I'm a bit of an anomaly in the Digital Advertising industry in that I've known since high school that I was going to work in advertising.  I've met countless history and English majors that have excelled in this industry but I decided at a young age that I wanted to work in advertising.  The fact that advertising revenues fund many of my interests such as sports, music, internet, and television is the thought process that led me down this path.  

I was born in Orange County, CA and moved with my family to Michigan when I was a small child.  In 2001, I graduated high school and moved to Kalamazoo, MI to attend Western Michigan University.  During my time at WMU, I took a couple semesters off to work and save money for a tuition bill that needed to be paid before I could continue my education.  This time also allowed me to mature and gain valuable work experience that would help me quickly land a full-time position in the depressed job economy in Michigan upon completion of my degree.

Aside from working in a few bars and coffee shops, my employment during college included; owning/operating an exterior painting company where I sold and executed exterior paint jobs while hiring and managing two full-time crews, media and public relations for a minor league baseball team, and served the AmeriCorps Main Street USA program building awareness and adoption of the Edison business district which is a main arterial road into downtown Kalamazoo.

I graduated in 2006 with a BBA majoring in Advertising and Promotion with a General Business minor. Immediately following graduation, I joined a small display ad network in Grand Rapids, MI called Adtegrity.com as a Publisher Relations Manager.  At the time, Adtegrity.com was plugged into the Right Media Exchange/Direct Media Exchange so I was fortunate to be exposed to the early exchange ecosystem. While I saw the benefits of RTB in action, I also saw the potential threats to automated digital advertising. Back then, fraud was showing up in the form of malware in creatives and in many cases, the scammers would swap out creative during the weekend when less eyes would be monitoring activity.  Exposure to the seedy side of digital advertising years ago has turned into a full fledged passion to fight fraud and maintain the legitimacy of our industry. 

In early 2008, I was recruited to become a media buyer for the DRIVEpm ad network which was part of aQuantive.  I moved to Seattle and joined the team after the Microsoft acquisition of aQuantive but before the sale became official.  My first several months on the job was dedicated to working with internal legal and finance teams to transition publisher accounts from DRIVEpm to Microsoft Media Network.  Throughout my time at Microsoft I was promoted from media buyer to senior media buyer to associated media planner to media planner.  The team I work with including my manager and two other planners have been together since I started.  While the team has stayed the same, our roles and charter have evolved over time. 

I've gone from managing dozens of individual publishers to focus on more strategic partnerships such as SSP's and bizdev partnerships.  I've also become a subject matter expert on our opt-out capabilities, reporting, payouts, and bot fraud threats.

To be continued...