Many people stumble into ad tech from entirely different career paths.
But Angelina Eng, a 30-year industry veteran who serves as the IAB’s vice president of measurement, addressability and data center, has been swimming in the ocean of digital advertising from the very beginning.
Although she did a fair bit of major-hopping in college, from psychology to accounting to home economics, Eng started her career doing admin work for Brand Dialogue, an interactive agency that developed websites for Young & Rubicam clients.
(Speaking of which, want to feel nostalgic? Y&R and Brand Dialogue once handled the consumer ads and interactive services for Geocities in 1998. Within two years, all three companies got bought by various competitors, and none of them exist anymore.)
Anyway, since then, Eng’s taken on roles as an account executive, a media buyer – making her “one of the first to start buying ads online,” she told AdExchanger – an ad operations specialist and a data analyst. At IAB, she has a direct hand in shaping industrywide standards and practices for measurement, identity and programmatic AI.
Eng, who was nominated as a 2025 industry impact nominee for this year’s Top Women in Media and Ad Tech awards, spoke with AdExchanger prior to the event.
ADEXCHANGER: Obviously, technology has changed since you started. But putting that aside, how would you say the industry’s changed in terms of culture?
ANGELINA ENG: In the early days, it was a big party. There was this very exciting time where you had a lot of young people, who were also a bit more innovative and tech-savvy, trying to figure out what this internet thing was. And it was more intimate. Everyone knew each other.
Now it seems more … I don’t want to say more structured, but back then, it was like, “Let’s experiment. What can we do that’s new? What can we do differently?”
The most popular phrase back then was “out of the box.” Now it’s more around scale, reach and efficiency. Social and programmatic have driven this market to be much more data-driven and performance-based.
There’s more focus on the bottom line.
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Is it harder to break into the industry than it used to be or easier?
I think that it’s a lot easier to get into this industry, but aspects of it are still difficult.
If you had a great personality and were able to get in front of clients to talk strategically and brainstorm and ideate, that was a big thing back then. Now there’s a bit more of a data scientist aspect to it. Everyone needs to really understand data and privacy.
What hasn’t changed is internal politics and operations. There are still issues with collecting data, reconciling invoices, trafficking campaigns, entering stuff into the budget finance system, all that.
Operationally, logistically, there are a lot of things that our industry hasn’t moved forward with, which are some of the things that I’m focusing on now.
Last month, at Programmatic IO in Las Vegas, you talked a bit about the role of AI in advertising. How often do you use those tools in your personal day-to-day workflow, and what kinds of tools are you using?
I use it a lot to help me articulate exactly what I’m trying to get across – so more for editing, if anything. I do use it for ideation in some aspects. I use things like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Canvas – and, within those tools, the AI image gen, too.
When I’m working on a new output, I’ll use AI as the foundation, then leverage our members, committee and working groups to provide me with the feedback. Then I reuse it for proofreading and editing grammar, stuff like that.
As far as the industry goes, where do you think AI has the biggest potential to positively impact digital advertisers?
From the business perspective, I think it’s really in measurement that it’s going to have the biggest impact. Now, is it going to be accurate? That’s a whole other conversation. And what are the ground rules and guardrails that we need to think about when using AI?
Two things that we need to consider are how to leverage AI without disclosing or sharing personal data and how to minimize bias. Because, if you give AI data and say, “Okay, analyze this,” it doesn’t take into consideration things like economic trends or cultural trends, or the fact that there’s a lack of data signals from a particular media channel like audio or CTV. If you don’t instruct it to consider that, then it’s always going to seem like search, social and programmatic are the best-performing channels.
Beyond AI, what’s the next big challenge that the industry needs to tackle?
What I’m hoping to focus on in the coming months and into next year is how to improve data quality and data integrity.
We know that there’s going to continue to be silos, walled gardens and data fragmentation. But how do we go about moving forward to make it easier, to enable the buy side and sell side to understand what’s working and what’s not working?
This interview has been edited and condensed.
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