Emily Karoline Kallhovde

“I feel like I work in Norway’s answer to Silicon Valley”

Meet Emily, our Head of Programmatic. She is a clever, outgoing and hard-working lady, and a huge part of the team already, just after a month.

Assuming most people are unfamiliar with the term “programmatic” - can you explain?

That is true. My experience is that people often feel uncertain about the term, even in the marketing industry. So I think it makes sense to give a brief introduction. Programmatic advertising means automating processes involved in digital media buying. By using software, we place bids to reach the right user, at the right time, with the right message. The term is most commonly associated with online display in local and national online newspapers, however, many more formats are becoming available. Before programmatic, advertisers were often limited to only a couple of different publishers, due to the fact that processes were too time-consuming to scale. My job here at Marketer is to empower our advertisers to run sophisticated and highly targeted programmatic campaigns. Today, we literally have the entire world at our fingertips.

What does your role include?

As many of you know, the Marketer platform automates marketing campaigns for real estate. The platform suggests programmatic targeting criteria based on property type, location and other relevant variables, and I was impressed to find Marketer’s existing programmatic offering so extensive when I first joined the company. However this is only the beginning, and I will work to expand and improve performance as we cover increasingly more ground globally.

How did you get into programmatic?

My first job following university was with Norwegian television broadcaster TV2, planning commercial TV breaks. Thinking back to the processes back then, compared to how digital media is bought today, the difference is immense. Advertisers used to send us VHS tapes by post, and I had to review these on a big, old television box before running down to the broadcast department with the tape for them to copy it onto the broadcasting schedule. Later in my career, working in both the media and tech industry, I got more and more into advertising automation, taking on increasingly more technical roles. I believe that the future of advertising is automation. Essentially, achieving more with less.

So you have always been interested in automation?

Ever since I started working I have always been the one ending up doing the more technical roles, even though my degree is in marketing. I took a personality test once, and it showed how much I love systems for everything, so maybe that has something to do with it? I sometimes joke about how I would have done well in the military, even though I don't enjoy sleeping outside or being cold. Which I imagine they do a lot in the military. Anyway. I had been following Marketer for a while, feeling intrigued by their fresh innovation and the brains and guts these people had. I felt so excited when I came across the ad for “Head of Programmatic”, I felt like it was meant to be.

The atmosphere here at Marketer is filled with so much enthusiasm and dreams, and the people are eager to learn, grow, and achieve success in what they do. We work hard, but we also respect and value each other as human beings, adapting the way we work to us, not the other way around. The working conditions and leadership is modern, and the culture proactive and future-oriented. I feel like I work in Norway’s answer to Silicon Valley.

Fun fact

I couldn’t think of anything fun, just boring facts, really. I do however have a disease called obsessed with horses.