Speaker’s Bios: Best Practices for Proving Advertising ROI Using Experimental Design

JANUARY 24 @ 1:00 PM – 5:30 PM • NEW YORK

Dane Aronsen,
Marketing Science,
Booking.com
I work on experimental design and measurement at booking.com.  As our marketing grows, either by scaling up or by exploring new channels, we need to be sure that we have the ability to accurately measure the incremental impact of our investments. Frequently we find that the readily available measurement solutions don’t meet our needs, so my challenge is to balance what is technically possible and what is analytically accurate to create bespoke measurement solutions. I also work with our AdOps team to ensure our experimental designs are optimized to learn as much as we can from our measurement setup. I’ve been in this role for 2 years, before which I was studying toward my PhD in behavioural neuroscience.

Rick Bruner, CEO/Co-founder of Central Control and US Vice Chair of I-COM, is an expert in the field of measuring the impact of advertising. He has managed product/research teams at DoubleClick, Google, Marketing Evolution and Viant. He is the founder and moderator of the influential Research Wonks forum for marketing scientists. A former Ad Age reporter and book author (“Net Results: Web Marketing that Works,” and “Net Results.2: Best Practices for Web Marketing”), he served as Co-Chair of the IAB Research Committee and shared in winning a David Ogilvy from the Advertising Research Foundation, among other accomplishments. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.

Markus Dmytrzak
Director, Marketing Analytics & Decision Sciences
Sam’s Club

As Director Decision Sciences for Sam’s Club, Markus and his team are responsible for delivering marketing measurement, targeting design and execution, model development, automation and visualization. Markus started his career at PepsiCo Germany in brand management and worked as an Analytics consultant for retailers in the United States (Costco, Meijer, Giant Eagle) and in Japan (Aeon). He got his MBA from the University Bremen in Germany and completed a Data Mining Certificate program at the University of California San Diego focusing on Predictive Analytics.

Paul Donato
CRO
ARF
Paul Donato joined the ARF as Chief Research Officer in October 2017. Paul is a highly-regarded leader in media and advertising research with more than two decades of industry experience. Earlier in his career he co-founded WPP’s Media Research Business Unit, served as CEO of Kantar Media, and Technical Director of IBOPE Latin America. He was the EVP and CRO for The Nielsen Company for more than a decade, overseeing Nielsen retail, consumer, mobile, and media measurement methodologies. Upon leaving Nielsen, Paul founded Jatopond, a media and market research firm. He also has led business units at Simmons, and at Audits and Surveys Worldwide. He currently sits on the Future State Committee of the National Air and Space Museum. In addition to leading the research team, Paul will also play an active role in overall ARF leadership, helping to guide our future direction.

Steve Geinitz
Quantitative Research Manager
Facebook
Steve Geinitz is a PhD Statistician who has spent much of his career thus far understanding how to effectively run and measure ad campaigns. He started from the advertisers point of view while at eBay on a Marketing Analytics team. He then went over to publisher side, to Facebook, where he worked on developing methods and tools to measure the effectiveness of advertising – both on and off Facebook.  He’s recently shifted roles at FB, now on an Ads Research team, where his aim to help advertisers of all types to better plan, run, and measure their marketing campaigns.

Jon Gibs
Chief Data Officer
Garter/L2

Bill Harvey
Chairman, RMT
For over 35 years, Bill Harvey has been leading the way in media research with special emphasis on the New Media. Bill is known to many as a media futurist. After a history of innovation, Bill co-founded TRA, the first company to show that naturally occurring purchase and media data can be used to create the first actionable process for true ROI measurement and optimization. In 2012, TiVo acquired TRA, now called TiVo Research. Today, beyond consulting for many companies, Bill has co-founded Research Measurement Technologies (RMT), which is developing a programmatic ROI optimizer that will benefit advertisers and content creators.

Margaret Hung
Head of Activation
Integral Ad Science
Margaret Hung oversees product management for IAS’ Activation business, developing solutions that quantify the causal impact of viewable, fraud-free and brand safe ads on marketing outcomes. Margaret joined IAS from IBM Watson Advertising, where she led The Weather Company’s Data Products, Research and Measurement teams.  She has extensive international experience consulting leading Advertisers on brand / product strategy and digital marketing tactics through data-driven insights. Margaret previously worked at AOL, WPP/Kantar, Ipsos and The Gallup Organization. She has a MBA in Marketing and International Business from Columbia University.

Garrett Johnson
Assistant Professor
Boston University
Prof. Johnson’s research on Internet Marketing examines online display advertising: the medium’s effectiveness and privacy issues. His ad effectiveness research uses large-scale experiments to measure how and how much ads work. His privacy research quantifies the value of online behavioral targeting to industry and considers the impact of policy & self-regulatory approaches. Prof. Johnson works with Internet companies—including Google and Yahoo!—to answer these questions with Internet-scale data. For his work, Prof. Johnson has been awarded the Paul Green Award and has been a finalist for both the John D.C. Little Award and the Gary Lilien Marketing Science Practice Prize.

Randall Lewis
Director of Economics
Netflix
Randall Lewis is the Director of Economics on the Science & Algorithms team at Netflix. He designs and builds causal measurement and prediction systems to guide business decision-making. He has developed advanced techniques to measure the causal impact of advertising, create advanced AB-testing platform analytics, and measure the value of entertainment media in order to help both humans and automated decision systems make better choices. Before joining Netflix he worked at Google and Yahoo. Randall attended MIT as a Presidential Fellow where he earned his PhD in economics.

Larissa Licha
Product Lead
AdRoll Group
Larissa is the Product Lead of Measurement at AdRoll Group where she oversees all aspects of measurement. Her ultimate goal: democratized advanced measurement in an actionable and transparent manner across AdRoll Group’s product suite. Her direction influences the products and features across the product and engineering organization working to push the measurement industry forward.

Before moving into Product Management, Larissa worked across Sales, Account Management and Operations always challenging the actual impact of ads on the customer’s bottom line. Running hundreds of incrementality tests across AdRolls’ customers and building an industry-leading framework gave her deep knowledge and understanding of what drives key outcomes for the end customer.

Ying Liu
Quantitative Analyst
Google
Ying Liu has been a quantitative analyst at Google since 2013. He got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in engineering from Tsinghua University in 2007 and 2009 respectively, and his PhD degree in statistics from Columbia University in 2013. His work at Google involves estimating ad effectiveness (e.g. Brand Lift) using randomized experiments and ghost ads.

Jim Nail
Principal Analyst, B2C Marketing
Forrester Research
Jim Nail is a principal analyst at Forrester Research serving B2C marketers. He leads Forrester’s coverage of the data-driven buying of television and video ads, marketing measurement platforms and services, new marketing frameworks for the “post digital” age, and the ascendance of consumers looking for brands that align to their social, political, and environmental values.

Amy Nodalo
Director, Partner Analytics
Viant

Amy is an experienced researcher and analyst who, for more than a decade, has focused on the digital advertising industry. She has worked with global brands and Fortune 500 companies to customize research and understand advertising impact as the discipline and industry has evolved. She enjoys helping companies try to solve for the big challenges in the industry; incrementality and attribution.

Laura Oliveria
Marketing Analyst
Booking.com
I’ve joined Booking.com one and a half years ago when I was finishing my MSc.  During my time here, I’ve worked in several analytical projects within the Marketing department, all aimed towards finding, improving and scaling solutions for measuring campaigns incrementally. I’m mostly involved in the outline of strategies for data collection, munging and storage, definition of experimental setups, measurement protocols and exploration of possible optimization paths.

David Reiley
Principal Scientist
Pandora
I am passionate about the use of field experiments in economics and the social sciences, and I have spent my career promoting their use. Before my dissertation at MIT in 1996, field experiments were quite rare in economics. Now there are dozens of people regularly performing field experiments to learn about economic and social behavior. Most people still consider economics to be an observational rather than an experimental science, but that has been changing significantly.

I have developed a course on field experiments for the master’s program in data science at the UC Berkeley School of Information, with the course offered for the first time in Fall 2014.

I am an economist in the advertising-science group at Pandora and an Adjunct Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. I previously spent more than seven years at Google and Yahoo! Research, primarily working on experiments to measure the effects of online advertising. I started my career as an economics professor at Vanderbilt University and at the University of Arizona.

Anvesh Sati
Director, Data Science
Wayfair
Anvesh is the Director of Data Sciences at Wayfair. He leads up the team that uses machine-learning to better improve business operations and improve customer experience across Marketing, Sales and Service functions of the organization. Anvesh enjoys breaking down complex business problems and solving them using data and machine learning techniques. Prior to Wayfair, Anvesh worked for Staples eCommerce in various capacities including as a Data Scientist. He has a background in business and entrepreneurship, having started and run two companies prior to his Finance & Entrepreneurship MBA. Outside of work, Anvesh enjoys spending time with his wife and three-year old daughter, but also can spot him catching up on business, tech & political news, and exploring new options trading strategies he likes to try out.

Kiril Tsemekhman
VP of Data Science & Engineering
BounceX 
Kiril entered the world of digital marketing in 2006 making a leap from a research and teaching work in theoretical physics at the University of Washington. Kiril went through a few early startups in Silicon Valley where he led what later became known as Data Science teams and was also a CTO. He made a move to New York to join Integral Ad Science where he led Data Science team from its inception in mid 2012 till the end of 2017 when the team was 40 people strong and well-known in the industry also for its work on causality and lift measurement as well as for winning I-COM Data Science Hackathon in 2016 by a landslide. Kiril now leads data science and engineering at marketing technology startup BounceX.

Vadim Tsemekhman
Director of Product Management
Waltmart Labs
After getting his PhD in theoretical physics and doing research work at UW, for over a decade Vadim was holding product leadership roles in a variety of ad tech start-up companies, including Red Aril and Integral Ad Science. Before coming to Walmart, he was a co-founder and CEO of CEO of OpenDSP, a high-scale marketing technology and measurement platform allowing advertisers to maximize their incremental revenue and sales through discovery and creation of new customers. At , Vadim led the development of WMX 2.0, a completely redesigned Walmart’s advertising platform utilizing immense amount and depth of Walmart’s retail data, allowing brands to target Walmart customers across devices and platforms using machine learning and to measure the true outcome of the brand campaigns. Currently, Vadim is a Director of Product on Walmart.com marketing team responsible for data solutions, identity resolution, measurement and experimentation.