How do you know if a self-service buying model is right for you?
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
AT&T purchased AppNexus on June 25th. Combined with existing publisher relationships this allows AT&T to tie together the demand side and supply side publishers and challenge Google’s dominance of this space. The end-to-end solution is expected to allow AT&T to onboard their data in a powerful fashion with much less risk of leakage. And that’s always a good thing.
A growing number of brand advertisers have set up their own in-house agencies in recent years. Many large brands have claimed substantial cost savings in more effective use of their media dollars, but it is not just media functions that brands have brought in-house. This has led to a critical opportunity for collaboration with other agencies and partners involved in the marketing initiatives.
Facebook is testing a new feature where publishers can monetize their content and presence on the platform. Publishers are invited to make money through advertising on driving subscriptions natively on Facebook. Early tests have shown that people are 17% more likely on average to subscribe to participating publishers.
With the popularity of mobile location targeting, it’s perhaps not a surprise to see that the tactic drives successful results for marketers. A new report from Lawless Research found that of 700 in-house and agency marketers surveyed, 87% reported using location-based targeting with most respondents reporting positive results. As one would expect, ad targeting was the main use of location, but personalization and improved customer experience were close behind.
Digital voice assistants, smart speakers and other connected, voice-first devices are already having a dramatic impact on consumer behavior, and represent the next phase in the evolution of human-machine interaction. As adoption continues to grow, from 91 million this year to nearly 106 million voice assistant users in 2020, the industry will turn its attention toward monetization models.
Nine out of 10 US households had access to a VCR in 2001, fast forward to today and that number has fallen to less than 0.2%. Consumer devices and services introduced within the last decade have gained wide acceptance by consumers: smartphones (89%), personal computers (79%), tablets (63%) and subscription video on-demand (SVOD) 62%. What’s more is others, such as internet-connected devices (36%) and smart TVs (35%) are growing at a significantly fast clip. This increased fragmentation has led to more ways for marketers to reach consumers with video content.
Roku released its Audience Marketplace which is designed to let publishers use it’s first-party data based on how consumers interact with the OTT device. The type of first party data available include what type of content Roku users search for or how much time they spend streaming content.
Five key tactical trends that can fuel your next winning product, service, campaign, experience, platform, business model and more. From consumers expectations of brands to automating the customer journey, these are trends that retailers can put into action, and see some impressive examples.
July's DIAL is also available as a PDF.
75% of agencies are breaking down buying silos. Are you?
Agencies of the future are converging buying functions. Hear how from Forrester & Centro.
The November midterm election may seem far away, but political operatives and marketers have been gearing up for this consequential series of events for some time. Centro tapped these folks for “ears to the ground” takes on digital media for political marketing and elections in 2018.
Respondents showed high optimism for digital budgets to increase. And many have an overwhelmingly high belief that programmatic advertising will be important for their digital campaigns. There was also much enthusiasm about audience data. However, proving ad impact to clients was the biggest concern. Contrast that with the minority of respondents being concerned about, arguably, the biggest general criticisms of 2016 elections – polling data and fake news.
Our survey, conducted in April 2018, spanned progressives, conservatives and non-partisan groups among 50+ agencies, consultants and advocacy organizations who focus on this specialty. Read on to learn about our survey results.

There is lots of optimism that digital budgets will increase, with a modest amount of respondents who “don’t want to guess” and very few who think it will stay the same or decrease. In 2018, it remains to be seen if the majority of dollars will be spent with just a few big platforms or spread across a wider range of sites and channels. A marketing strategy with a more diversified digital mix appears to be supported by responses that follow.

The optimism in the rise of digital budgets looks to be tied closely with the enthusiasm surrounding the role of programmatic advertising. We heard a resounding “Yes” from more than 3/4 of respondents, who say that programmatic advertising will be important to their efforts, and not a single respondent answered “no.”
Programmatic technology fuels many of the key elements in a political campaign’s digital strategy, including voter targeting, hyperlocal (aka geo-fencing), cross-device targeting, and connected TV. And it also brings pricing efficiencies and scale that help maximize campaign dollars, whether through self-serve technology or managed service partners. Ideally, these tactics should fit neatly with other aspects of a campaign such as social and search, so that all function with synchronicity.

When we asked what would be the most promising developments for digital campaigns this year, more than half of respondents selected “Audience data that is higher quality and more readily available.” The second highest response: “Improved technology for connecting offline-online audiences,” also speaks to confidence in data. For political and issue marketers, data is king, despite recent headlines around data usage and privacy concerns. New policies and regulations on the governance of people’s data may pose challenges in certain areas, particularly within social platforms, which might explain why social products ranked last among the choices. Perhaps social is reaching a peak, or maybe it just didn’t make an impression (see what we did there?).

Despite the multitude of headlines on this topic surrounding the 2016 elections, an issue that had the least amount of concern is “polling data accuracy.” Political professionals understand the nuances of how polling works, including its limitations—however, they still have a lot of confidence in its accuracy when applied properly. Interestingly, the choice of “Fake news or fake ads,” another headline-grabbing topic drawing tech giants to Capitol Hill for hearings, does not garner much worry, with less than 1/3 reporting concern.
The issue of most concern (identified by two-thirds of respondents) was “Proving advertising impact to clients,” which is reflective of the age-old desire to undeniably prove advertising works, combined with the underrepresentation of digital audiences in traditional polling, and challenges of measuring impact against objectives like opinion shift. Nearly half of respondents cited “Targeting specific voters effectively and accurately” and “Securing/expanding ad budgets” as the other top concerns. These top three concerns may go hand in hand, as the ability to prove effective and accurate targeting, and its impact, are essential to increase digital spending in this cycle and the next.

Nearly 80% of respondents believe that the current political environment will impact their ability to achieve outcomes, but most aren’t sure if it will have a negative or positive effect. Sometimes, despite the data science, resource and smarts, a campaign may be at the mercy of political climates that can shift gradually or quickly. As we all know, a lot can change between now and November.

The majority of respondents are focused on independent and swing voters more than turning out the base. This is understandable given the continuing surge in registered independents, up nearly 30% over a decade ago. Independents are critical to most campaigns; and while targeting them is easy, messaging that persuades them can be trickier – understanding the key issues and varying partisan leanings among independent voters is crucial. Now apply that with the challenges of understanding local issues, and one can see why this is top of mind for political marketers.
When we asked respondents to pick the best presidential candidate between Oprah, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, or themselves, more than half (36% for Oprah and 17% for The Rock) chose a celebrity over themselves. Though Oprah and The Rock have the immense wealth, visibility and business operations acumen to win a campaign, a little less than half of the respondents still believe they’d be better suited for the position than these celebrities. That’s a lot of self-confidence among marketing professionals.
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Centro offers advertising solutions unifying programmatic and direct media buying, along with workflow automation, cross-channel campaign planning, universal reporting and business intelligence. For nearly a decade, political and advocacy groups from all sides of the spectrum have relied on our technology to boost media, team and business performance by enabling advertisers to plan, buy and analyze real-time bidding (RTB), direct, search and social campaigns in a single platform. To learn more, send us a note at [email protected].
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If you’ve been searching for a comprehensive, intelligible introduction to machine learning that doesn’t read like it was written by Einstein for Einstein, we’re here to help.
Because, come on. There was only one Einstein, and no one has had enough coffee to be on his level right now. Or ever.
Given how saturated our media landscape has become with mentions of machine learning, however, we felt the need to explain the topic as well as clear up some of the misconceptions between it and AI. Moreover, it’s incredibly important if you’re a marketer or business to understand machine learning and what it can do for you.
Ready to learn … about how machines learn? Read on.
Today’s average marketer already has an almost unmanageably full plate. Not only are you supposed to create meaningful campaigns, understand the difference between and select the best search engine marketing strategies, and somehow find time for that cup of coffee – now you’re supposed to understand machine learning too?
Before you give this a pfft and head to the nearest monastery to resign from your worldly way of life, be comforted: Machine learning isn’t actually that complex a topic.
In a nutshell, machine learning is a way of helping machines access information. It’s a complex world, and to give an algorithm all of the information it needs to perform a certain task – for instance, predict consumer behavior and design ad strategies accordingly – would be nigh impossible. The rate at which humans can feed information to our exponentially faster machine friends is laughably slow.
Instead, we feed sample pieces of information to machines. Given enough samples (we’re still talking in the millions), the machine can then learn what it’s “looking for.” Calum McClelland uses the example of a cat: Give a machine enough pictures of cats/not cats and tell them which is which, and it can eventually build a model for recognizing whether or not an image contains a cat.
So when the robots come for us, we can at least rest assured they will not be confused by cats.
Seriously, though, if machine learning is all about an algorithm teaching itself to do stuff, then how is this different from AI?
Good question. No introduction of machine learning would be complete without a quick look at the difference between it and artificial intelligence.
In a nutshell, artificial intelligence is any intelligence that can mimic human behavior to perform a complex task: say, recognizing human speech or faces (or cats). Machine learning leads to artificial intelligence. Machine learning about the difference between cats and non-cats >> the AI ability to recognize cats in the future.
This is one type of AI, recognizing cats, and as such is classified “narrow.” Once AI can do most or all of the things humans can, that’s general AI. We’re not there yet.
Where are we? At the point of a machine learning explosion in business.
Lest you think machine learning is some nebulous future endeavor, know that it’s not. In fact, smart companies are already using it to build ever-more-sophisticated digital marketing campaigns. It is officially changing the customer journey.
So how can you use machine learning for marketing? Well, for instance, you could use machine learning to teach an algorithm which of your products consumers have historically searched for on a given holiday sale weekend, then use the sophisticated algorithm it builds in your campaign strategies going forward.
You can also use it to predict retail cross-selling, financial risk assessment, and medical mortality. The leg up this will give you over your competitors is substantial – although it’s worth noting that more and more businesses are jumping on the machine learning bandwagon, so you won’t stay ahead of the curve for long if you don’t start leveraging it today.
At Centro, we know that keeping up with the trade pubs and latest trends can be tough and time consuming. To make that easier, we’ve compiled all the articles, reports, and other bits of awesomeness you may have missed, but should definitely read. Enjoy our latest list below!
The much anticipated Internet Trends report is now available, clocking in at 294 slides. Check out some of the key takeaways that range from the slowing growth of mobile and internet users due to market saturation to a fascinating look at global adoption and innovation.
Once, Mad Men ruled advertising. They’ve now been eclipsed by Math Men—the engineers and data scientists whose province is machines, algorithms, pureed data, and artificial intelligence – but at what price to consumer’s privacy (and the advertising industry) today and in the future?
Take your ad fraud knowledge to the next level by reading through what still causes it and what you can do to prevent it. Highlights - ad fraud is still at an all-time high and insane profits still come from ad fraud.
Header bidding enabled ad spend continues on the upswing thanks to mobile. Publishers are becoming increasingly more interested and experimenting in this area but some ad networks have been slow to adopt as they are comfortable with the secure spot in the waterfall.
Now that the GDPR has taken effect in Europe, take a look at what is happening within the U.S. Later this year, California will vote on a privacy law that has already eared the ire of Facebook and Google. This act gives people the right to know what information companies collect about them but it does not require companies to get people’s permission to collect that information.
The IAB released a disclosure framework to help buyers evaluate the attributes of audience segment data. If this is adopted, digital media buyers will receive information about sourcing, age and any modeling used for third-party audience segments, data transacted through a co-op or first-party data old directly by a retailor or media company.
As one of the world’s largest data management platforms with approximately 65 data partners and over 4 billion cookies and mobile device IDs to date, Lotame recently rolled out 4 ways to test the quality of PC cookies and similarly also mobile-based data. The 4 components of data collection they are measuring are, ‘labelling’ (knowing where the data is coming from), ‘provenance’ (knowing how the data is collected and how it will be used), ‘accuracy’ (confirming that data points are in fact what they say they are) and ‘efficacy’ (knowing whether the data works).
Amazon is testing a new display ad offering that is threatens companies like Google and Criteo. The tool will let merchants selling on Amazon’s online marketplace purchase spots that will follow shoppers around the web to lure customers back to Amazon to buy. Amazon is an ideal place to advertise since visitors that come to the site are there to shop, rather than to browse like they would on Google or Facebook properties.
While Stories themselves may be ephemeral, the format continues to live on and grow. The 9:16 aspect ratio has given rise to the vertical format for content (and advertising), and does not look to be going away any time soon.
Still not sure on what all the hype around blockchain is for? A recent eMarketer report breaks down why there’s so much interest by digital marketers around blockchain, what it is, and how it’s bring solutions (or a lack thereof) to various aspects of the programmatic advertising space. Topics covered include supply chain transparency, programmatic payments and identity management in a post-GDPR world.
June's DIAL is also available as a PDF.
Prioritizing investment in SEO vs PPC is far from a new challenge for marketers today. Each technique is a valuable way to reach your target audience. However, both require careful attention to optimize so that your marketing can start benefiting from them.
If you want to improve your SEM strategy overall, here’s everything you need to know about prioritizing SEO vs PPC.
PPC has its strengths and so does SEO, but very few businesses can invest 100% in both from day one. Here are a few reasons why your business might want to prioritize SEO first:
You probably already know search engines (especially Google) are one of the most common platforms people use to access information on the internet. If you fail to have a presence in search engine results, you’re missing out on a huge potential channel to reach your target audience.
Sure, using PPC ads is an easy way to jump to the top of search results without investing in all that organic optimization. But consider: between 70% and 80% of users completely ignore paid advertisements when they use a search engine. There’s a growing number of consumers who don’t put any stock in advertisements. SEO is a way to reach them without direct promotion.
Most search engine users today understand that Google considers the authority of domains when delivering search results to users. If a page appears on the first page of search results for a query, users trust the content is truthful and from a source that people have a lot of confidence in.
That’s why getting your pages to rank well in search results is a great way to increase your brand authority. In fact, 50% of visitors are more likely to click a result if the brand appears multiple times in search results.

Unlike PPC advertising, where you have to pay for each click to your content, SEO is completely free. Create quality, relevant content and build up the right ranking signals for it to get search engine visibility without spending a penny.
That said, the efforts you make to optimize for SEO can cost a lot of money in and of itself. The only difference is there’s no minimum threshold to get visibility, like with PPC ads. If you’re working with a lean marketing budget, SEO is the obvious choice to start with because you can limit your financial investment and still start getting results.
PPC ads usually target very specific search queries to drive sales or encourage searchers to click through and become leads. That seriously limits your keyword targeting opportunities compared to SEO.
If you host a blog on your website, you can target long-tail keywords related to questions people ask about your industry. Considering that 50% of search queries are four words or longer, targeting long-tail keywords with SEO gives you more opportunity to appeal to the needs and interests of search engines users.
It takes a lot of time and effort to build up an effective presence in organic search results, but once you do, it’s going to keep on delivering results. Building up your domain authority through link building and other tactics makes it much easier to get new content you publish to rank well quickly. Meanwhile valuable cornerstone content you published years ago can still bring in a steady stream of traffic every month, with no extra effort on your part.
PPC, on the other hand, is like flipping a light switch. You either invest money and get results or you don’t. There’s no opportunity to benefit from long-term residual traffic like with SEO.
SEO might seem like the obvious choice to prioritize in the beginning, but PPC has some unique traits and benefits that make it appealing for certain kinds of businesses and marketing goals. Here are a few factors to consider:
There’s no denying that PPC ads get prime real estate in search results. They appear above the fold, above organic results, and are often the first thing people see after hitting “Enter” on their search query. It’s no wonder that search ads can increase brand awareness by 80%, according to Google.
Even if users don’t click on your PPC ads, your message can impact what they click on in organic results below, or impact their next query search. Getting your brand name and products/services in front of people’s eyes is an important digital marketing strategy for just about every kind of business.
Google AdWords provides you with all the information you need to better optimize your ads through your Quality Score. Quality Score looks at your ad relevance, landing page experience, and click through rate and tells you which ones are negatively impacting your ad quality.
When you use Campaign Experiments, AdWords also makes it easy to A/B test different ad elements (Headline, CTA, extensions, etc.) so you can identify exactly what kind of message resonates with your audience. There’s even options to rotate your ad variations and auto-optimize by displaying the most effective ones.

Optimizing for SEO isn’t as intuitive as PPC ads. People create quality, compelling content all the time but can’t get traffic to it because of domain authority, keyword targeting, or other issues they can’t identify. Optimizing for SEO takes a lot of troubleshooting and long-term analysis to identify the best content elements for your audience.
If your main goal is to get visibility for your products and increase conversions, PPC is an obvious choice. Paid ads get 65% of all clicks for high commercial intent searches.
While people often ignore ads when searching for information online, they have no qualms clicking when they’re making a purchase soon. Targeting search engine users who are already looking to buy is a great way skip organic competition and drive more sales from PPC ads.
While there are certain factors that work together to determine organic pagerank, it’s really more of an art than a science. That’s because Google changes its algorithms 500 times per year, so the strategies you use to optimize today can become irrelevant tomorrow.
With PPC ads, you have much more control over performance. You can choose what keywords you do/don’t want your ads to appear for, how much you want to bid for various keywords, what your ad will look like in search results, etc.
With organic search, you’re often left wondering what factors will help your pages improve and maintain rank long term.
It’s true that optimizing for PPC requires some upfront financial investment. Especially if you work in a competitive industry, getting ad visibility can be quite expensive. But as long as you target relevant keywords with quality content, you should be able to quickly realize a return on your investment. PPC site visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic site visitors.
After you invest in creating and promoting your SEO content, you have to wait for it to start ranking. And even then the revenue you drive from organic traffic might not match what you could achieve with PPC in much less time.
So if you want to maximize your PPC ROAS, you should focus on product promotion to see quick results.
Now that you understand the pros and cons of each strategy, hopefully you have a better idea of which is the most valuable for your business at this point. It mostly boils down to your industry, budget, and goals. For example, if you’re an ecommerce seller looking to drive sales quickly, PPC is the obvious option to start with. If you run a startup with a shoestring budget, SEO is the more economical strategy to start with.
The final verdict for the majority of businesses is that they need a little of both. Despite their differences, SEO and PPC actually complement each other quite well. In fact, marketers that use both SEO and PPC ads average 25% more clicks and 27% more profits than those who use one technique.
That said, very few businesses can hit the ground running with complete SEO and PPC strategies at one time. It’s best to pick and prioritize how you invest in the beginning so you can grow and improve results long-terms.
Here’s how you can make the best of both worlds with SEO vs. PPC:
Assuming you’re not marketing a brand new site, it’s quite likely you have pages that already rank well for certain keywords. Instead of starting from square one with your organic optimization, boost the SEO of pages that are already ranking well. This will free up more of your budget and time for other SEM activities.
To see what keywords you’re already ranking well for, you can use SEMRush. Go to their main page and type in your domain name. Then it will return an overview of your domain analytics.
If you don’t have a SEMRush subscription, don’t worry. You can get 10 free reports by creating a free account. Once you’ve done that, scroll down to where it says “Top organic keywords” and click “View Full Report.”

Then it will return a full report of your pages’ rankings for various keywords in search results:

Sort the data by “position” and you can see what keywords and associated pages already appear on the first page of search results. Look past these to the ones that appear on pages 2-10 of search results for a given keyword.
These are your opportunities. Since the vast majority of people never go past the first page of search results, doing anything you can to bump these listings up to page 1 can have a big impact on visibility and traffic.
Look for ways to improve this content to rank better. For example, you can promote it to get more non-search traffic and high quality backlinks, update the content so it’s fresh and relevant, or make efforts to improve your page speed or other user experience factors.
While the low hanging fruit keywords might not always be the most important ones for your marketing goals, taking the time to optimize for them is one way to get quick results while you work on creating new content around keywords you don’t rank for at all.
Of course you should be targeting your most financially valuable keywords with SEO, but most businesses can’t afford to wait to build organic rank to start driving revenue from their site pages. That’s where PPC can help.
Save your PPC budget to focus on the keywords that are most likely to drive revenue for your business (that you can then reinvest in better SEO and PPC). These are going to be your bottom-of-the-funnel keywords.
Bottom-of-the-funnel queries imply users have already done their research and are ready to convert/buy. Say you just launched an ecommerce store that sells water shoes but don’t yet have the budget to target all the relevant product keywords. You could skip over top-of-the-funnel awareness keywords (e.g. “water socks vs water shoes”) and focus on keywords that imply a readiness to buy (e.g. “buy water shoes” or “water shoes best price”).
Here are a few more examples of keywords/modifiers that imply purchase intent:
That said, which keywords are most financially valuable to your business really depends on your unique products/services. If you’re a consultant trying to sell tickets to your annual workshop, then any keywords related to your workshop would be important to target.
Besides targeting keywords your pages already rank for, you can also target low competition keywords to expand your SEO efforts. Low competition keywords should be easier to rank for, while you target high competition ($$$) keywords with PPC.
Long-tail keywords are usually ultra-relevant search queries that have much lower competition than keywords with high commercial intent. To find some relevant ones for your business, you can use AdWords Keyword Planner to start.
Type in a base keyword related to your niche (e.g. “motorcycle repair”), and Keyword Planner will return a list of relevant related keywords, including helpful information like search volume and competition:

Once you have a list of relevant keywords, you can turn to a long tail keyword research tool to expand on them for SEO. Keywordtool.io, Answer the Public, and Longtail Pro are popular options. Or you could rely on Google’s native Auto Suggest. Type a root keyword you got from Keyword Planner (e.g. “motorcycle frame repair”) into Google then scroll down to related searches to get ideas:

Lastly, you can use your SEO and PPC strategies together to nurture leads at various touchpoints. Say someone finds your blog through a search engine and consumes some top-of-the-funnel content. You can use PPC to remarket to them through the Google Display Network, Facebook, or another third party advertising service.
Use these ads to only target people who have visited your site and/or consumed specific content and it shouldn’t take up too much of your advertising budget. That’s the beauty of PPC — you can control exactly who sees your ads and how much you spend. And since you’re focusing on warm leads with your remarketing ads, there’s more opportunity to drive revenue from your investment.
Don’t have the budget or resources to invest fully in PPC or SEO ? You don't have to pit them against each other. Both strategies have their strengths and weaknesses. Smart marketers use both in unison to fill in the gaps and develop a robust search engine marketing strategy overall.
Rely on your business model and unique goals to inform what to invest in first. Then employ the tips above to get the best of both worlds using PPC and SEO.
In June, we kick off another summer of our internship program. As we get ready to welcome our new “Centerns,” let’s take a look at what our 2017 Centerns have been up to! We talked to a few of them that were hired full-time following their internships.
Matan Horenstein, Digital Media Associate in New York
Matan was a Centern on the Media Services team in the New York office last summer. He was hired on full-time as a Digital Media Associate. Centro’s Giving Tree program was a big reason he knew he wanted to be hired full-time. The New York interns organized a fundraiser for a program that gives school supplies to children in the city, and Matan had an amazing experience working on it. Matan is passionate about the intern program, and advises this year’s Centerns to reach out to people on and off their team—schedule 1:1s, ask questions, and learn from others. The door is open and it’s up to you to take advantage!
Maggie Nemoy, Strategic Insights Associate in Chicago
Maggie interned on the Strategic Insights team in Chicago, learning research tools and putting together research decks. After her internship, she joined the same team full-time. During her internship she learned the “Centro Way,” and it has stuck with her. Everyone at Centro is so friendly and outgoing, they changed her way of communicating and helped her relax. Maggie recommends that Centerns get to know departments outside their own and learn about what everyone at Centro does.
Caroline Nugent, Analytical Operations Associate in Chicago
Caroline joined the Analytical Operations team in Chicago as a Centern last summer. During her internship she learned to use software tools like Datorama, LiveRamp, and DoubleVerify, all of which she uses now in her full-time position. She loved the “snack and learns” where Centerns learned about different departments throughout the company. Plus, the trainings gave her a chance to get to know other interns. Caroline encourages future Centerns to get out there and mingle, don’t be intimidated because everyone here is nice. Soak it all in!
Kelsey Brockett, Digital Media Associate in Dallas
Kelsey interned in Dallas and joined Centro full-time as a Digital Media Associate. As a Centern, she learned all about media strategy and client communication, knowledge she now uses every day. Joining the company as an intern allowed her to find her place in the office and gain confidence to ask lots of questions. Kelsey wants incoming Centerns to know that they shouldn’t be afraid to make mistakes (everyone does!). She also encourages everyone to meet their coworkers, as she has loved getting to know others and their experiences.
This year, we are hiring 17 interns across the U.S. and Canada. For more information on more career opportunities at Centro, visit: https://centro.net/careers.