Our Interview With Nadine Thomson
Nadine Thomson is the Global Chief Technology Officer for MediaCom, an international media agency part of the WPP Group that uses data, technology and creativity to design communications strategies that build brands. Over her career Nadine has led international, technology transformation programmes across media, retail, travel, entertainment and professional services. She has previously worked as Group Technology Director for Conde Nast International (Vogue, GQ), Technology Director for Vue Cinema and consultant for News UK on their digital technology. Alongside her technology career, Nadine is on the Board of Visit England, the national tourism agency raising Britain’s profile worldwide and developing England and Britain’s visitor economy.
What made you pursue a career in technology?
Well, I actually went to university to become a vet. However, I did work experience where I found that my 17-year-old romanticised ideas of what a vet does, is not the reality! So, I changed my degree, took a bit of a pivot, and picked up computer programming at university.
I found computer programming creative. I loved the problem-solving aspect of it. Out of the 200 people in the class on computer programming, I was one of only two women and I thought, hang on a second, we need to get more women in this room. So, I changed into a major in computer science.
This was in the late 1990s and I could see the Internet was going to have a big impact on the world. I didn't foresee the impact it’s had today, but I had a sense that it was going to be a pivotal change, so I jumped into technology and never looked back.
Which of your previous roles has had the biggest impact on your career as Technology Leader?
I’ll pick two roles here. The first, I worked for STA Travel earlier in my career. STA Travel was a global organisation and I was in that role for over eight years. I gained experience across the breadth of technology including operations, programme management, engineering and infrastructure. It was a great role for gaining a large amount of experience as the travel industry was going through a transformational period moving from the high street to online to multi-channel.
I led the global team and the transformation of technology across the global business from back-office applications to BI to e-commerce to the websites and transitioning operations to offshore. Mobile apps were starting to come of age and I was involved in launching the first app for STA.
That was a pivotal role for me. It is important in a technology career to enter an industry at a time of change. It’s very formative being an integral part of the change cycle where you touch so many parts of the business, influencing the business strategy, ways of working and outcomes internally and externally. It enables you to develop many skills.
The other role I would select is my Non-Executive Director role for VisitEngland, the Tourism Board for England. This is a vital role as we're in the midst of trying to get tourism back on track in the UK after the impact of the pandemic.
I was a trustee in the 10 years leading up to being appointed to the board of VisitEngland, so I've previously been a trustee or board member for charities, and now I'm in a non-executive role. This experience has been important for my development as a leader as it has given me a broader perspective on business strategy and business performance plus an understanding of how to manage business risk and governance at a board level.
In your current role(s), what are your top 3 priorities?
A High performing team: You can't do anything without a good team in place. It takes a lot of energy, time, and effort to create and maintain a happy, motivated and skilled team with the right culture. It’s what I spend 80% of my time on. This is my top priority because without this in place, I can’t be successful and therefore the business can’t be successful.
The creation of a strategic platform for MediaCom: Connecting together an ecosystem of hero applications. We've got a myriad of applications and huge amounts of data across 100 countries. The business has grown organically over a number of decades. Each of those acquisitions has bought systems in and therefore we have a plethora of systems from back office to media planning applications.
My third priority is new product innovation. MediaCom does media planning and buying for clients and we're always looking at new products we can create for clients to help their business grow. Recently, we've innovated around BI platforms, using machine learning to reduce the time staff spend gathering, aggregating, and cleansing data so they can focus on insights.
What are the 3 best things about your role?
I love the global nature of the role. I love working across time zones and cultures, and as much as that sometimes creates its own complexities and challenges, it means you are continually learning and developing new skills.
When I came to Mediacom it was quite a siloed global team where the EMEA team serviced EMEA and the APAC team serviced APAC. Now it’s an integrated global team working across regions rather than duplicated capabilities. Seeing the team come together and work as a global team makes me very proud.
It's both a bad and a good thing, is the complexity and challenge of the AdTech and MarTech landscape. I love the learning that comes with a complex ecosystem. We service over 2000 clients at MediaCom, and each client has a different AdTech and MarTech solution! That’s the learning nature of the role, which is something I really enjoy.
The third thing is being a trusted thought leader in the business. I'm relied upon to make tech strategy decisions and to shape the team to move in the right direction to deliver the wider company objectives. That’s a huge privilege and it allows me to make the decisions that I believe will best serve the business.
How do you see the role of the Technology Leader changing over the next 3 years?
It's becoming more business-focused and increasingly, the role should become responsible for how technology contributes to driving business strategy and to revenue generation. I see technology leadership roles moving away from purely being efficiency and effectiveness focused to also being responsible for driving business strategy and business growth.
What technology trends are you most excited about and why?
The commoditization or democratisation of technology. As it's getting more complex, technology is getting more abstracted. There is low code, no code solutions and cloud which is more of a managed service now in many instances. This trend has an impact on what future technology leadership looks like, and therefore what our teams of the future look like.
There is a challenge and an opportunity here for technology leaders, which is why I think it's exciting. It means that employees close to the business challenges have more ability to solve their own problems. An employee who is moving data from one system to another or doing a repetitive task of some kind, can go to a cloud platform and build a low code solution for themselves and because they're so close to the task, they are in a very good place to create a workable solution.
This also means the future technology leader needs to be much more business-focused. They need not only an understanding of tech but also the ability to apply technology in resolving business challenges. I see technology leaders being more focused on strategy and on the big complex platforms and issues as we're going to shift some of the technology responsibility into the business as people get more technology literate and technology becomes more commoditized.
AI and machine learning. AI is doing now what people were saying it could do five years ago! We've done some work with AI recently to cut down the manual work in connecting data for reporting across the business. It removed 50% of the actual effort to collect and connect this data. This tangible benefit is an example of how I see AI now being useful in specific areas.
AI still needs close oversight though. AI doesn't always understand the context and cultural references that humans do, but it is getting there. It's quite exciting what opportunities it opens up in advertising and media for example, synthetic humans in advertising. It also brings many questions and considerations such as what does that mean if you put synthetic humans in ads? Are we taking people out of work? We could provide greater diversity in the advertising industry through synthetic humans in ads, which is good and positive, but then we're potentially taking work away from people who could be represented in the advertising.
Another example is using AI in advertisement targeting. If you click on an ad that has a person with glasses in it and you respond to that ad more than you respond to other ads, does the AI continue to show you only people with glasses? If you apply this to ethnic diversity, we could be creating situations where people don’t see diversity in advertising. If somebody clicks on an ad that has a white person in it and the AI assess that they are more likely to respond to an ad with a white person in it and continues to customise the ad in this way then we have the bubble effect and create bias in media. Whilst I think there's lots of fascinating stuff going on, it also has a lot of challenges.
What 3 skills should a Technology Leader look to develop?
Storytelling. Storytelling ability is key to success. You need to be able to influence a board, inspire a team, communicate an idea to the business and get people on board with what you want to do. Good storytellers do this well.
Strategy, bigger picture thinking. A depth of understanding of your industry and the purpose, culture, and strategy of your business.
Look at technology through a business lens. An ability to assess new technology, like blockchain for example. Does it make sense for your business? What are the pros and cons? Is it the Emperor's New Clothes? An ability to dive deeper into a technology and understand how it could be applied to your business or make a decision that isn’t right.
Who (individual) do you follow or which sites do you use as a source of trusted technology information & inspiration?
Peers that have been through the same issues or a tried and trusted technology supplier. I do some reading on the Internet and I'll also go to networking events and conferences, but I will mostly rely on peers or trusted suppliers. That's where your network becomes important. You can contact someone in your network knowing they have experience in that industry or area and ask them how they are handling a technology or business challenge.
What book would you recommend for someone looking to get on in their Technology career?
Science fiction writers inspired me to go into technology. I love how they often predict the future or plant the seed of an idea of what a future could look like, and people then build on their ideas.
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro describes a future with intelligent robots that act as children’s companions and shows the emotional connections that humans make with technology. It’s a beautifully written book exploring the human side of technology.
If you could tell your 20-year-old self one bit of information that would enable them to get on in their career, what would it be and why?
Confidence and self-belief will take you far. It took me a long while to develop my confidence and self-belief and at the point you do, this is when your career starts really moving. People want to follow people who are confident and know where they're going.
Another lesson is both breadth and depth are important. I started my career going deep into infrastructure and operations. When I wanted to move up in my career, I initially had some challenges around not having breadth across all areas such as engineering.
So, getting breadth is important, because when you get to this level, you can't have depth in all of the areas. You need to know a bit about everything and have the ability to dive down and understand the detail whilst also being able to see the bigger picture.
Also, be prepared to move around industries and roles at the right time to get the breadth and depth of experience you need to advance.