Tinuiti - Marketing Executive of the Year

Company: Tinuiti, New York City, NY
Company Description: Tinuiti is the largest independent performance marketing firm across Google, Facebook and Amazon, with over $2 billion in digital media under management and 700 employees. With expert knowledge in search, social, Amazon & marketplaces, mobile apps, CRM & email marketing and more, Tinuiti understands success requires both strategy and channel specialization.
Nomination Category: Marketing Organization / Professional Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Marketing Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Dalton Dorné, CMO

As Tinuiti’s CMO, Dalton led the company through a rebrand and integration of Elite SEM, CPC Strategy, Email Aptitude and OrionCKB. The rebrand marked the fourth in her career, including a brand refresh as CMO at Merkle, rebranding RKG before they were acquired by Merkle in 2014, and supporting the global rebrand of Euro RSCG to Havas during her tenure as CMO, HavasPR. Prior to being one of the youngest CMOs of a global advertising network, Dalton served as the Head of Marketing for Euro RSCG Asia, and Ogilvy Greater China. A mandarin speaker, she spent 12 years in Asia working with clients across high-growth markets.

Dalton is equally recognized for her track record in delivering growth. During her tenure at Tinuiiti, the company has experienced 4x growth. At Merkle, she ran a department of over 35 global marketers delivering three consecutive years of double-digit marketing growth - winning “Greatest Impact on the Company” at Merkle’s leadership awards for two consecutive years.

She has worked with clients such as Johnson & Johnson (Beijing Olympics), Coca-Cola, Anna Sui, Pernod Ricard, Reckitt Benckiser and Avocados from Mexico (Super Bowl) and has been recognized on the Hall of Femme Women to Watch list.

When Dalton was hired as Tinuiti’s first CMO, she was tasked with rebranding and overseeing Tinuiti’s growth strategy. Within the first six months, she had built a high-functioning 25+ person marketing team, and led a detailed rebrand from Elite SEM to Tinuiti. Dalton developed the company’s new vision, strategy and productized and launched Tinuiti’s proprietary technology suite, Mobius. She then put Tinuiti on the map with their first inclusion in The Forrester Wave™: Performance Marketing Agencies for having the “strongest ecommerce ad strategies in the field”.

The momentum didn’t wane during COVID. She set the tone that “the best defense is offense” and the team produced 53% more content than their nearest competitor (Merkle) during the 1H of 2020 with 173 blogs, 46 webinars and 10 whitepapers. Specifically, she led a COVID campaign that produced a media spend dashboard, 20+ blogs, three webinars, a rebound playbook, weekly emails that led to over 40k site visitors (50% of which were new) and 19 sales opportunities. Most important was the lasting impact it had on the business during uncertain times: five consecutive months of beating sales lead targets (averaging 700 leads passed to sales per month Feb-Jun), pivoting SDR outreach strategy that saw a 21% increase in meetings, and rebounding pipeline after only a one-month dip in April.

Dalton solidified Tinuiti as leaders of the Trioply—Amazon, Facebook and Google—and the go-to experts on data privacy, all while generating almost $22M in revenue since the start of 2019.

Flawlessly pulling off a rebrand and repositioning exercise would be a career-making year for any CMO—let alone productizing and launching a technology suite that truly differentiates the firm. But the significance is rooted in continuously driving growth through these changes and a global pandemic - by pivoting the strategy, rallying the team, and providing invaluable resources to the industry. Yes, this resulted in great business results, but she’s proudest of ensuring the stability of her team and not a single furlough or layoff for the agency by stabilizing growth.

Despite COVID-19, her team delivered Y/Y revenue growth while also increasing average deal size—ensuring the rebrand and repositioning helped land bigger clients. Avoiding layoffs and furloughs, they were able to remain stable for 600+ employees and even continue to provide new jobs during the most challenging times in recent history.

In a competitive analysis of marketing output (blogs, webinars, content, etc) among performance marketing agencies in the first six months of the year, Tinuiti produced 53% more content than the nearest competitor. Additionally, Tinuiti had the largest topic ownership around their largest service lines compared to any other agencies analyzed. In keeping with the focus on offense, Tinuiti was the only firm to launch new services in 2020 too.

PR coverage saw Tinuiti constantly inside the top 3 in terms of share-of-voice (SOV) according to Cision data, with hits in AdWeek, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Inc., Vogue, and Forbes.

“A CMO is tasked with elevating the brand and driving growth. Since joining Tinuiti two years ago, Dalton has successfully spearheaded and championed transformative growth on both sides. Under her leadership, we successfully rebranded to Tinuiti with a strong market adoption rate.” -- Zach Morrison, CEO Tinuiti