ problems, and you have to build a compelling story around that.

When you’re building a story for a product, what is that process like?

At the beginning stages of a product launch, we partner with product teams to understand the offering and key requirements. We then put pen to paper and craft the messaging, positioning and packaging for a product launch. After getting buy-in from all stakeholders, we make sure internal operations teams are set up for success. Then, we prepare our Sales teams – training them on our new offerings, creating the sales enablement materials and putting together any competitive intel that’s needed. And the final piece is our marketing strategy – do we need a press release? LinkedIn post?

In the end, product marketing is not only responsible for driving the messaging and positioning of a product, but also facilitating the necessary collaboration and communication to successfully bring new products to market.

After we launch the product, we gather market feedback to evaluate the success of the launch. Our team is constantly keeping a pulse on industry trends, and we lean on our sales teams to help us gather customer feedback, which then drives product priorities. Is there anything we need to revise or iterate on? What can we do to drive more client adoption? This all varies depending on each product, but this is the general process for each launch.

That makes sense. Now that you’re on the product marketing team here at Nexxen, is there a specific product (or products) you focus on?

Generally, we own different products, but this year a big focus of mine is our identity resolution solutions. Identity resolution isn’t one product in particular, but a bucket that includes many different solutions.

When it comes to your work on identity resolution, what are some of the greatest challenges? And what are you most excited about?

The challenge here is figuring out how to continue targeting audiences and measuring attribution once third-party cookies are gone. Also, how do we handle continued changes to mobile ad IDs and new privacy regulations that arise? It’s truly an unprecedented time in the ad tech space, and all of these changes will impact how digital advertising works, now and in the future.

Ultimately, our approach to identity resolution is to remain agnostic and not tie ourselves to any one partner or solution, because there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution here. We will support as many solutions and integrate with as many partners as needed to provide our clients with flexible activation options.

One exciting product we’re currently building is our Nexxen Unified Identity Graph. The Unified Identity Graph will combine multiple identity solutions into one graph to unify bidding across these IDs. It will expand our biddable universe to all IDs within the graph, versus working with separate identity providers. This unified graph, in addition to Nexxen ID, will enable us to perform targeting, frequency capping and attribution at the device, person and household level.

Sounds like an exciting time. Are there any rituals that you have at the start of the day, at the end of the day? To get yourself in the right headspace to tackle these challenges and opportunities?

I start the day with either a hot tea or a chai latte. Once I get to my desk, I catch up on industry news. With my current focus on identity resolution, that typically includes any news on cookie deprecation or Google’s Privacy Sandbox. At the end of the day, I’m usually either doing Pilates or yoga. I try to go three to four times a week.

And last but not least, in your free time, what do you enjoy doing?

I live close to the coast in southern California, so I often spend time at the beach. And if I’m not trying a new restaurant with friends, I’m trying out new recipes in my own kitchen.