We speak to Mack Grenfell, Biddable Lead
Mack Grenfell works at Babylon Health - a health-tech company built around the idea of putting an accessible and affordable health service in the hands of every person on earth.
They’re best known for offering virtual consultations (GP appointments over your smartphone) and AI triage (intelligent chatbots which can understand your symptoms and can signpost you to appropriate care).
Q. What does your current role as 'Biddable Lead' involve?
For anyone less familiar with the term, 'biddable' is basically just any form of advertising that's bought through auctions. It could be the auction that's triggered when a user makes a search on Google, or the auction that happens when someone scrolls to an ad spot on their Facebook newsfeed.
In all of these auctions, advertisers submit bids based on how much they want to show their ads to the user who triggered the auction. That's biddable!
I look after the biddable channels (paid search, social etc.) at Babylon for both the UK and US, helping to make sure we're spending budget as efficiently as possible. We also have lots of partners around the world who run marketing for products that feature Babylon’s services, so I spend some of my time consulting with them on how to get the best returns on biddable spend.
Q. At Oxford University you studied Physics and Philosophy. What made you enter the world of digital marketing when you graduated?
It was a bit of an accident really. At the end of my third year at Oxford, I spent a summer as a 'strat' (doing maths and programming) at Goldman Sachs. The work was really cool, but I was pretty sure by the end of it that I didn't want to work in anything like finance.
A couple months later, now back at Oxford, I was wandering around a careers fair looking for free stuff. I found a stall for a digital marketing agency (Brainlabs) and gave them my email. They followed up the day after, so I submitted an application and went down to London for an interview. I found myself fascinated by reading about the ins and outs of digital on the train ride down, and the rest is history.
Q. What you help to market is a relatively new innovation in healthcare. Is there anything about this particular industry which makes it harder to market your company's services?
Yes, lots! We're a healthcare company first and a technology company second, and so with that there's a lot of scrutiny on the way we market ourselves. This manifests itself in the language we use, our approach to user privacy, and how we deal with different regulatory frameworks across the markets we operate in.
Q. Where do you look, to keep yourself up-to-date?
I browse some of the usual sites. MarketingLand, Campaign, etc. Hands down the most interesting site for me though is Product Hunt. I love checking it every morning to see what new stuff people are building in the marketing space. Mainstream news sites can be quite reactive, but Product Hunt is the pinnacle of proactivity; you're seeing cutting-edge stuff that's literally just been built.
Q. Lastly, what advice would you give someone looking to land their first PPC role?
For your first role, just know the basics. Know things like how an auction works, why you might want to structure an account in different ways, or why some ad copy might work better than others.
For people looking for more advanced roles - learn to build. Having a bit of technical knowledge can go a long way. Not only will it let you build stuff that's useful to you, and that you can use in your day-to-day, but it'll also help you understand how platforms, websites, and the internet as a whole work at a more fundamental level.
