In our new column, from time to time we will host leading figures in the digital industry and ask them to answer professional and personal questions. The goal of this feature is to provide a platform and space for leaders in the digital community so they can share their knowledge and experience with others.
Last time we hosted Irit Frank, click here to read her answers.
This time on the A-List – Ido Sela!
How did you start your career?
I started from an inexplicable passion for digital. I’m from the old generation; there was no internet at all, and when I first encountered the internet, I felt an excitement on a whole other level that simply cannot be explained. I used to play chess with people from around the world on Yahoo, and it blew my mind every single time.
To this day, I drive in the car and talk on Zoom with India, and it amazes and excites me. I know that’s standard for every kid today, but it excites me.
To this day, years later—leads, campaigns, conversions, and technology do it for me, and naturally, I was drawn to it.
How did you take your first steps in the industry?
I was blessed with a client who brought another client, who brought another client. To this day, I argue that digital marketing is only there to expose your good product or your excellent business, and that’s it. But whoever isn’t good won’t last. Marketing or advertising is “merely an intro” between someone who doesn’t know you and them getting to know you and staying your client.
What are your challenges as CEO of Wisy?
Our profession is very deceptive; it looks very easy, but it’s the hardest thing in the world. I have a lawyer friend who once told me that law is the profession with the craziest inverse ratio between the easiest studies and the hardest profession. I’d like to offer my own observation: in digital, we have the craziest ratio between zero barrier to entry and a profession that is one of the most complex there is.
In what sense is it very hard? In the sense that an account manager sits—regardless of whether they do SEO or advertising management, etc.—at the end of the day, they sit alone. Even if they are in a shared office, they are alone in front of the computer. This self-management, along with managing clients when you think about it, is crazy in how difficult it is because you work alone, you have to generate your own tasks, and you also have to execute them. Super hard. If that same advertising manager, for example, were a shift manager in a restaurant—all their tasks would be predefined and pre-managed, and there would be no problems at all.
Our profession requires emotional intelligence, an understanding of advertising, marketing, human beings—you name it. And all of this has to be done alone, and not just with one client, but with several in parallel, which is super complex. So that’s the main challenge—training people who are essentially Supermen, making sure they are consistent, so that the client receives the same level of management from everyone in the company. That is unequivocally our most complex challenge, and we deal with it most of the day.
Which primary platforms do you recommend advertisers use?
With your permission, I’ll start with what not to use. When I say what not to use, I mean in most cases—there are always exceptions and special edge cases.
I don’t recommend Outbrain or Taboola; it’s the bottom of the barrel for traffic quality. If you examine this traffic, it mostly comes from clickbait junk sites and very little from premium sites like YNET, etc. They give you a taste of premium sites and shove all the “junk” on spam sites.
There are three entities making money—the spam sites, the platforms of course, and the agency. Who isn’t making money? The client. There are exceptions of course, but most of it is garbage. Where else to avoid? LinkedIn—expensive traffic, people (Israelis) aren’t really active there, and ultimately, even if there are conversions, they are very, very expensive. Where else to avoid? All the performance networks, Sekindo & co.—absolute trash.
Who gets a yes from me? Only three platforms—the first is Google, which is still the queen of high-quality traffic, the second is Facebook, and the third is TikTok.
What do you think is the next big thing in digital marketing?
Zuckerberg’s entire metaverse is still far off, but once it arrives, it will be an entire city with billboards, in-store shopping, influencers, and what not—but we’re not there yet.
The immediate thing on the horizon is AI: intelligence for ads, intelligence for copywriting, intelligence for targeting, etc. We’re not quite there yet, but very soon.
What does your daily work routine look like?
I am very, very structured and I have a whole methodology that deserves a full post, but I’ll give the summary—I start with “flash tasks,” tasks that can be wrapped up in a few minutes, and afterwards I work in “time blocks” and make sure that when I do something, I only do that: no answering phone calls, no sending WhatsApps, and nothing else until the task is complete.
Generally, I work in blocks: “phone call time,” “email time,” “WhatsApp time,” rather than doing everything all at once. It’s obviously more complex than that, but that’s the gist—invite me to a podcast and I’ll tell you 🙂
What marketing move did you make that kept you awake for a few nights?
I don’t have a marketing move that kept me up at night, but there are plenty of business moves that cause me concern and trouble me a lot. An example of this was when we closed the website design studio; it took us a very long time to decide, with tons and tons of meetings—debates over losing money versus strategy, etc. Usually I decide in a second, but when something is so contentious, it took a long time and troubled us a lot.
What advice would you give to someone who just started their journey in the digital world?
I could give so much advice that I wouldn’t even know where to start—so as not to ramble, I’ll give three tips.
- First tip – Just do it – which is also one of the slogans I’m deeply in love with – just do, don’t overthink, don’t hesitate, and don’t stall. Just do, try to stay in the circle of action.
- Work with people you love, including vendors; you’ll be at work most of the day, so it better be enjoyable.
- Move fast and break things – that’s Zuckerberg’s motto. Don’t be a perfectionist, that belongs to the past. Take action, break conventions, try, and initiate.
Where do you draw inspiration from?
I’m a podcast beast—literally every minute I have, especially in the car, I listen to podcasts. I take something from each one. I listen to Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, VC podcasts like YC; mostly I listen about business, companies, entrepreneurship, etc., and I try to adopt—usually it happens naturally—the things that “sit right with me.”
For example—Jason Fried from Basecamp said they stopped working with Photoshop and just build things live; they don’t do “mockups or schmockups,” they just build live, because he says afterwards you just burn hours upon hours aligning between the designer and the programmer. When he said that, I went “Boom!” That’s fire, he’s a thousand percent right, and the very next day I made a change at Wisy.
How do you stay updated on what's new in the world and in general?
From blogs—I subscribe to about 20 or so, skimming what interests me. There are areas I dig into less, like analytics, and areas that interest me more, like SEO.
However, I don’t attend conferences unless they belong to friends; I don’t find value in them other than social gatherings.
Did you feel at any point in your career that you had made a breakthrough?
My breakthrough isn’t necessarily professional; it’s managerial. I run the company like a place I would actually want to work at. No yelling, no drama, no pettiness, no micromanagement—simply a place where I’d love to work. I take great pride in the fact that employees at Wisy were either let go or moved on to become independent, but no one ever left me for another agency.
We brought a “no bullshit, no games” approach to running the company, and in my opinion, that is the breakthrough.
How do you summarize the year 2021?
Darwin said – “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” There’s no point in crying over COVID or playing the blame game; you have to understand reality as it is (that COVID isn’t leaving anytime soon) and deal with it.
A complex year, 2021—so what? Should we cry? How would that help? Should we wait for Bennett? For Bibi? For Yair? Absolutely not. We need to take responsibility for ourselves and find new opportunities. I don’t always believe in turning lemons into lemonade; sometimes a lemon is just a sour lemon, but you still have to deal with it.
What was one of the biggest challenges during this period for you?
The most complex challenge was the lack of control at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, when clients simply left in a panic and you had no control over it—no conversation or anything would help. The challenge was holding that drama together.
By the way, we approached it in a very transparent, collaborative way: every morning during that dramatic period, we conducted a “situational assessment,” literally every day, and shared it openly with the employees, including the hard parts, and they really appreciated and valued that.
Do you have any new tools or activities that you credit to the COVID period, which you might not have had without it?
Honestly no, because I’m a known tool enthusiast—we always worked on the cloud, we’ve used Skype calls since day one of Wisy, half the employees always worked from home, so it felt like we “were ready” for this. There’s no new tool that we owe our existence to.
Following the COVID crisis period, what should we take forward to preserve?
Cutting the bullshit between businesses. Company owners realized there’s no need to fly abroad for a meeting; clients realized they don’t need to “see the owner of the company in person.” What we already knew hadn’t caught on with the general public, and COVID accelerated technology and “legitimized” it.
If three years ago I had told a client “skip the meeting, let’s close this over Zoom,” they would have thought I was disrespecting them; today it’s completely legitimate. I think it moves everyone forward—not just us, but the clients as well; it cuts out a ton of bullshit and leaves a lot more net value.
A bit about the interviewee
