Emily Del Greco likes to understand how things work and make sure they work well.
This applies as much to the Dyson humidifier she recently took apart and reassembled as it does to the inner workings of ad tech.
Today, Del Greco is a consultant and partner at McKinsey & Company, but her career spans nearly every aspect of the digital advertising industry.
She spent time on the sell side at Vogue and New York Magazine, held multiple executive roles at Google (most recently as global head of audience data commercialization), was VP of sales at Adelphic before the Time/Viant acquisition and was president of the Americas on the agency side at MightyHive for nearly four years.
Del Greco also ran her own independent consultancy focused on the advertising sector for almost six years before joining McKinsey.
“Throughout my career, I progressively dug into areas I thought were interesting and that would allow me to learn,” Del Greco says on this week’s episode of AdExchanger Talks. “I wanted to cross-train myself with the goal of being an all-around athlete – I’m never going to be an awesome engineer or the best marketer, but having a more complete perspective is something I’ve found has been a great asset for me.”
A wide purview is definitely helpful these days, as McKinsey’s marketer clients navigate the ever-changing digital advertising landscape, from platform privacy changes, regulatory scrutiny and signal loss to the looming recession (if we’re not already in it).
Everyone is well aware of the headwinds. But there are also a few strong tailwinds, including the rise of retail media networks. McKinsey estimates that commerce media has the potential to generate more than $1.3 trillion dollars of enterprise value – and attract roughly $100 billion in ad spend – in the US alone by 2026.
“We’re just seeing the beginning of … the marriage between media and commerce,” Del Greco says. “It’s been predicted for a while, but it’s starting to come together.”
Also in this episode: Why commerce media is set to explode, why one-to-one measurement is on the way out (sorry, MTA lovers), why digital advertising isn’t “a hot mess” so much as it’s a caterpillar in the process of becoming a butterfly, and remodeling an 1800s-era historic house in Jersey City.
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