My name is Jean Lissac, born in 1993 near Lyon. I started this blog/article to tell you a a bit about myself. I traveled to Belgium after getting my master’s degree in 2012 and now growing as MarTech Enthusiast. For more than 5 years, I worked within Brussel’s Ad Agency starting from a web analytics internship to a Lead Ad Operator position in 2022. By the time you are reading this, my curriculum may have changed, so feel free to have a look at my CV and experiences
About myself
Soon to be married and (hopefully) good future husband, I like getting things done but preferably the smartest way (not necessarily the quickest). I like solving puzzles and training my brain daily. When I am not working, I like playing the guitar, producing music, playing video games, reading Science Fiction or chill in front of Netflix. Usually on Thursday I’m out playing with my rock band.
Music is key to my life. while some have sports to blow out some steam, I like shredding and jamming with my guitar. My references musically are Pink Floyd and Led Zep, although I quite dig Garage, Stoner/Desert and other underground rock culture. I played the guitar for about 15 years but am very far away from the ones that did took classes. If you are curious, you can listen to some of our tracks, give it a listen. you can share if you’d like, we don’t mind.
I like coming up with ideas and follow up on them. while I do not think I am an entrepreneur (yet), creating things from existing structure is were I enjoy myself most. Maybe that’s why I like management games like Factorio.
Starting from a sandbox idea to something else.
“Hello World”. Apparently, this is what developers say when they first build a website. Here, let’s say this is my greeting to whomever is reading this. I expect a lot of bots showing in my analytics in here, but to you as well, welcome!
This might be the very first time I write for myself publicly about stuff I learnt over the years. To be honest, it was never really my strong suit. My parents raised me with a “never too old to learn new things” philisophy. So I had to give it a try.
After many tryouts, loosing my domain to Chinese hackers (true story), I decided to recreate my personal website. The idea is of course to improve the look of my CV, but mostly to get a “sandbox” to test my (wild) ideas. Come back later, there might be more articles about them !
While building it, I felt the need to also improve my writing. Better than an obscure knowledge portal, a public one for everyone to read sounded better (at least in my mind), wouldn’t you agree ?
More like Curious Jean…
Marketing & Sales were the things I was most interested into. As a kid, my mother and I watched Culture-Pub over and over. The creativity these agencies had by relaying an underlying message with a funny or clever situation always amazed me. Similarly to the main character in “99 francs”, I was too excited about the coming attractions at the cinema.
As a kid, while my brother built Legos, I enjoyed dismantling them. All so I could see (and ultimately understand) its inner part. How it got built to rebuilt it later and – when creativity struck – improve it with the skills I had. Much topics in my life (Music, drawing, coding, etc…) followed the same path. Courses and programs where available, but I preferred a more self-made way. The research, the hair-pulling, the debugging, the optimization; these were the things I enjoy the most.
Right out of high-school, I enrolled in business school. There, I learnt about business plan, financial markets & equity, social ethic classes and other topics that were – in the end – all but marketing’s. Curious and Challenges-seeking, I wanted to understand why people “want/need” things at a deeper level. And mostly how marketing – as a science – could leverages sociology, psychology and other sciences to sell ideas or products. I had no medical nor psychology background. The ways of the mind simply intrigued me. I believed Neuroscience was the common denominator. To a point where, I then decided to write my master’s thesis on NeuroMarketing.
The big leap: from Business to science
How an ad trigger needs, compulsion? What drives our decisions (logical or not)? If these decisions arise, it must come from the brain. And, if someone understands its mechanisms (which no one really does), wouldn’t it be possible to use such knowledge to sell more or – better – anchors brands or product into consumer’s mind?
These questions fascinate me. Mostly because I saw that these insights might have real-life application both as experiments and on a daily basis. I wanted to learn (a bit) about how the human mind works. How stimuli trigger our decision and who is calling the shot. Finally, there was maybe a way to measure these effects and turn quantitative into qualitative data.
While no job was available on that field for 23Y.O. me, I though joining the marketing life would grant me sufficient experience and access to one day, get back at it… maybe.
Okay, time to work now.
In 2016, I discover the ad-game and its inner mechanism as an intern. My role was to learn as much as possible about Tag Management and Web Analysis to transmit knowledge before leaving. This was well suited for my personality: research, analysis, recommendations.
Falling in love with Tag Management
After the internship (6 months), I join a programmatic media buying team. Larger data sets were available. There I could feel the impact of my initiatives coming from my analysis and own recommendations. Every day, questions would pop in my head. I could not, however, answer them as it needed other data features yet to be not scoped. With the help of my managers, same old curious me had the opportunity to go deeper into the technical side. My new role was to play around with AdTech/MarTech to improve data collection/activation. While Nico worked on creating the attribution model, I was busy feeding its brain and teaching how to communicate with humans.
Two years later, another agency approached me to join their team as Lead Ad Operator. The job was different; I was more focusing on the Adserver. We needed to make sure all campaign went live on time and ran smoothly within the industrial-like processes.
Of course, by that time, Covid-19 hit us hard. The transition period, grant me some room to (re)-think about smarter ways of working. After 6months, I realize that Adops life is more about copy-pasting, ticket completion and QA; than it is about creation, innovation and critical-thinking.
From pain the machine rises.
Trafficking is boring. There! I said it! While it is a paramount step in the flow of digital marketing; its execution is monotonous, repetitive, alienating and not challenging – at all. I must train my brain daily. It is a primary need for me. otherwise my brain would ultimately collapse on itself. A bigger challenge was needed.
As an AdOps, speed & efficiency is the name of the game. Who better than a machine can achieve what human do but a at much faster and better pace?
Through (lots of) research, the Excel skills and little Python Nico taught me, my first automation program came to life. After countless days developing, a machine successfully made the job for me. I cannot express how proud I was of this moment. More features were introduced, and the program was completing more and more.
With the productivity gained from pure trafficking, technical consultancy tasks was my main focus. At the time I first wrote this article, the script is becoming mature enough to include it as a framework for current and future Ad operations.
Being less focused on trafficking grant me the time to look to the future. More specifically on landscape that digital marketing is facing with ever more technical requirements: Cookieless & Server-Side tracking; data collection under Eprivacy; Data Enrichment; etc.
What’s next ?
I know I do sound like a cliché, but I really think that I came from afar and I am today very proud of what I have and will acomplish professionally.
Today, I also plan on growing personally. After 6 years, I can now call the one that stood by me from thick and thin, my wife. We will grow together and maybe I’ll get to be an awesome-geeky-dad who’ll share my excitement about Legos and doing things its own way to my kids.
Thank you for reading this first blog entry and bearing me ranting about my life.
I hope to see you next time for another story.
J