From Sales to SaaS: Diana Lee, CEO of Constellation Agency, Discusses Building and Licensing a Hyper-Local Ad Tool

It’s not every day that a car salesperson becomes a founder and CEO of a SaaS company that is revolutionizing the way companies do localized advertising. But that’s the path that Diana Lee followed, and on this episode of Up Next in Commerce, we went through the whole story… and dug into how her company, Constellation Agency, built a technology that helped marketers stop crying (literally) because it was so hard to create hyper-local advertising. We also dove into how to think about capturing data in a world without cookies, and we discussed why, if you’re going to be in the market for a car in the next year, you definitely need to be ordering one right now. Enjoy this episode!

Main Takeaways:

Scaling Creative and Locality of Ads: In the past, there was no easy way to do advertising at scale in a hyper-local way, which is one of the most effective ways to advertise. Making local ads was a problem that would take a month for advertisers to solve, and now it’s a one-click solution. By investing in this solution, not only was Constellation Agency solving a problem for itself, but stumbling on a solution that everyone in the industry needed and wanted.Life Without Cookies: The downfall of cookies is a worry for many marketers, but there is still a way to capture first-party data that will allow you to succeed. By rethinking the ad unit itself, and building all of the choice and preferences into the ad unit, you can ingest the consumer data you need in a way that you control.Don’t Water it Down: It’s a nice idea to be a one-stop-shop for your customers, but when you do everything, you’re never able to become an expert at anything. Find what you’re great at and focus on that because if you can be the best at one thing, you won’t need to do anything else because customers will flock to you for your expertise.

For an in-depth look at this episode, check out the full transcript below. Quotes have been edited for clarity and length.

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For a full transcript of this interview, click here.