In a close interview with MARKETECH APAC Founder Joven Barceñas, Shahid Nizami, the new regional vice president for Asia-Pacific of US-based SaaS unicorn ActiveCampaign, shares the career journey he’s had in the marketing tech space, and bares with us his professional stand on current issues in marketing as well as the biggest learnings he’s gained through his longevity in the industry.
Nizami, who is a Google, Oracle, and Hubspot alum, boasts more than 17 years of experience in the marketing tech space.
Of what makes him stay, he shares, “All [these] years, the love for marketing has only grown, especially having been at Google, and [seeing] how marketing can really change the world and [seeing] the impact of that.”
He continues, “Over these years, the MarTech world has changed a lot. Every single year that graph only grows bigger and bigger. This means that there are more complex problems which need to be solved.”
During the conversation with Nizami, we also didn’t let the opportunity slip to ask his opinion on the recent OCBC catastrophe in Singapore – the phishing scam that had nearly 500 customers losing their money amounting to at least S$8.5m. This drove financial bodies in the country to order the removal of all clickable links in emails and SMSes sent to retail customers – an action that has now become an important matter of customer experience.
“As a marketer, you might think at the first go that – what does it mean for us? But I believe, and I strongly believe that anything that improves the end customer experience is actually a good thing,” said Nizami.
“And it’s about how do you convert this opportunity where customers are losing trust in their banks? It is a problem into an opportunity where now the banks are like, how can we earn their trust back?” he added.
Listen to the full conversation between Barceñas and Nizami over at Spotify, where Nizami shares further on what has been his biggest challenge as a marketer in the past 2 decades and whether he, in the future, also plans to join others who have decided to establish their own companies.
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