Kelly Abcarian

Hometown: Pickerington, OH

Favorite Sports Team: Chicago Blackhawks

I want 30 seconds in an elevator with: Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Where do you work most frequently—home, office, road? Although I’m based in Chicago, I spend a lot of time with my colleagues and clients in the New York office.

My best ideas come when… I feed off of the innovators. I like looking at how ideas can be connected across companies to accelerate change. As they innovate and come up with new metrics and approaches, looking at the white spaces and opportunities to better connect companies and measurement signals across to redefine the future is invigorating.

Favorite place you’ve ever visited? Aiguablava, one of the most famous beaches on Costa Brava

Last TV series watched: “Formula 1: Drive to Survive” on Netflix. Winning in F1 is all about executing a highly tuned plan! Attending a Formula 1 race live is now on my bucket list!

Where do you work most frequently—home, office, road? Although I’m based in Chicago, I spend a lot of time with my colleagues and clients in the New York office.

What impact could AI have on the industry’s future? I see a future where there is no single currency, but multiple high-quality measurement signals. Our future will be about transacting media by harnessing the power of AI that takes these measurement signals across measurement companies and empower brands to automatically optimize to what combination of signals make the most sense to drive their KPIs to deliver on outcomes. We are going to move to a place where brands can bring forward a KPI, where it is less about which measurement company’s data one should choose to partner with, and more of a framework where different signals can be run at the same time and algorithms can evaluate these different signals and optimize on it to improve outcomes for marketers in a more automated real-time way.

Industry Top Priority for 2023: Readiness for an entirely new measurement ecosystem. We have made great strides on improving the accuracy of cross-platform currency delivery. This is our opportunity to also redefine the metrics of what matters most to advertisers – impact – and we do this by understanding accurate delivery, context quality, environment of ad playout, and quality of the creative. We need to begin to move to a new framework for measurement that focuses on answering the right questions as the next evolution of measurement and currency will target the intersection of creative, content, and platform experiences. We know great content has a halo effect on advertising. We know that creative quality is critical to ad performance. Now we have the measurement signals to prove it. As we embrace these new metrics, media buyers and sellers will be better able to intelligently place the right creative in the right environment to drive results.

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