Salutations! I always enjoy the opportunity to put a spotlight on our wonderful employees. Not only does it give me an opportunity to get to know my colleagues better, it allows me to share their qualities and talents with all of you! Last quarter I interviewed Account Executive Damon O’Brien and unearthed a handful of his many talents including painting, descending mountains purposefully (or snowboarding), and golfing. Now with promotions and performance discussions just around the corner (just kidding of course), I decided to interview my fearless leader, Director of Marketing, Ariella Robison. I have been very fortunate to work for and alongside such a passionate marketeer, and it is my distinct pleasure to share more about Ariella.
One thing that stuck out during our interview, and also rings true in her marketing strategy is Ariella’s passion for storytelling. She has a zest for consuming books, movies, and stories from filmmakers and authors like Mike Leigh, Lynn Shelton, Martin Amis, Wes Anderson, and Julian Barnes. In fact, in her college career, she dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, but decided to pursue a degree in English.
Her educational background introduced her to a variety of genres and styles, but she fell in love with the intersection of literature and film as well as poetry. When it comes to poetry, Ariella enjoys learning how a poet’s life informed their work. She tends to agree with the old adage by author Mark Twain “write what you know”, and she hopes to one day apply this methodology to her very own screenplay or documentary. From her childhood on a San Juan Island hippie sheep farm to her active participation in the 90’s Seattle grunge music scene, it could be the sleeper hit of 2023. I’m personally looking forward to seeing it.
With Ariella’s admiration of language and imagery, it’s no surprise that she found herself gravitating towards a career in marketing. Her marketing career began with a job in technical publication (known today as documentation). Here she learned about kerning and pagination as well as structured markup languages and became familiar with HTML and information architecture. This led to a role as a website producer and content marketer. She enjoyed not only the process of building websites, but thinking about ways to implement marketing strategies to drive traffic to the sites she built. Her career path led to several digital marketing roles and ultimately to a more strategic role here at DomainTools as the Director of Marketing.
Ariella once described the process of coding a website as similar to the process of developing a photograph. When developing a photograph, you dip a blank piece of paper that has been exposed to light into development fluid. The chemicals surrounding the photo paper take a clean slate and turn it into an image anyone can interact with. When developing a web page, you are leveraging a language like HTML to render what appears to be a mishmash of tags and rendering an interactive experience in a browser. This practice technique itself well to our approach here at DomainTools. We aim to tell a story about why and for whom DomainTools exists, communicate how much we appreciate infosecurity professionals, and stay true to our goal of helping to map attacker infrastructure for a stronger network defense.
Between this employee spotlight interview and working across from Ariella for the past two and a half years, it is clear to me how hard working and innately curious she is. She is always pushing her team and herself to learn to take our storytelling and marketing to the next level. We are very lucky to have her!
