“Though brands face difficulties, in those difficulties there are also opportunities for the feisty, dedicated, and forward-thinkers to capture market share while the mastodons get stuck in the muck.”

A quadrilingual digital specialist with an MBA in e-Business, I have spent my career building, promoting, and optimizing digital products and services in the pursuit of better customer experiences.

I started my career in publishing at Mediaplanet covering new technologies for America’s major newspapers: USA Today and The Wall Street Journal. I was responsible for creating custom B2C and B2B reports for national release from scratch. Using my relational and sales skills I developed strong relationships with the world’s leading technology companies like Microsoft and Intel, commissioned journalists, edited content, and published reports on subjects like Smartphones and Digital Out of Home (DOOH) advertising. The role taught me how to take an idea and turn it into reality, managing a project from beginning to end, creating value and partnerships.

Thanks to these relationships I had an opportunity to transition towards the digital side of content joining up with the small consultancy 21st Century Digital Media where I was responsible for creating custom online communications strategies for our clients – both technology suppliers and advertising networks – in order to raise their notoriety and credibility in the nascent DOOH space. I used strong fundamentals in content marketing to create hundreds of videos, talks, ghostwriting blogs for thought leaders and placing client articles in industry trade publications. The role furthered my interpersonal skills and honed my ability to research, identify interesting trends, create value with content, and acquire new business for our clients.

When I moved to France I wanted to expand my scope and move towards the B2C side of things so I found a job as Marketing Manager for Whyd, a social music startup in Paris. At Whyd I was responsible for three things: product development, marketing, and community management. For the product development I served as the link between our community and our development team, helping to gain insights into how our product was used and how to prioritize and effectively promote the development of new features. I monitored our KPIs, identified problematic areas as well as opportunities for growth hacking. At the same time I created our user acquisition strategy, word-of-mouth growth and PR efforts which helped us to gain traction and raise nearly $1 million in investment.

Once we had a marketing budget to work with I ran our digital and offline campaigns, organizing music events in Paris and London as well as all of our YouTube, Google Display, and Facebook campaigns. The last part of my job was community management, engaging our users on a daily basis to encourage connections and increasing network density. I helped to create nodes of interest around different genres of music and automated the amplification of our user-generated content across our internal and social networks. This experience at Whyd taught me how to lead a project within a team, how to use data to justify road mapping and marketing campaigns, how to modify engagement strategies depending on the audience and how to federate people around a common cause. Whyd was covered in hundreds of articles, our iOS app was named one of The Next Web’s best new music apps and today Whyd is building a connected speaker for the home aimed at the community I built at the prestigious YCombinator accelerator in San Francisco.

After evolving my career through different domains from journalism to content marketing to building a community, I wanted to drill down on the technical and business side of things. I decided to go back to school to get my MBA in E-business at ESG in Paris. I wanted to gain management skills, develop more business strategy, and learn how to code, both for the web (HTML/Javascript/PHP) and for working with data and analytics (SQL). At the same time I found an internship at Disney where I became a Digital Analyst in charge of monitoring the performance of marketing campaigns as well as running the A/B testing program to optimize Disneyland Paris’s e-commerce sites. My main initiative was to educate our internal partners about the value of testing and optimization and solicit projects based on problems and opportunities they have identified. I managed the tests with our US optimization team and produce all of the reporting, analysis, and recommendations. I gained valuable insights into highly complex systems, how to optimize for user experience, and how even the smallest innocuous changes can generate hundreds of thousands of euros in additional revenue.

In September 2016, after my MBA I was fortunate enough to join one of the world’s largest beauty companies, L’Oréal, to work on digital brand content strategy for a few of their designer perfume brands. The job was a mix between accelerating the digital presence of our brands by building out ecosystems and improving content and leveraging new types of technology to created deeper customer experiences. For example, I launched the Viktor&Rolf Fragrances Account on Instagram and planned out the content strategy for the launch of Proenza Schouler’s first ever fragrance.

But the job at L’Oréal was much more about digital in the strategic sense than simply content. I created activation strategies for product launches, including minisites, augmented reality applications, and a virtual reality experience for the point of sale. I contributed to the coordination of our CRM programs and the animation and content that went along with it. I was also called upon to help illustrate how we were moving our brands into the digital future.

In January 2018 I started working at Shiseido, managing a digital activations team across their designer fragrances brands such as Zadig&Voltaire and Narciso Rodriguez. The focus of my role is to accelerate digital across all brands focusing on each brands’ strategic objectives while always keeping an eye on conversion (drive to retail/e-retail). I built 360 digital experiences combining organic platforms and paid initiatives (media, influencers, events) to launch new beauty products, and leveraged the need for 1st party data to construct CRM programs from scratch.

In a global role, I worked with Shiseido’s countries and regions to create yearly communication guidelines and assist the transformation away from traditional touchpoint to digital-oriented approaches. I upskilled teams across the organisation via learning sessions and digital events.

Then, in September 2019, I moved into a newly created role of Head of Digital Media to manage digital media for the full portfolio of Shiseido’s brands (Dolce&Gabbana Beauty, NARS, bareMinerals). As the Head of Digital Media my role was to manage a team of 7 people working to coordinate digital campaigns across EMEA markets that were bought centrally as well as reorganizing our relationship with our media agency, going from a scattered team paid on commission to a dedicated team on retainer. I was also directly responsible for our performance media for our three e-commerce sites in EMEA. We slashed costs and improved agility, which paved the way for much e-commerce success once the covid-19 pandemic hit. I also created our digital media posture – how we approach and leverage the different partners in our ecosystem in a complementary way between brands – as well as creating Shiseido’s first Digital Media Responsibility Framework to better understand the impacts of our investments.

In March of 2021 I started to work at Facebook where I am a Global Client Partner managing a group of clients in the Luxury industry. My role today is to accompany my brands to help them get the most out of their investments on our platforms, to make sure that they are using all of the tools to their advantage, and to assist them in their digital transformations in a larger sense – whether it be customer care, online business, or driving clients to store.

I’m obliged to note that this blog has absolutely nothing to do with the company that I work for and any views I express here are solely my own and do not represent my employer. 

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