Last week, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) threw its largest event of the year: the Annual Leadership Meeting. The association gathered together over 100 dot-com and ad tech companies, as well as, representatives from all the major media companies in the U.S. Hot topics surrounded the rise of OTT content, direct-to-consumer (DTC) “disruptor” brands, programmatic TV (or advanced TV), and concerns surrounding market fraud. The event also included the 2019 IAB Sales Excellence Awards.
The IAB Sales Excellence Awards recognize the best IAB sales executives and sales teams of the year that show exceptional client service, digital advertising expertise, and innovation in digital advertising sales.
Over 500 leaders from the ad buying community answered a questionnaire, nominating, and then voting for the best sales teams and individuals across four main categories: large organization, small-to-medium sales organization, leadership through mentoring, and sales person of the year in four key U.S. regions. Respondents represented companies that spent at least $1 million on interactive advertising during the last year.
MediaRadar Would Like to Congratulate the Winners!
See a full list of winners here.
Overall Sales Excellence for a Large Sales Organization: YouTube
Overall Sales Excellence for a Small-to-Medium Sales Organization: MediaMath
Leadership through Mentoring: David Cristini, Sales Leader, Amazon Web Services
David Cristini is an executive sales leader with experience in sales, management, and technical roles. Cristini gained experience with multiple firms, ranging from his own start-up to large corporations like Microsoft, IBM, and Citrix. In 2013, Cristini was hired to be the first Named Sales Leader in the East at Amazon Web Services. While his initial focus was to build the regional team, his primary focus now is on leading one of the Enterprise teams, which serves the New York market.
Sales Person of the Year:
East Coast: Donna Bourke, Eastern Sales Manager, Pandora
Donna Bourke is a gifted sales manager in the audio industry. In the span of around 20 years, Coast worked as the VP of Sales McGavren Guild Radio (a division of Interep Radio), as the National Sales Manager at Emmis Communications, and, currently, as the Eastern Sales Manager at Pandora. Coast received her B.A. in Political Science and Government from Gettysburg College.
West Coast: Shankar Raswa, Marketing Science Lead, eCommerce, Facebook
Shankar Raswa is a marketing leader (11 years) with deep eCommerce, retail, and analytics expertise. He has a proven track record in driving high growth agendas for some of the industry’s biggest players and unicorn startups. At Facebook (FB), Raswa helps advertisers unlock value by leveraging industry-leading experimentation solutions, building custom analytics, and offering measurement and attribution thought leadership. Prior to FB, Raswa spent most of his career in management consulting at top firms, where he’s engaged with C-suite executives across scores of multinational companies (in retail, CPG, and eCommerce) and where he’s used problem solving on topics of strategy and business transformation.
Central: Erin Figenholtz, Account Executive, Discovery Inc.
Erin Figenholtz is an advertising sales executive who specializes in cable, online, and mobile sales. Figenholtz began her career at The Weather Channel, quickly moving through the ranks from Agency Coordinator to Sales Associate to Cable Account Manager to Cross Platform Account Executive. She did a five-year stint as Digital Account Executive at Scripps Network Interactive before moving on to her current role as Account Executive at Discovery, Inc. Figenholtz received her B.S. in Marketing from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
South: Matt Ross, Account Executive Government Team, LinkedIn
Matt Ross is an executive sales leader with experience in sales and advertising as well as government and public policy. In the past two decades, Ross has worked across mediums, including social, display, TV, radio, and print with multiple vantage points of publishing houses, ad tech companies, and agencies. In his current role as Account Executive of LinkedIn Marketing Solutions, Ross’s Government vertical spans customers in federal and state agencies, non-profits, foundations, associations, and government contractors. Ross received his B.A. in Political Science from the University of Arizona.
