On April 29, 2019 Sparrow co-founder and partner Ana Milicevic presented a session on vendor selection at AdExchanger's Programmatic I/O conference in San Francisco. Here are some of her notes and thoughts from the conference.
This year's Programmatic I/O in San Francisco gathered more than 1,500 advertising and marketing professionals and yet managed to maintain that elusive feeling of being just the right size to learn, meet, and instigate new business. The AdExchanger team always puts on a great event and I was thrilled to return to the ProgIO stage once again. Settling on a topic didn't take long either: I knew I wanted to develop a new keynote for this show that would be applicable to the buy side, sell side, and tech companies so how about something that addresses how to work better with one another? Enter the 7 Questions To Ask Your Vendors: a simple framework that outlines the benefits of adopting a repeatable vendor selection process vs treating each selection as a one-off followed by a list of questions that you'll use to gauge if someone will be a good partner for your company. Many of our clients have seen first-hand how much of a difference a process like this can make: from reducing vendor functionality overlap (and hence cost), through shrinking the time to select, all the way through to being able to advocate for smaller or emerging vendors that better fit one's needs than the industry default. So without further ado, here are the slides from this session along with the audio track you can listen to here.
I've slowly but steadily been growing our speaking line of business over the past 18+ months which now includes appearances at major international conferences on 4 continents as well as numerous private client events (like presentations at annual kickoffs, leadership retreats, or keynoting and moderating client & partner conferences). Let's chat if you need a custom keynote or want to select one of our 'stock' ones for this year (we keep it fresh and roll out new ones quarterly). You can next catch me discussing the future of digital advertising at AdWeek's NexTech conference in NYC in July.