Digital Maturity as a North Star: How DFDS is Unifying Its Marketing and Tech Teams and Stack
Preview of Annika Hällsten’s talk at Martech Masterminds May 2025
In a planning call for the upcoming Martech Masterminds event, I had the pleasure of speaking with Annika Hallsten, Global Digital Media Manager at DFDS. What began as a routine speaker briefing quickly turned into an insightful conversation about the challenges,and victories, of orchestrating Martech across silos, regions, and departments.
A Performance Marketer Turned Martech Strategist
Annika’s story is a compelling one. With more than a decade of experience in digital and performance marketing, including roles at Radisson Hotel Group, Klikki (now Nordic Morning), and MEC Finland, she brings both strategic clarity and commercial depth to her work. At DFDS, she has been instrumental in helping transform a highly fragmented marketing setup into a more unified, data informed, and purpose-driven operation.
Finding the North Star: Digital Maturity
What guided this transformation? A digital maturity programme. As Annika explained, DFDS adopted a digital maturity framework as its “North Star,” not only to benchmark progress but to align teams, technologies, and goals across a sprawling organization. “Everyone used to want their own Martech tool or direction,” she told me. “But we had to align and put things together to succeed.”
Orchestration Beyond the Stack
With a large marketing team across markets, DFDS’s orchestration challenge wasn’t just technical—it was human. Orchestration, in this context, meant aligning on the future vision, rewiring how teams think, plan, and share ownership.
Measuring Maturity and Aligning on Goals
Digital maturity wasn’t just a vague ambition—it was scored and measured across various areas such as Martech, content, automation. The resulting scores didn’t just guide where to improve—they sparked conversations and paved the way for the departments on what good looks like.
A Journey from Channels to Culture
Annika’s journey started in performance marketing, optimizing media buys, search, paid social and establishing the foundation of programmatic display and video. But scaling performance across the touchpoints and teams forced her to look beyond tactics. Orchestration became less about channels and more about connecting people, channels and data across the customer journey.
Culture First: The Human Element of Martech
Her perspective is refreshingly honest: this isn’t a story of overnight success or tech-first transformation. It’s a ‘people-first journey’ about building orchestration not just into the data and tools, but into the culture. “We needed to stop playing solo and start playing as one orchestra.”
Orchestration changed more than platforms, fit reshaped culture. “Our digital maturity programme made us speak the same language,” Annika shared. Cross-team planning became more fluid. Martech decisions started factoring in content strategy and vice versa. And data democratization shifted the way teams asked questions—and answered them.
Looking Ahead to Martech Masterminds
Annika’s upcoming talk at Martech Masterminds will delve into this journey—how DFDS operationalized a digital maturity model, how her performance marketing roots shaped her cross-functional leadership style, and why Martech only works when the human side is addressed first. It’s a story that will resonate with any brand striving to get more value from their stack by aligning people, process, and platforms.
For those who think Martech success is all about implementation, Annika reminds us it’s equally about integration—and that includes the humans behind the dashboards.
Annika Hällsten
Annika Hallsten is the Global Digital Media Manager at DFDS, where she leads/orchestrates offline and digital media performance channels across the customer journey. With a background spanning Radisson Hotel Group and Klikki/Nordic Morning, Annika brings deep expertise in digital transformation, omnichannel media, and team alignment.
