Who is Yoli Chisholm? Intro to new weekly?show

TLDR; The 90’s were crazy, remember the portal years? the transition to mobile was crazy, all GenX’ers will get it. I hope you’ll follow my podcast

Listen to the podcast: Yoli Chisholm

Or you can read the un-punctuated un-edited rambling transcript

Oh God ringtones do you guys remember

that time do you remember those few

years where the mobile phone evolved as a home now pre the

iPhone I was actually working for a

company called lava life that started a

mobile ventures division and we were

building chat apps dating apps and like

mobile messaging apps and dealing

directly with the telecom companies so

we would have to deal directly with them

and create apps that that could live on

the phone

hey everyone it’s Yoli Chisholm and if you

don’t know me you will get to know me if

you’re watching this it probably means

that you’re in my network somehow and

those that know me know I do a marketing

experiment every single year. I’ve been a

digital marketer for 20 years and if

you’re watching this well you’re in my

experiment. I never talk about what it is

I’m testing each year but let’s see… a

couple years ago I grew my facebook

following to about a hundred thousand

and then just deleted that account that

was an experiment… a couple of years ago

I rode the crypto wave and took 7k and

grew it up to 70,000 dollars and that

was a ride and I captured that on

YouTube and so this year I’m going

bigger. So I want to make sure that you

guys are connected with me on all of my

various social networks so whatever your

flavor is pick it up and I’ll be there

Yoli Chisholm across the web and please

feel free to check out my website Yoli

Chisholm.com and if you wanna text cuz

you know that text is the next thing

text me “Hey Yoli” to 474747 let’s connect so I know

some of you are wondering why should I

even bother tuning in why should I

listen to

Yoli Chisholm what does she got to say

that might be interesting well it might

not be interesting but I do happen to

think I’ve had a very interesting life

as I said earlier I’ve been a digital

marketer for twenty years I’ve kind of

grown up with the web and actually fell

into the web originally as a marketer I

was working for consumer packaged goods

retail organization in company in Canada

called BiWay that had over 500 stores

and I would design the flyer and work

with the merchandising team to decide

what would be in that flyer and there

was a whole art and science in terms of

how we wanted to

drive people through the store that was

fascinating and that was kind of like my

first sort of real corporate job now I

put it in quotes because I actually fell

into marketing I am NOT a professionally

trained marketer over the last 20 years

I have obviously had a ton of experience

at companies like Microsoft 

where I’ve worked through

all three three different CEOs and worked

for companies like eBay and working at a

company called Sprinkler right now

that’s — in a really interesting space I

worked for a company called points.com

worked for MSN all category Kings which I

will talk about over the course of the

year so I’m gonna be developing some

content talking all about marketing and

if you are into marketing I’d love for

you to tune in so make sure that you

connect with me on all of the social

media channels whatever is your

flavor. So as I mentioned a little bit

about my background. I started out

in consumer packaged goods working for a

big retailer that got swallowed up by

folks like Walmart and Amazon and lived

through what it

was like to be in a company when you’re

you see your industry essentially

transitioning and being sort of eaten up.

In this case it was the web and made

the transition into work technology and

working for a technology organization so

I actually quit my job in retail took a

six-month course learned HTML and the

first job I got was to build an

affiliate program for one of Canada’s

biggest e-retailers/ecommerce

retailers so they go by indigo.ca

right now but originally it was

chapters.ca and they were the first

online bookseller so I really kind of

lucked out my first job in tech was for

the first ecommerce bookseller in

Canada that was sort of the Amazon

equivalent. 

I built an affiliate program to

9-thousand sites, now I have a very deep

affinity for affiliate marketing and I’m

still amazed by the amount of marketers

who do not use affiliate marketing it is

at the core of Amazon’s success and

we’ll talk about things like that. Anyway

I went on to work at msn my second gig

in technology was working for msn they

were coming into the Canadian market

they needed to build different channels

and I built the first Shopping Channel

on the Canadian MSN portal and went on

to build the finance Channel the games

Channel and then eventually and ended up

managing what we call the network entry

points — So MSN’s home page hotmail

homepage responsible for driving

the balance between editorial content

and advertising throughout the network

that was a really really fun time and

actually that was when I really built an

affinity with working with business

development teams and you know the

relationship in terms of how do you

ensure you’re working with the right top

partners and how do you enable the sales

team to have the right assets as they go

out to acquire those channel

partners so every time we launched a new

channel we had to make sure we had the

top finance organizations for the

finance Channel, the top sellers and top

retailers for the shopping channel the

top gaming providers for the gaming

channel. So that was really cool and

I learned a lot in that experience. One of the companies that I ended up

working quite a bit with was eBay. So this was during the years when you

know brands and startups that were just coming

into market would work with

maybe one or two portals cuz in those

days the portals were the kings and so

they would spend like their entire

marketing budget on a portal that

definitely changed the as the web

evolved but I was there during those

years and it was very interesting anyway

I brought up eBay because I ended up

going to work for eBay as they were

coming into the Canadian market and they

were they had some specific challenges

as you can imagine Canadians had been

shopping in the US and so it was like

how do you tell them hey we’ve got a

Canadian siTe over here and then how do

you evolve and drive acquisition

they had to scale growth at a breakneck

speed. I got to work with some

amazing amazing thought leaders and and

amazing growth marketers in that space

before it was called “growth marketing” so

some exciting things we did at eBay was

basically built new tech so I remember

working in a project where I worked with

double click — double click had not been

acquired by Google yet and we built using

some technology that they called boom

tags and enabled us to personalize the

website and personalize the homepage for

every single user differently so we had

five different landing pages for

five different segments of users

a lot of interesting learnings around

audience segmentation and building tech

to enable personalization based on

actions that those users have taken or

not taken very interesting very very

early this was sort of almost 15 years

before sort of the discipline of website

personalization with companies like the

demandbase had evolved and actually some

of them are really

in the early stages. So it was

exciting to be with a company that was

ready to push the envelope in

growth and also driving a developing new

tech as part of your marketing role

which sometimes companies…companies have been so focused

that the marketing discipline I should say

sometimes get siloed and you don’t

necessarily have the opportunity to

extend beyond your discipline.

I really appreciated my time at eBay for

that reason very forward and progressive

company. So I got to work with

engineering teams a lot in the in that

and that period you know and they would

laugh at me because I’d be like well

can’t we just do this you know like sure

Yoli so I really do appreciate it when

I have the opportunity to work with

engineers who are like maybe we can’t do

it the way you articulated it but I’m

gonna find out how we can that

can-do attitude which is super super

super cool because you end up building

some really innovative technology so

gosh since then I you know I ended up

working in…

 Oh God ringtones do you guys remember

that time do you remember those few

years where the mobile phone evolved as a home now pre the

iPhone I was actually working for a

company called lava life that started a

mobile ventures division and we were

building chat apps dating apps and like

mobile messaging apps and dealing

directly with the telecom companies so

we would have to deal directly with them

and create apps that that could live on

the phone… and then the iPhone came

on and the iPhone was launched and that

just changed that whole world and what

was exciting though was to see

how developers were able to build whole

businesses on this new medium this new

platform and I as a marketer was also

able to try new tech I was one of the

first mobile marketers when AdMob was

just launching they hadnt been acquired by

Google yet companies like Millennial

Media I think it was was one of the

first mobile marketing advertising

platforms and fortunately I had the

opportunity to be one of the first

marketers in the Canadian space on those

platforms for b2b and b2c sort of

marketing so super super exciting time

gosh I remember the mobile sites and I

remember the marketing around ringtones

a lot to be learned in terms of

the fine line between 

optimizing forms and how much data you

take in and what you

ask for upfront. So privacy I would say

during that tenure evolved in terms of

asking for permission, opt in, exposing

what are the T’s and

C’s because if you’ll remember it was so

easy to get people to buy ringtones you

know kids would end up running up their

parents bills and it’s because of that

phenomenon that you’ve seen a

lot of the the governance that has

evolved on the phone and just even on

the web in terms of opting in etc I

found got refined during that period so

it was an exciting time as a marketer it

was so cool because the everything was

moving at such a breakneck speed and now

we had to add this

whole other dimension in terms of to our

marketing we were used to just marketing

for the desktop and people coming to our

experiences on the desktop and now we

had this opportunity to market directly

to the phone right and they had their

phone with them and at all times

and you’ve seen how that has evolved

anyway so I remember the start of that

and being part of that evolving and

evolving our marketing and evolving how

we design websites and even how HTML has evolved and how

the use of video etc has evolved anyway

lots and lots to talk about so I’m

hoping you will join me this year as I

chat about my career in marketing and

some of the things that I’ve experienced

and as the technology has evolved.