Limitless Leaders: Devin Fallon, Head of Media Insights, VIZIO

Devin Fallon is the Head of Media Insights and Analytics at VIZIO. Watch this video to find out more about his work, the VIZIO “A-Team”, and how he is a Limitless Leader. 

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Devin Fallon. I lead the VIZIO Analytics team for VIZIO Ads. What that is, essentially, is a consultative group that assists our sales and client services teams, working hand-in-hand with our clients on strategy, targeting, and measurement.

I help advertisers understand whether the commercials that they show to VIZIO consumers are working, why they're working, why they might not be working, and how we can make them work better in the future.

What’s an example of helping customers push past limits?

I think the one that always gets the best reaction is when we get into the dichotomy of the audience that a brand is reaching on linear TV, and who we can reach on our platform and how we can reach them. It's always this big a-ha moment. With some clients, it's a moment of disbelief. With some, it's a moment of excitement when we show them what their actual reach is from their linear, by where in some cases they're spending millions, tens of millions of dollars on linear, and they're only reaching a small fragment of our active audience.

Once we get them over that initial shock and show them the backing data behind it, we can then follow that up with a compelling story of how we can complement that reach that they are getting on linear with the huge audience, that they're missing the opportunity costs. Sometimes we call that the FOMO slide, right, it’s “here's what you could be getting if you engage with VIZIO ads," and not just from a spray-and-pray perspective, but from a truly targeted, granular approach. Who are the audience members that you care most about? Now let's focus in on them, and it's still incremental to who you're reaching on linear.

VIZIO Analytics, why are you called the “A-Team?”

So for one thing, Media Insights and Analytics is a big mouthful. So that's the name, you know, in the signature line, if we still had business cards, that would be the team name on the business cards. But it's a lot. So “A-Team” is a nice abbreviation. The reference is becoming increasingly dated, but those of us of a certain age fondly remember the old A-Team TV show. And there is an ethos there in terms of that team being a team of specialists that could really slot into any role that was needed.

And that is part of the operating ethos of the “A-Team” — there's no job too big, there's no job too small. We place a high emphasis on flexibility and adaptability mixed with optimism, to really try to meet the audience where they are and meet our clients where they want to be, with the advertising that we can do.

Where in the sales cycle does VIZIO Analytics get involved with customers?

We find it advantageous to incorporate the analytics team as early as possible in the process because we can hear directly from clients what their challenges are, and what's keeping them up at night. And we can provide recommendations in concert with our sales team and our client services team for tactics that can help address those issues, and measurement opportunities to help define success for them, as well as drive key learnings for future initiatives.

How are you a limitless leader at VIZIO?

My team is often on the front line of that gray area of what we can do, what we can’t do, and what makes sense from a business and strategic perspective. So I think it's an integral part of our team's DNA, that I think goes well for other teams and other organizations as well, to be open to possibilities, to approach any conversation with a degree of intellectual curiosity.

How would we accomplish what the client is asking us to do with our current data sets and tools and skill sets? If we can't do it today, what would we need to do it tomorrow? And are there ways that we can empower ourselves to do those things?

And that's, you know, going back to the examples of learning a new tool, learning a new coding language, leveraging the experience that we have within the organization from other teams that might not have the same background of client analytics that we do, but are whip-smart at data science or engineering, and it's been really rewarding working here, having that free rein to collaborate across organizational boundaries to go to our data science lead and say, “here's what I'm trying to do. Here's why it's valuable. Now, can you help me understand what the data would tell us?”

That really underpins all of my relationships with my team members – it is intellectual curiosity, optimism, and balancing what we can do today with what we can do tomorrow, given all the resources we have available to us.