Leadership Q&A with Christie's VP digital marketing, Samantha Margolis
ClickZ spoke with Christie’s VP digital marketing, Samantha Margolis to discover her journey in marketing leadership, challenges, and opportunities.
Samatha Margolis: I graduated with an undergraduate degree in Art History which led me to a career working in fine-art auctions. I discovered that my favorite part was finding ways to connect people with art and objects that they love and making the auction experience more approachable. I then studied luxury marketing, digital marketing, and product development at the NYU Stern School of Business and transitioned onto the Digital Marketing team at Christie’s.
Samatha: I love getting to work with incredible objects every day and bring them to new audiences. I consider myself lucky that over my career I’ve had the opportunity to work on everything from The Collection of George Michael to lost Da Vinci paintings to meteorites. Every day is different! Christie’s hosts auctions in over 80 categories—in the morning I’m figuring out the best tactics to target meteorite buyers and in the afternoon I’m collaborating on a strategy to announce a Picasso masterpiece.
Samatha: Creating a marketing strategy that could adapt to so many unknowns.
Samatha: That people are more adaptable than we give them credit for. When I started at Christie’s almost 9 years ago, colleagues would say that they had clients that would never use the internet. I don’t think anyone would say that now.
Samatha: Test and learn. This may be a bit of a cheat answer: we’ve seen so many changes in the marketing ecosystem and there are certainly more to come. Strong marketers will need to continually experiment with different options and opportunities to discover what works (and doesn’t) for their brand.
Engage in open dialogues with customers. We know that customers are willing to share information with brands when they are getting something valuable in exchange. As marketers, we have an opportunity to find new ways to create and communicate that value to build lasting relationships with customers and learn how we can new ones.
I am a horror movie fanatic!
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