Tove-Lia Jansson Stiernblad

Describe your role and what it is that you do overall and on a day-to-day basis. 

As industry manager, I'm overall responsible for a handful of the largest advertisers in Sweden. My job, together with a team of account managers and product specialists, is to ensure the advertisers get the best ROI from their media investments with Google and help them become more data-driven in both their marketing efforts and overall organizations. Although we have a few really savvy advertisers in Sweden, there’s room for improvement. My main counter parts at the advertiser side are CMOs, Head of Media, Head of Performance Marketing and similar roles, as well as the agencies my clients partner with.

What interested you about the field/company/role you are currently in? 

The tech industry has always been appealing to me, the fast pace and above all the change it is driving in society. At the same time I wanted to have an outward facing role where I got to meet a lot of people and see different challenges, and working with sales has really given me that.

Why did you choose to study your Masters subject area at SSE? 

I ended up choosing between marketing (that was available as a stand-alone master then), and accounting and financial management and landed on the latter, as it gave me a broader stepping stone. I took a lot of marketing courses as electives and during my exchange semester, and got a bit of both worlds which has been ideal for me.

How did your time/education at SSE help guide you to the career journey you have embarked on? 

My career path, given the master I studied, has maybe not been the most usual one, but to me it makes sense. My career has been in the intersection of tech, marketing and sales. Being able to quickly understand a company's business objectives and underlying drivers for them has been very helpful, especially as I’ve worked with companies from many different industries. I have conversations with CFOs from time to time too, discussing how marketing costs should be treated - as cost of sales or as more traditional overhead. With my studies from SSE I feel very comfortable in these discussions, and we see more and more advertisers moving to flexible budgets optimizing towards for example ROI  instead of more traditional brand metrics.    

Following your time at SSE, do you have any words of wisdom or advice you would like to share with our current students? 

At Google we often talk about being “uncomfortably excited”, which is a term I like a lot. For me it means to always challenge yourself to continue to learn and try new things - even though it might feel uncomfortable. And every decision doesn't need to make sense, it’s in the unexpected events we can learn the most.