It was early in my career when I realised adtech, internet marketing as it was called back in 2008, is the perfect industry to combine my creative and analytical skills as well as my international background. There is always so much ongoing innovation when working with different brands and new campaigns. Over time adtech became a very large industry expanding to other forms of media.

In my latest role, as a VP of Product, I work across the R&D and sales team overseeing many aspects of the business. Being connected to the engineering team and customers, helps me with putting realistic product roadmap and with scoping client relevant features for our stack. Audio is only starting its measurable and programmatic journey. The more advanced forms of audio like podcast and advertising on smart speakers are only gaining the momentum among the largest adtech players. It’s very rewarding to be able to design a programmatic exchange for a rapidly innovating branch of adtech and to be able to enable creators of all sizes to earn more money.

Having dyslexia and talking about it openly was one of the greatest career challenges so far. Lucky early on in my career I have learnt to touch type which improved my typing speed. That said, there are so many technologies these days supporting dyslexics that there is very little difference to other colleagues. At the same time I have learned to embrace the positive sides of dyslexia like pattern recognition and system thinking style that is very sought after in product development.

I think there were many good managers on my path with many different styles. Overall it’s the organisation that fosters the culture and roles and responsibilities within. For that reason I always look up at the senior executives for guidance to evaluate the decision and direct managers. One of the skills that I have learned over time is to embrace what many call ‘difficult conversations’, these are great learning experiences and means to move forward in a career and personal development.

Work smart, not hard. And it really made a world of difference. I think in adtech in particular everyone can get overwhelmed with yet another meeting, yet another presentation, yet another software, yet more granular data point etc. It’s important to keep a good balance between innovation rate and time spent on the project. Morse, to seek the return on time and technology spend and be confident about any technical debt in building a product.

In some capacity, we are re-writing the future and decide how technology communicates with consumers. That impacts how we perceive one another and how we utilise media technologies as a society. There also has already been significant progress in digital media since I started my career. These thoughts come to my mind when I think about my first years of my work and what’s else to come in the following decades.

Persistent, curious, patient.

The ad market will be very diverse and fragmented with ads being displayed on the car dashboards, various forms of IoT and a lot more accessible to small and medium size businesses. We are also looking for a lot more improvement around identity protection and management solutions across the globe. Large scale economics with AI being the dominant forms of planning and targeting for a lot of advertisers, with instant reporting dominating the contactless and voice enabled economy aka. Jetson’s economy.