Thomas Dawson

Just started this new and exciting opportunity!

What I Accomplished: Through providing commercial and operational leadership of four organizations I partnered with our business leads to triple programmatic revenues in 24 months. I also led the global re-positioning of our programmatic commercial proposition and led the commercial strategy for strategic media and tech partner agreements while also overseeing the consolidation of SEM and SEO activities into a new entity.

What I learned: How to have a lot of fun while setting and stretching for seemingly unattainable goals and how to steward the financials of a company high growth mode. How to build a new company and help re-invigorate an old one. How important it is to identify future challenges and plan for them today and build a strong and diverse team across multiple commercial functions.

What I Accomplished: Through partnership with our customers, account leads and global organization, I led the commercial strategy for our 500m+ global client roster that saw a significant increase in global scope and market footprint over three years. This led to growth that significantly outpaced the market growth and internal expectations. I steered the development systems and processes to set and track client level KPI’s globally. This helped organize and systemize global commercial information gathering to provide market and agency leaderships with better data with less time spent gathering. I also created and administered commercial and consultative selling training globally with a focus on pay for performance compensation

What I learned: Humility and patience. How little I knew about the business works in each market. How to package and negotiate commercials on a multi-market global pitch and have the patience to steward a deal from start to finish. How to build and lead a team with people across the world. How to build a commercial training and deliver it internationally. How build a great commercial presentation and make it meaningful.

What I accomplished: Doubled US revenues over four years and significantly increased US operating income through setting KPI’s and building united plans to achieve them. I partnered with business development teams to lead the commercial strategy and deal management for many new client wins that helped lead to an agency of the Year award in 2009. I developed initiatives to increase network business opportunities including programmatic, search, barter, DRTV, and multicultural leading to substantial growth in our diversified businesses.

What I learned: How to get things done in an agency network (it’s insane when I really think about this sometimes!). How to work as part of a team to build consensus and address big challenges. How to lead a finance team and support good talent and manage out the poor talent. How to work with client procurement and marketing contacts. How to grow revenue through partnering with other network agencies to benefit the whole group. How the financial processes and systems work in the media industry and how to fix them when they go wrong. GAAP, SOX and internal revenue recognition and billing procedures are equally nuanced, challenging and fascinating at the same time.

What I Accomplished: Mostly proving that i am a good fit for the commercial world of advertising agencies. We built some of the first client profitability, staff utilization and forecasting reports, templates and procedures to improve overall transparency and decision making of the company

What I Learned: Advertising agencies need good commercial people and they can be a fun, fascinating, frustrating and fast paced place to work.