Guest · B2B demand and pipeline
Dragos Marica
Associate Director, Performance Marketing, Directive
Performance marketer who believes efficiency is what you earn when marketing stops living in its own silo. Seven years of recorded agency experience, now at the world’s largest independent B2B specialist.
About
Dragos Marica is Associate Director of Performance Marketing at Directive, the B2B growth agency. His career maps a decade of how paid media has matured: from selling local businesses on Facebook ads in Craiova to leading strategy for Google Consumer Apps across EMEA, and now to a B2B remit where every pound of media spend has to show up in pipeline, revenue and CAC.
Dragos began as a freelance social media manager in 2017, knocking on doors in his home city of Craiova, Romania, offering to post on Facebook for local businesses. At Marica Advertising he built social strategies and ad campaigns for B2B and B2C clients, then moved to London in 2018 for his first agency role at Maple Forest, managing paid social for international clients across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and LinkedIn.
In 2019 he joined MG OMD as a Senior Biddable Executive on UK Government accounts: Business, Education and Defence. Managing budgets of half a million pounds across Google, Bing, Adobe, SA360, Meta, Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest and LinkedIn, he ran setup, optimisation, reporting and post-campaign analysis, and trained the Biddable Executives and Assistants beneath him. A year at Publicis Groupe as a Biddable Account Manager followed, leading day-to-day activity for Bel Group, Travelodge, Royal London, Hammerson and Police Mutual.
EssenceMediacomX promoted him to Account Director in 2022. He led the Paid Media team for Google Consumer Apps across EMEA, built onboarding roadmaps and audit frameworks that rolled out globally, and contributed to Google’s global activation testing strategy across all pods. Since May 2023 he has been at Directive, promoted to Associate Director in June 2024, bringing the same performance discipline to B2B clients where the scoreboard is LTV, CAC and pipeline rather than clicks and leads.
Career9 years
- 2024 to now Directive Associate Director, Performance Marketing
- 2023 to 2024 Directive Associate Director, Paid Media
- 2022 to 2023 EssenceMediacomX Account Director
- 2021 to 2022 Publicis Groupe Biddable Account Manager
Show earlier roles: MG OMD, Maple Forest, Marica Advertising
- 2019 to 2021 MG OMD Senior Biddable Executive
- 2018 to 2019 Maple Forest Social Media Executive
- 2017 to 2018 Marica Advertising Social Media Manager
How Dragos thinks3 convictions
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Efficiency is a consequence of integration.
Dragos argues that when a marketing department is set a narrow KPI (leads, clicks, cost-per-whatever) it will hit that number and ignore everything further down the funnel. Qualified leads, opportunities, revenue, retention: none of it gets optimised unless marketing, sales, product and finance are wired together. When they are, LTV and CAC run through the whole system, and efficiency stops being a negotiated target and starts being a natural consequence of the operating model.
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AI discoverability is SEO done a bit better.
The companies generating real demand through ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude are not doing anything mystical. They are running the fundamentals of SEO, with content designed to be parsed, aggregated and reproduced by a language model rather than clicked on. Citation sources have moved: Reddit and LinkedIn are now optimised surfaces that feed the LLMs, and old content that still ranks has to be refreshed or it starts to work against the brand.
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Break things. Test. Keep what works.
His advice to younger marketers is not to learn the old ways of working. Current agency playbooks are optimising for a world that is already fading. The job of a performance marketer entering the industry in 2026 is to build the revenue engine of the future by breaking the current one, testing what replaces it, and scaling what holds up. What worked in paid media last year will not work next year. It never has. Curiosity beats credentialism.
