Lisa Utzschneider, CEO of Integral Ad Science, on Leading with a Global Mindset in a Connected Digital World
Lisa Utzschneider spoke with Business Today at the 45th International Conference, where she lead an executive seminar for conference attendees.
Lisa Utzschneider is the chief executive officer of Integral Ad Science and a member of the company’s board of directors. IAS is a global technology company that offers data and solutions to establish a safer, more effective advertising ecosystem. Lisa joined IAS as CEO in January 2019, bringing more than 20 years of digital advertising expertise and tech-industry leadership experience to the role.
Before entering the traditional workforce, Lisa Utzschneider started her life after college in the Peace Corps teaching English in Bulgaria after the Berlin Wall fell. It’s unsurprising, then, that she’s constantly led every role she has had with an eye toward global impact. Now CEO of Integral Ad Science, Lisa oversees a technology company focused on digital advertising, which has become ever more pertinent in an increasingly connected online world.
Utzschneider’s global mindset stems from a history of working around the world and engaging with those of diverse backgrounds. Utzschneider studied public policy at New York University and then worked at the International Refugee Committee (IRC), where she visited Eastern European refugee camps and wrote grants for the organization.
In the early years of the Internet, Utzschneider decided to pursue a career change and enter sales. She would spend the next two decades leading digital advertising at some of the most prominent companies in Big Tech, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo! though she herself was based in New York. The global perspective she had gained from the Peace Corps and IRC, along with her remote work from one coast to the other, assisted her understanding of how to scale businesses across multiple markets. More importantly though, Utzschneider says, “Don’t just focus on what employees or customers are telling you in your New York radius, but listen to feedback from everywhere.”
These experiences, including her roles as Chief Revenue Officer at Yahoo! and Head of Global Sales at Amazon, prepared Lisa for her current role as the CEO of Integral Ad Science (IAS). Digital advertising targets a variety of audiences, and much of the work requires capitalizing on early identification of global trends. One innovation that Lisa pointed out was the development of apps like Tik Tok, which has virally captured a youth audience spanning the globe. Tik Tok’s growth challenges industry incumbents such as Facebook and Twitter. Consumers around the world have also become better educated. IAS doesn’t gather consumer data in order to to protect their users’ privacy and adapts to every nation’s privacy policy approach (i.e. GDPR regulation in the European Union). At the same time, as our world has grown closer in this digital age, it has become increasingly easy for fake news and terrorism content to spread through the Internet. Regarding this challenge, IAS more carefully considers brand safety by evaluating their use of content verification and ad placement.
As the Internet has brought information to more and more individuals’ fingertips, it has created innumerable links between those on opposite ends of the world. Given that reality, Utzschneider says that it’s necessary to maintain a global mindset in order to successfully target these consumers through digital advertising.
“Don’t just focus on what employees or customers are telling you in your New York radius, but listen to feedback from everywhere.”