Placement Report: ABOUT YOU GmbH

(1)

Placement Report:

ABOUT YOU GmbH

Luka Kiehne, S4113357

University of Groningen 23rd of February, 2021

(2)

1 Introduction

For the last five months (01.10.2020 – 28.02.2021), I worked for the e-commerce fashion retailer ABOUT YOU. For administrative reasons, the first months was registered as a working studentship and the following four months as my internship being part of my M.A. My internship was situated in the performance marketing department, more specifically paid social & app marketing. I had a specific focus on marketing on Facebook and Instagram and I was also involved with the optimization of the play store presence. I will go into greater detail in chapter X, in which I describe the tasks I had. During my internship, I learned a lot of operative skills directly bound to performance marketing and I also had insight into how data-driven e-commerce companies can get scaled.

2 ABOUT YOU – A Company Overview

To understand my internship at ABOUT YOU, it is important to understand where ABOUT YOU comes from, what the company is based on and what the mission is. While it has grown rapidly and is evolving into a household brand in many European countries, most people do not know much about ABOUT YOU’s business. ABOUT YOU is amongst the biggest online fashion retailers of Europe. It was founded in 2014 by Tarek Müller, Hannes Wiese and Sebastian Betz who still manage the company today. It is valued at above 1 billion Euros and the first unicorn 1_of

Hamburg. The company crossed the 1000 employee mark when I joined in October of 2020. Even though it is still often thought of as a start-up due to the young age, culture and hyper-growth, it outgrew the start-up size significantly. The company is active in 23 countries now and launches in several other countries are planned for 2021. In 2020 alone, we launched 9

countries as ABOUT YOU is generally profiting from the corona crisis.

The company is very technology-focused and the overall mission is to digitize the classic

shopping experience (ABOUT YOU, n.d.). The average employee is 30 years old (XING, 2020) and the fluctuation rate of employees is remarkably high. One reason for this is that the work is very demanding and thus exhausting on the one side, but also because ABOUT YOU is a great

launching pad for other career opportunities due to the great reputation in the digital economy.

3 Application Procedure

The application procedure was quick and straightforward. I prepared by listening to podcasts with the founders and employees from online marketing, reading the website thoroughly and looking at employer rating platforms such as kununu or glassdoor. After I handed in my application including motivational letter, CV, certificates and grades, I was invited to an

(4)

interview call with the head of performance marketing, Stefan Hock. The interview was relaxed in the beginning since we only spoke about my interests, motivations and

background. In the end, however, Stefan asked several quick mathematical questions related to e-commerce and marketing metrics such as “What do you estimate our CPI (cost-per-install) to be”, “If your CPO (cost-per-order) rises by 50%, how much would our AOV (average-order-value) need to rise in order to make equal revenue?”. Those questions took me totally by surprise and I did not think to have performed well enough. I answered most questions solidly but struggled a lot with others in that situation. To my surprise, Stefan was very positive about it at the end of the interview. He said that I performed well and he has to talk back to the HR department about my internship. Around a week later, I got a positive response from ABOUT YOU and an offer for an internship. At that time, I was in the second round of interviews with The Trade Desk, but I immediately accepted the offer by ABOUT YOU since it was my first choice due to the great reputation in the online marketing-field.

4 Internship Tasks & Reflection

4.1 Onboarding

My start at ABOUT YOU was a well-structured and extensive onboarding. The first month was filled with intros to many different topics relevant to the performance marketing department. That includes intros to more theoretical and strategical concepts, such as to the organigram of the marketing department or logics behind web- and app-tracking. At the same time, it involved more hands-on intros to relevant tools such as Google Analytics, Smartly 2_{or the Google Play}

Console used for App Store Optimization. For every new employee, irrelevant if intern or FTE, there is an excel sheet with all important intros. The other employees can check the intros they can and want to provide, so that everyone is involved with the onboarding process of new employees. Task-wise, there was more free time in the first month and the time was mostly filled with intros. While this was monotonous a few times, it is difficult to integrate very new

employees without much knowledge, otherwise. Once I had a rough idea of Smartly after a few ideas, I was appointed with creating new designs for social media ads in the Smartly creative editor. That was a beneficial to ease into the internship as it was very independent from everything else in the department and I could easily bring in my own ideas.

4.2 Timing

The time during which I interned at ABOUT YOU was an interesting one. I joined just before Black Friday, which marks the most important day of the e-commerce industry. Also, Q4 is very important since it achieves most revenue. At the same time, the fiscal year ends at the end of

2_{Smartly is a tool to optimize and automate social media advertising that is used to manage all}

(5)

March and yearly revenue forecasts need to be steered towards that deadline for annual

reportings. Budgets and expectations on the margin had to be adapted as a result of a dispersity between forecast and actual revenue numbers. This also had an impact on our work since marketing budgets were adapted and some aspects were prioritized over others. Therefore, I experienced the most important campaigns of the year with the largest ad-spend, but also periods in which marketing budgets were cut to meet expectations.

4.3 Tasks

I was working in team SOMOREM (Social – Mobile – Remarketing) and my tasks were also related to those three pillars. However, I had a stronger focus on social and mobile marketing and I did not work much in the domain of remarketing campaigns. On a top-level view, it can be summarized that I was involved in the creation and optimization of campaigns as well as in the App Store Optimization, which is the purposeful optimization of the app store presences.

4.3.1 Testing

Testing is a meaningful concept in performance marketing in general. The constant goal in performance marketing is to optimize performance. Here, performance can get measured easily and the performance of different campaigns and ads can be compared. Therefore, it is important to try out different ideas and strategies to see how performance can be improved. Thus, testing plays a big role in every step of performance marketing at ABOUT YOU. There is almost always some budget set aside for testing ideas. Throughout my internship, I setup and analysed many tests. For some tests, I tested concepts that were already laid out as the variants. For other tests, I brought in my own testing ideas and designed the different variants to test. Coming up with testing creatives was one of my very first tasks at ABOUT YOU and when Evelyn, my supervisor during the internship and head of paid social at ABOUT YOU, told me that we have a daily budget of 1.000€ over a period of 30 days, I thought that we waste a lot of money if the test is not successful. However, it is a necessity to have populations large enough to deliver significant results. While the overall mindset is that it is not important if the challenger win over the current active variant, it is still refreshing to bring in new variants to replace the current versions since it allowed me to leave my footsteps at AY even when I left.

The testing process was analytical and a good knowledge of statistics is required. It is important to understand concepts of statistical significances, audience sizes and inference tests. Especially Chi²-tests were used to analyse A/B-Tests, which I would not have expected before. I had to refresh my statistical knowledge a little bit, but it was pleasant to be able to apply operative skills I learned in my rather theoretical M.A. in a practical internship.

(6)

4.3.2 Design

Prior to starting my internship, I definitely would not have thought that I will end up designing ads for ABOUT YOU. I expected a clear cut between the performance marketing and design department. While this is the case for larger campaigns, it is of course more time- and resource-consuming to have everything briefed to the design department and wait for a good design. The approach of performance marketing is often more “quick & dirty”. We quickly design ads ourselves and see how they perform. Since I have some background with Adobe Photoshop, Premiere and Photography, I developed a moderate feeling for aesthetic and brand identity. I would never consider myself a designer, but it was clearly enough for the learn process of testing designs. Additionally, a learning that has proven itself valid over and over again before and during my internship: Nice designs do often not perform better than simple and less professional designs do. To exemplify, I attached the performance of a glossier variant by the design department with a very simple design by myself in the appendix.

4.3.3 Campaign Management

When another working student left, I took over the campaign management of capsule collections from him. Capsule collections are collections that we designed in collaboration with artists and influencers. When they are released, there often is an accompanying paid social campaign to increase awareness of the collection. The top-level planning was exercised by the department responsible for capsule collection but the execution of the paid social campaigns became my task. I managed the project independently and communicated with the capsule collections department about the execution of the campaigns. I wrote the media plans in a way that we spend most efficiently on new customers and existing customers, distributed budget correctly per country (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) and that we had a good balance between overall reach and frequency to reach each person. Additionally, I monitored the campaigns while they were running and analysed them to derive best practices for future capsule collections after they ended. Overall, the budget I managed for capsule collections was around 150.000€, split across four campaigns. This was a rewarding task because I truly felt like the project owner but it also felt like there is much fuck-up potential. The campaign setup was not double checked (apart from the first campaign), so an unnoticed mis-click would have led to up to 50.000€ lost. While that did not happen, it still felt uncertain at times since I was afraid to overlook something.

4.4 Working conditions

According to my contract, I had a 40-hour week. There are flexible working hours at ABOUT YOU with fixed hours between 10:00 and 16:00, but outside of that window (which is fixed to make finding time for meetings is easier) everyone can start and end their working time flexibly. Realistically, most employees work significantly more than 40 hours a week. I heard that it was even more stressful before I joined but I still experienced ABOUT YOU as a work-intensive

(7)

environment. While no one actively expected myself to work more than 40 hours a week, tasks with close deadlines sometimes piled up so that it easily happened. Also, peer-pressure often made me stay longer simply because I did not want to be the first to go home every day.

Consequently, I ended up working around 45 – 50 hours per week. I was still at the bottom-end of working hours with that amount. Juniors often worked close to 60h and I regularly received mails from seniors at past 23:00. I remember one of the heads of the department saying “we cannot achieve the current hyper-growth with a 40-hour work week”. I agree, but I do not want to do that time investment myself right now. Also, it was not a surprise when I started the internship. I knew that overtime is a common business practice in companies thriving for high performance and growth and I was absolutely willing to be part. However, this changed during my internship. I cannot exactly pinpoint why it changed since I was always convinced of the ‘work hard’-attitude, but I know now that I do not want to work more than 45h per week on a regular basis. Since working time is so decisive for a job in my opinion, this is the biggest reason why I did not want to continue working at ABOUT YOU after my internship despite having a great team, fulfilling tasks and a steep learning curve.

The internship was compensated with 600€/month which is mediocre for German standards but not enough considering the quality and quantity of work that interns are expected to do at ABOUT YOU.

5 Reflective Outlook

On my last day, I had a wrap up with Evelyn about my internship. We discussed feedback both ways – how I assess the internship at ABOUT YOU and how Evelyn and the team assesses me as an intern. I attached the evaluation form which I used to evaluate my internship in the appendix. We also discussed the work-life-balance since that was one of the points, I rated worst. I talked to her about the reason for not joining ABOUT YOU is the constant overtime and high workload which she totally agreed on. Also, she said that whenever I feel like I have too much free time and I do want to work more again, I should contact her about possibilities to join ABOUT YOU. Hearing that they would like to keep me was especially nice to hear at the end of the internship. Additionally, I am sure that I will meet the team at future lunch breaks when everyone is back at the office since my new employer is located only 300m away.

I invested a lot of time into the search for a fitting internship because there is no better way to get a foot into the door at a company, especially. I made the experience that it is a lot easier to get hired when you have worked at the company before, so I looked for an internship I was as certain as I can be prior to starting that I would like to continue there afterwards. Now, after the internship, this has not changed apart from the long working hours that I am not willing to take anymore without compensation. ABOUT YOU is a company driven by hyper-growth and

(8)

work-life-balance often lacks behind, consequently. Apart from that, I would have really liked to continue working at ABOUT YOU because the company culture, team and learning curve are all amazing.

However, I wanted to stay in performance marketing as my entry to the job market. First of all, because I really like the domain and second, because I felt well-trained and most confident there to find a job in a difficult situation like the current corona crisis. I started looking for jobs and writing applications at the end of 2020 and I could really see how there were less jobs available than usually in marketing. OTTO, for example, did not have any entry position marketing jobs available at that time, when they had around 20 at the beginning of 2020 as a colleague of mine at ABOUT YOU told me.

I started applying for jobs after the internship around New Year’s 2020/2021 and I was relatively anxious at first because of the difficult job market during corona. However, the job hunt turned out very successful. I applied for four jobs, got two interviews, proceeded to the second round in both and then accepted one of the offers before I had the second interview for the other company. Starting from 1st_{of March, I will work at Parship which is Germany’s and}

Europe’s first and largest serious online dating service. I am staying in online marketing as I will join as Junior Online Marketing Manager for Cooperations with marketing partners. Parship is home to a lot of interesting data and one of the statistics that make me look forward to the new job even more is that every Parship employee is responsible for 50 babys per year (Nicolai, 2015).

6 Reflective Essay: Black boxed algorithms and algorithmic

failure in professional contexts

During my MA, the intransparency and complexity of algorithms was a relevant topic which we discussed in many classes. We read about extraordinary cases like the stock market crash which is yet to be explained technically and very individual cases of people trying to imagine how social media feed decide what is relevant for you and what is not. While the first is a large-scale failure making history as a one-time-off event (so far), the latter is not a necessity to reach Facebook’s objective to keep users entertained. However, there is a space in-between where algorithmic trust plays a fundamental role and it is important to understand the mechanics of an algorithm of regular events: the professional context. While there are many more examples, I will, based on my internship, focus on social media marketing here. The professional context gives the issue of black boxed algorithms an interesting edge since it becomes part of the job to understand the mechanics of algorithms even though there is no direct influence. Marketers cannot influence the algorithms of Facebook or Google, nor do they have access to it. Also, they

(9)

do not try to. Instead, it they must understand algorithmic processes and outside-factors. Those are largely neglected in academic discourse. If we discussed or read about algorithmic cases in class, we mainly discussed the result. Why did Google show sexual content when searching for “Black Girls” (Noble, 2018), which data points go into the sorting algorithm of Netflix to show you the most relevant movies (Hallinan & Striphas, 2014) or how do algorithmic stock traders decide when to buy and when to hold a stock (Pasquale, 2015)? While the scholarly intention is more related to critical concerns and the understanding of larger concepts, a corporates’ main intention is to optimize efficiency and effectivity. From an exclusively economic standpoint it is not useful to invest too many resources into shedding light onto the Facebook algorithm, because there is no opportunity for change. Instead, it is important to understand every aspect which can be influenced by the corporate itself. Learning phases, for example, are viable to the performance of campaigns. When the targeting is done solely by Facebook, marketers need to keep in mind that Facebook’s algorithm needs a learning phase to understand who the campaign is most relevant to (“About the learning phase”, n.d.). The eventual impact of respecting or ignoring the learning phase is diffuse.

The same applies for Facebook’s algorithm that decides which ads violate the company’s ad policy. Which are strict and conservative to say at least – you are not allowed to use profanity or sexual content of any kind. However, how do you define profanity and sexual content in a way that algorithms can check the ads based on that? The technical definitions are, as one would expect, not disclosed but marketers can get a feeling for what gets through and what gets declined over time. The interesting aspect here is that algorithmic failure or sloppiness can become part of the strategy. For an upcoming new launch in a country, the planned claim across platforms is “Who the fuck is ABOUT YOU?” I wondered if this will get through on Facebook, so we decided to test it before the official launch. We also discussed it with our Account Manager from Facebook back-and-forth and he was pretty clear: It violates the policy and if the algorithm declines it, there is no way to get the Ads back active again. The tests showed that some of the creatives we tested were not declined by the algorithm, however (see appendix). Thus, the top-level decision was not to be aligned with Facebook’s policy but to bet on the algorithm not identifying the violation. It is a new dimension of ‘playing the algorithm’ (Cotter, 2018) as the weaknesses of an algorithm become a strategic business domain.

7 Conclusion

Reflecting on the past months, I can conclude by saying that it was the best decision to intern at ABOUT YOU. I got the perfect training to be prepared for jobs in performance marketing at one of the most advanced companies regarding online marketing and e-commerce. While I decided not to stay at ABOUT YOU, I did not regret the decision to intern there for a second. Also, the

(10)

team was extremely welcoming and I quickly felt like a full member of the department. I am sure that paths will cross again with a few of the other employees and I am looking forward to that already.

If anyone is interested in interning in performance marketing at ABOUT YOU, do not hesitate to contact me via lukakiehne@web.de. I am happy to assist you with the application – however, you should like number-crunching and bring good grades since those are two main factors HR looks at in performance marketing roles at ABOUT YOU.

(11)

8 Literature

About the learning phase. Retrieved 23 February 2021, from

https://www.facebook.com/business/help/112167992830700?id=561906377587030

ABOUT YOU GmbH. (2018). ABOUT YOU becomes Hamburg’s first unicorn – Heartland A/S joins the

fashion-tech start-up as a new investor. Retrieved from

https://corporate.aboutyou.de/en/presse/about-you-wird-zum-ersten-unicorn-aus-hamburg-

ABOUT YOU: Corporate page. Retrieved 17 February 2021, from https://corporate.aboutyou.de/en/ Cotter, K. (2018). Playing the visibility game: How digital influencers and algorithms negotiate influence on Instagram. New Media & Society, 21(4), 895-913. doi: 10.1177/1461444818815684.

Hallinan, B., & Striphas, T. (2014). Recommended for you: The Netflix Prize and the production of algorithmic culture. New Media & Society, 18(1), 117-137. doi: 10.1177/1461444814538646

Nicolai, B. (2015). Tim Schiffers: „Jeder Parship-Mitarbeiter sorgt für 50 Babys“. Retrieved 18 February 2021, from https://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article146027213/Jeder-Parship-Mitarbeiter-sorgt-fuer-50-Babys.html

Noble, S. (2018). Algorithms of oppression :data discrimination in the age of Google (1st ed.). New York: New York University Press

Pasquale, F. (2015). The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and

Information. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.

Why Smartly.io. Retrieved 18 February 2021, from https://www.smartly.io/why-smartly XING. (2020). NWXnow HR-Special – Panel: New Work leben, New Work messen und New Work

(12)

9 Appendix

Note: The public version in the repository was shortened due to sensible data

which I am not allowed to share.

(13)

Appendix B: Design Performance Comparison

Design done by the design department in a more editorial style.

Performance overall: okay-ish

Design done by myself.

Performance overall: okay-ish (but significantly better than the prettier design done by the design

(14)

Appendix E: Mid-internship reflective notes 29.11.2020

I am doing my internship at ABOUT YOU during the most interesting time of the year. Q4 is busy and important for the retail sector due to various sales, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and Christmas shopping. I am partly integrated into the sales processes. However, for Black Friday for example, I could have been integrated more. It was not possible, unfortunately, since the Black Friday tasks were difficult to pass on to others due to the urgency and importance of tasks. Black Friday 2020 was the most profitable day in ABOUT YOU history and it was super interesting to see how the marketing plans were build up and executed in the prior weeks. I had a feedback conversation with my supervisor Evelyn on the 25th, which was very positive overall. I actively asked for feedback on my performance so far and got the response that getting no feedback is usually positive at ABOUT YOU. Additionally, Evelyn said that she heard good things about me interning so far, that I am hungry for tasks and driven. However, she cannot assess me that well herself because we did not have that many touchpoints in projects.

Also, I intend to start writing applications for after my internship now. The internship at ABOUT YOU definitely helped me in that it gives me insights into different departments of online

marketing and it also exposes me to a new working environment. So far, I worked interned at a large corporate (Volkswagen) and a small start-up. ABOUT YOU fits somewhere in-between because it has the mentality and speed of a start-up while being a larger company with 1000+ employees already.

16.12.2020

As if there was a sudden switch, I cannot complain about not enough tasks anymore. I took over a bigger project of someone who left and it is really interesting and challenging. I now manage the campaigns for ABOUT YOU’s capsule collections, which are the exclusive collections of ABOUT YOU together with influencers, bloggers and musicians. They each have mid to high 5-digit budgets and partly C-level executives are involved. It is interesting to see how the

communication flows from the very top of the company down to me actually executing it on the behalf of top-level management. At the same time, I feel kind of trusted with this task.

Also, I took over the project of automated IG Story ads which can become quite important. It feels important to “own” this project and I am also a little bit intimidated.

10.1.2021

The Christmas Holiday was super nice because I was able to recharge my batteries. I was looking forward to the tasks that piled up after New Year’s and until now my tasks kept me really busy,

(15)

so that the first week in 2021 passed by super quickly. A phenomenon occurred to me that is apparent in online marketing: very small details and clicks can have really big impacts. I changed optimization goals one day and because I changed them, the ads had to go through the Facebook review again. This led some of our ads to be offline for a few hours which quickly can add up to not spending a few thousand Euros.

30.01.2021

I feel how the end of my internship is approaching and its becoming more difficult to keep motivation upwards. I feel like I always had this feeling towards the end of jobs. The work is more familiar and for new projects one always has to think about the remaining time I have. Still, I feel like I have a few bigger projects to wrap up now.

At the beginning of the year, Johanna joined the team. She is also an intern and will be working at AY for 6 months. I started handling tasks and projects over to her that she will take over once I am gone.

Also, I realized yesterday that I still have 6 vacation days leftover. Since Christmas was perfectly placed regarding calendar days this year, I only had to take 3 days off. I decided to shorten my internship by placing the leftover vacation days to the end of my internship. This also gives me time to finish my internship report quickly. If I do not have a job by 1st of March, this will backfire because than I have at least a month of no work. If I get a job by 1st of March, this will be totally fine because than I have a few days off in-between which will be refreshing.

I have to say, the internship at AY was the best I could have gone for. I learned so much in so little time because I was really challenged and ‘thrown into cold water’. I had two job interviews now and proceeded into the second round of interviewing both times. A lot of this success I attribute to the internship at AY. I do not know how I would have performed without this internship, but certainly worse.

Placement Report: ABOUT YOU GmbH