Monzonaut AMA - Vittorio - Paid Social Manager

Community & Events
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Afternoon Community!

We’re back with another deep dive into who is helping build the bank and this week we’ve got the man of many talents @vittorio.boccanera :tada:

Vittorio looks after all things Performance Marketing related and he’s more than willing to give a little more context to what that job entails.

Aside from being known for his resounding Italian humour, impeccable tiramisu skills and throwing heavy weights around, Vitto has worked in the finance and tech verticals all his professional careers.

Vitto joined Monzo at the start of the pandemic in the first remote onboarding group as a Senior Paid Social Manager. He’s now responsible for all things Performance Marketing related, helping spread Monzo’s mission of making money work for everyone in the UK, and hopefully overseas as well (!?)

Before that, he worked in Investment Banking at Citigroup, where he quickly realised he wanted to have a tangible impact on consumer’s lives. He joined Wise where he worked in Performance Marketing’s Paid Social team as Operation Lead, picking up on the technical foundations and moving into a pure Data Analyst role.

He’s always up for a discussion or private chat, drop him a note on LinkedIn with the subject line “Monzo AMA” :smiley:

Vitto will be answering questions by this Friday 29th October :tada:

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Resound Italian humour - please expand on this for the Community @vittorio.boccanera :pray:

What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced since joining Monzo?

What’s biggest “win” you’ve experienced whilst here?

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Stats, numbers & data please.

And would you rather… A hamster appear from your pocket every time you coughed or a goldfish come out of your mouth every time you yawned?

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I’m genuinely curious to what a Senior Paid Social Manager is? Does that mean regular Senior Social managers don’t get paid or am I being dumb?

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I think it means he’s in charge of the social side for Plus/Premium.

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Ahh thanks for that! Makes sense!

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Hi @Revels!

I’d probably go with a hamster out of my pocket every time I coughed. Hoping there’s no hidden meaning there, and if there is, woopsies!? :sweat_smile: Pardon my Italianness :it:

With regards to Stats, numbers & data – there’s only so much I can share, but let’s see, what were you interested in specifically? :slight_smile:

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Nothing hidden! I just try and create a strange would you rather for these AMAs.

As for the data part, not really sure. I’m just a bit of a numbers nerd. Something that impressed you for engagement, something that went viral, any sort of graph that has a huge spike on it. Obviously sensitive data removed.

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Hi @Ashton,

That’s a really good question, it’s not immediately obvious, and the name with some of our products can actually cause some confusion – it definitely fooled @Revels !!!

Paid Social is part of wider Performance Marketing, it’s a specific channel.

Broadly speaking, Performance Marketing is when you show ads online by paying for them – it’s basically like when you see a poster in the tube, but only this time you see it on the web. Usually, the mechanics means that you are bidding on a platform to have your ad shown to the relevant people in your target audience.

Performance Marketing consists of various “channels” or avenues you can advertise your company, and reach a different variety of people.

You have:

  • Paid Social
  • Paid Search
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • In some cases even PR can be considered Performance Marketing
  • Display
  • Audio and Podcasts
  • SEO (although this is really to drive organic growth, you could evaluate performance through the same lens as the channels above)

Paid Social specifically is when you are bidding to show ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Quora, Pinterest, Reddit, Twitter, Linkedin etc.

“Social” refers to social channels like the ones above, and “Paid” means you are paying for the ads to be shown.

There’s a lot of data analysis, optimisation tactics and strategy involved, it’s very interesting and it allows you to work with creative and data at the same time! :slight_smile:

Hope that answers it!!! :slight_smile:

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What kind of metrics do you use to say if a media campaign has been effective or not? Is it just sign ups or how much they use that account after signing up?

What tools do you use to analyse the data?

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Fair! From a creative standpoint we saw that actually a lot of content that @cookywook worked on during the pandemic went totally viral. Things like chart showing how customers use their Pots to save up for when we came out of Lockdown – “Pubs” was definitely in many of those Pots titles! (sensitive data obviously removed and only aggregated data was shown)

Another really cool one which went viral was again something @cookywook had worked on when Whatsapp had the outage a few months back. We used the fact that you can send payments instantly to your friends as a hacky way to communicate during the outage by effectively sending 1p and putting the message in the reference section of the payment :slight_smile: That was really smart and super reactive from the team there!

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@Rat_au_van we use a whole series of different metrics. On Paid Social (but not limited to) we tend to look at pre-install metrics. This shows the efficacy of the delivery of the ad to the selected audience. Things like

  • CPM (cost per mille, or cost per 1000 impressions served)
  • CPC (cost per click)
  • CTR (click through rate which is #clicks / #impressions)
  • CVR Click > Install (conversion rate from clicks to install)
  • CPI (Cost per Install)

We’ll also look at the absolute number of those metrics being driven.

We’ll also look at post-install metrics, and these I’d say are the more important ones you want to be measuring as it’s what you measure to calculate your ROI (return on investment)

So things like:

  • How many people start an application process
  • How many people have the ability to make a payment with Monzo and the CPA (Cost per Acquisition) which is our north star KPI.
  • How many people open a Plus or Premium or Business Account
  • How valuable are those customers? (LTV - Lifetime Value)
  • Payback (CPA / LTV) i.e are we spending more or less than what we get back? Are we efficient or are we burning money?

We will also look at (where possible and with customers having given us their consent) - demographic data, post-attribution data, what campaigns are working based on the metrics above, what creative works etc.

We use several platforms:

  • Big Query to write raw SQL code and extract data
  • But predominantly we use Looker for data visualisation – it allows us to keep an up-to-date snapshot of how our marketing efforts are developing over time.

:slight_smile:

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I have literally no idea what you do.

If I was writing a Science Fiction story, and one of the characters was described as a Performance Marketing manager, what would the next paragraph say?

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@Anarchist This should help! :slight_smile:

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It usually entails me either referencing “Pizza Pasta Margherita” without context, or me just telling rubbish dad jokes which only Italians would understand (mainly because I translate them word-for-word). Oh well :sweat_smile:

I think joining such a fast growing, ambitious and under-the-spotlight company during the pandemic and being the sole executer in Performance Marketing was a big challenge. But with it has come so much opportunity to have a say of how we market to our audiences, and responsibility. And I’ve had a fantastic team to help me along the way. Goes without saying that joining a new company and not being able to meet the team in person for over 12 months was difficult. But the cohesion of the group was such that it was made very easy for me to integrate and feel a part of the company!

Definitely kick starting Performance Marketing in 2021! As a marketer you always want to be showing your work to people you think can benefit from it. And I’m happy to say that so far, it’s working and I’m very happy to be actively contributing to Monzo’s mission of making money work for everyone

:heart:

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As a non-Italian who loves tiramisu to the extent that if a pudding menu has tiramisu on I will disregard the rest, but who has experienced a wide variety in style and quality of tiramisu as a result, I have two separate but related questions:

  1. What should one look out for to know if they’re eating an authentic style tiramisu, as opposed to a ‘tiramisu’ style dessert?
  2. Can you tell us how to make the perfect tiramisu? (Hopefully it’s not your nonna’s secret recipe)
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@HoldenCarver GREAT QUESTION! :slight_smile:

The main debate amongst italians right now is / and will always be what type of “biscuit” you should be using. Is it “Savoiardi” or “Pavesini”? They are similar but different in height, how they will absorb coffee etc. The original recipe uses Savoiardi, but I’ve been bought up with Pavesini, and both are exceptionally good (I’d lean towards the latter). So if someone has made tiramisu with those biscuits, you can be certain that the tiramisu is “authentic”. Obviously the zabaglione needs to be well amalgamated. The number of layers is also a giveaway - between 2-3 layers is the norm. :stuck_out_tongue:

Hahahha my nonna’s secret recipe is definitely one of the ways to make a perfect tiramisu. But the real secret is in the zabaglione. You need to make sure that when you fold the whites and the yolk together (after they have been worked) it’s done from bottom to the surface in a slow manner. That’s what makes the tiramisu top notch :slight_smile:

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What advice would you have for folk who are on the same journey? How did you go about picking up technical and data skills?

(Also: welcome :wave: and thank you :man_bowing:)

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@Peter_G

Firstly, thanks for the welcome, and you are welcome back! :slight_smile:

This was not a pondered decision but it stemmed from the way that I was working and what I was interested in, back at my time at Wise.

My journey

I started as a Paid Social Exec, the most junior role in any team in performance marketing. I was always very data focussed, I studied Finance and Maths, so I have always been very accustomed to dealing with numbers. What was the turning point for me was needing to understand how metrics were defined, and coming up with new metrics that would inform investment decisions for the team. We used Looker as the data visualisation tool, and models were defined in Python and SQL.

I first started to define metrics for the team in LookML, which requires a data model to have been already built. There, you can basically grab variables from a table and actually add it to a Looker explore. This allowed me to break away from having simple things blocked by data analyst’s time variable.

I think I really wanted to push the team to start thinking about optimisation which was solely data driven and focussed. So I essentially asked for help to our data team. They essentially up-skilled me to learn SQL basics. And then from there it was a very steep learning process to become independent and push model changes to be able to quickly impact Performance Marketing’s visibility on data, and how they could be thinking about growth from a higher company perspective, not only driving user growth, but also product adoption.

So the change was a mix of grit and determination, but also having the right support system and opportunity to be able to dedicate time to this. My first project as a data analyst was re-writing all of the marketing models to make them more modular, write checks for data reliability and making sure we were not breaking models, and then displaying them visually for teams in Performance Marketing to use. I ended up giving a lot of 101s to the Performance Marketing team on how to use these data points.

Although it’s not my job now at Monzo, we have a very similar challenge, and I am fortunate to have exceptional colleagues with an insane breadth of experience to help me out on this. They are able to pick up on complex problems which I am very close to so quickly, I am always in awe of their work, and methodic approach to problems. :slight_smile:

Advice

  • Find the right people who can teach you the raw skills
  • Understand how you learning these skills can unblock people around you and have a positive impact on the company trajectory.
  • Always explain what you learn to others because this will help you understand if you actually understood concepts properly yourself or not. The number of times I explain a concept to someone and half way through I realise “wait a sec, this actually doesn’t make sense” is innumerable.

Hope this helps, great question :slight_smile:

EDIT: I say “essential or essentially” a lot but there’s nothing essential about having great colleagues, that’s just luck!

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