Julia Klein
Director of performance marketing
Compare the Market
Julia Klein joined Compare the Market a year ago, following growth marketing roles at the likes of Canva and Amazon, and has just been promoted to director of performance marketing.
She is described by her nominator as building a “motivated, effective and high-performing team” and making a huge impact in her first year at the business by revamping its approach to performance marketing.
Internally, she has leveraged her network to arrange upskilling courses for Compare the Market’s team. However, her influence doesn’t just sit within the business, with Klein acting as a guest marketing lecturer at Aberdeen University.
Reflecting on marketing today, she says there is “more disruption, more ambiguity and much less time to make decisions”. With the impact of AI and the media mix evolving, she notes it means marketing leaders are “increasingly required to make fast, informed choices with incomplete, imperfect information”.
“Earlier in my career, testing and learning felt more controlled and sequential, whereas today, it’s all about agility and adaptability,” she says.
“I came from a background in accounting, finance and law, and found a discipline that blends creativity, analytics, psychology and strategy. There truly is a place for everyone.”
Considering the biggest opportunity for marketers to embrace, she says that while it may feel like a boiler plate answer, “AI remains the single biggest opportunity”. Under her leadership, her team is embedding AI across the whole performance marketing process to “drive smarter bidding, sharper insights and more efficient creative production”.
Drawing on her experience using AI at other tech businesses, she says the “only way to truly unlock AI’s potential is to use it daily and learn from it, while also understanding how the general public interacts with it.”
“To market effectively in an AI-driven world, we need to not only understand what these tools can do for us as professionals but also how consumers themselves are adapting to and adopting AI. The key is balance,” she says.
The biggest challenge for marketers today is standing out, says Klein. She reflects on her upbringing in rural Germany, where the difference in brands’ marketing budgets was obvious based on “print quality, ad frequency and production polish”.
“When I visit my hometown nowadays, that clear divide no longer exists – and I’ve seen the same in the UK. Today, a small business can create the same level of visual impact as a global brand, thanks to the accessibility of AI and design platforms,” she explains.
The levelled playing field means differentiation is “harder than ever”.
Looking ahead at how the job of marketing may change in the next decade, she believes strategic thinking will become “essential” much earlier in marketers’ careers as automation takes on more tactical tasks.
For future marketers, she says it’s one of the only careers with a “place and niche” for every type of thinker. “I came from a background in accounting, finance and law, and found a discipline that blends creativity, analytics, psychology and strategy. There truly is a place for everyone.”
