Experian Marketing Services is thrilled to announce we have a new Director of Innovation, Sunaina Chaudhary. An entrepreneurial product professional with an extensive track record of directing products through ideation, design, development, marketing and production. Sunaina brings years of experience in product leadership, digital media and advertising, machine learning and more to her current role.
As we continue to seek new ways to innovate and become better for our clients, we sat down with Sunaina to discuss what she hopes to achieve as Director of Innovation:
Q: Tell us about your background and how that will make an impact on your new role?
A: Directly prior to joining Experian Marketing Services, I served as Senior Manager, Ad Monetization & Direct Sales at MobilityWare. During this time, I developed a multi-million-dollar in-house Ad Exchange, as well as managed over a dozen partnerships. I also worked at DIRECTV as their Associate Director, Enterprise Strategy & Innovation for several years. At DIRECTV, I led a team of industry experts in designing and developing solutions for multiple strategic ideas and initiatives which focused on customer experience, risk management and use of disruptive technology while also fostering a culture of experimentation.
With a background ranging from advertising and consumer analytics to product development, I have a number of experiences that can be applied to my new position. While my experience in product innovation is most similar to my current role, my advertising experience can be used to understand what challenges our clients are facing, and how we can innovatively solve those problems.
Q: What key areas will you be focusing on as Director of Innovation?
A: One of the biggest challenges that our clients face is a siloed understanding of customer journeys. Purchasing data from providers in market is the easy part but what differentiates leading brands from rest of the market is how well they understand customers and their journeys. A goal of ours is to develop innovative solutions to solve this problem for all marketers but make it relevant for individual vertical.
Q: Can you explain how this could be achieved?
A: We have to shift the dependency within the advertising industry from reporting to analytics. Reporting does tell what happened as the last touchpoint in a customer journey, but analytics will enable the insights to explain why it happened and what should be done differently to optimize future campaigns and influence the customer journey overall.
Q: What are your top three objectives in your role?
A: Firstly, I want to focus on two distinct types of innovation for the advertising industry; incremental and disruptive innovation. Incremental innovation is innovation that improves existing practices or products, and disruptive innovation is innovation that disrupts entire industries. We would like to focus on balancing the output of incremental and disruptive innovation from Experian Marketing Services over the course of the next year.
Secondly, we are focused on building on our culture of innovation at Experian. On a personal level, I am not afraid of taking risks and I believe in the mantra – fail fast, fail cheap. We want our business to follow suit, and become more comfortable with potential failure, within reason, as this is where we can find room for growth.
Thirdly, our team is full of some of the most forward-thinking minds in the industry, and we would like to be recognized as such. We are more than another vendor, we are thought leaders, and it is time for that to be acknowledged by the industry.
Q: What qualities do you have that will help you achieve the objectives outlined above?
A: Personally, I love innovating and challenging myself. Whenever I find myself in a state of inertia, I know it is time to shake things up and think outside of the box. Additionally, my previous work experience with industry leaders such as DIRECTV and startups ingrained an early stage innovation mindset, pushing me to think about what can be achieved, rather than simply improving upon what is.
Q: What are three innovations currently taking place around the globe today that excite you?
A: The Internet of Things (IoT) space is particularly appealing to me, especially since it impacts so many aspects of people’s lives. From self-driving cars to the healthcare industry and medical advancements, this holds immense potential for improving quality of life.
Another area that fascinates me is NLP, or Natural Language Processing. A branch of AI, NLP deals with interactions between humans and computers utilizing the human language. People are currently unlearning how to type and write and interacting with devices through voice technology more and more.
Lastly, data continues to be of interest to me. The more we understand, the more we can do. However, I believe in taking a conservational approach to data. We want to use consumers’ data in a privacy-compliant manner that improves their lives.