How 5 Industry Experts Are Solving the Data Puzzle in 2024

What do you get when you bring an incredible panel of adtech and media leaders together in one room? A night of insightful discussions about how data is shaping our industry. 

Madhive recently co-hosted The Data and Media Puzzle event with Google Cloud and TechBae, a community that aims to nurture the advancement of women in media and adtech. The evening was full of mingling, networking, and unique POVs, underscoring TechBae’s mission to create meaningful connections and develop opportunities for women in the industry. 

The event featured a timely topic, as media today is all about data. 

At Madhive, data complexity is something we’re constantly navigating with our clients, because it’s not just about collecting data; it’s about reaching your audience and extracting meaningful insights, too. So we were thrilled to co-host such an inspiring discussion. 

Having a solid data strategy in place is more important than ever before, but it’s also an extremely complex topic. Our panel of women leaders had a diverse range of perspectives on everything from data-driven culture to operational challenges, untapped markets, and more.

Below we’ve highlighted some of the panel’s top takeaways. Keep these perspectives in mind as you navigate data in 2024! 

Maria Farricielli, VP of Digital Strategy and Operations at Fox Television Stations, on staying current with the industry: 

“You have to be curious. You cannot be doing what we're doing anymore and not be curious. You have to be looking around every corner. You really have to be exploring the new things that are coming down the pike. I fall off my chair every other day lately with how fast the industry's changing.”

Seema Patel, SVP of Data Enterprise at TelevisaUnivision, on creating a culture shift around data: 

“If you don't harness and leverage your data to influence the culture of your company to become one that is making decisions based on data, you will very quickly fall behind.”

Linda Payson, VP of Product at Madhive, on supporting small local advertisers with data: 

“It's about creating efficiencies of scale. There's a lot of platforms where you really couldn't execute with a data set that was too small. 

But because our customers are very local, we need to facilitate them to be able to upload a small amount of records and marry that with third party data to make it meaningful, in a way that’s easy to understand and shows results.” 

Cori Fernandez, Enterprise Account Executive at Google Cloud, on the commitment to becoming a data-driven culture:

“I think it comes down to just being agile. It's your appetite for agility and being able to embrace that. But there are some very big companies that it just takes a while, and you just gotta keep on chopping the wood.”

Maria Farricielli, on creating valuable customer journeys for clients:

“[When you use good data] to start talking to your customers, you have a way of really bonding with them that you never did before. Now we're creating strategies and taking a journey with them. Sometimes the journey dips, and you’ve got to bring it back up and out. What I tell my teams is even if we're in a challenging moment with the data, it's letting you be a consultant and have a chance to bring it to a better place.”

Linda Payson, on how advertisers will navigate changing privacy regulations: 

“People now have choices. They can choose to be ad free or they can choose to be ad supported. And when they're ad supported, they're actually signing up for an account. And so the permission there is much more explicit.” 

Amanda Rubin, EVP of Brand Solutions at Enthusiast Gaming, on harnessing their user-base: 

“When we reach out to brands, we say, you're trying to reach audiences, we have communities. So we have a very different perspective. Communities are involved through cultural connection, identity, and ultimately that connection leads to influence. 

A lot of what we do is content and talent driven with scale. So we will lean on scale partners like Madhive, where we can lean into data subsets to scale our larger content plays.” 

To learn about future events from Madhive, or to stay up to date on all the latest in CTV, follow us on Linkedin.