Amanda
Richman

The Story

Mid-Stride at Microsoft

When Amanda Richman joined Microsoft Advertising in March 2024 as VP of Global Media Sales, she brought something that can't be downloaded or prompted: three decades of standing inside the room where brand dollars get decided. Her team of 700-plus people works with the agency holding companies, direct clients, and advertisers who want to understand what Microsoft's stack - Bing search, connected TV, a DSP, an SSP, and now generative AI - can actually do. Her job is to make that case, at scale, every day.

The path to Microsoft wasn't a straight line. She started her career at The Majestic Theatre and Young & Rubicam, picked up her M.S. in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern's Medill School, and then found herself at Time Warner - not streaming TV as we know it, but one of the industry's first interactive television trials. In the 1990s, that was about as frontier as it got. She's been comfortable at the frontier ever since.

At MediaVest and Starcom (Publicis Groupe), she spent roughly 12 years evolving from VP, Account Director to President of Investment & Activation at Starcom USA. Her clients included Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Walmart, and Comcast. On P&G alone, she oversaw digital strategy across more than 100 brands - online video, mobile, advanced TV, social, gaming, and the early wild west of virtual worlds. That work won P&G's Global Media Innovation Award in 2007 and landed her on Ad Age's "40 Under 40" list in 2006, timed almost to the wire at age 39.

GroupM came calling in 2017. She was recruited as U.S. CEO of MEC, arriving just ahead of its merger with Maxus to form Wavemaker - a newly minted agency that needed its first American leader immediately. Under Richman, Wavemaker US didn't just survive the 2020 pandemic year. It grew 4.6% in net revenue, won the $400M Novo Nordisk account, and walked away with Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year. That's a record most agency leaders would retire on.

She didn't. In April 2021, she took the CEO chair at Mindshare North America, stepping into a 1,700-person organization serving Unilever, Ford, and General Mills. There she coined "Good Growth" - the philosophy that media decisions can be both commercially effective and socially responsible. She also received the NYWICI Matrix Award at the 51st annual ceremony at Lighthouse at Pier Sixty in New York, recognized among the top leaders in communications in the country. Her departure from Mindshare in March 2023 was abrupt, noted publicly by GroupM with a memo. She moved without missing a beat.

What followed was arguably her most interesting move yet. She became the first person from an agency background to serve as IAB Executive in Residence in the program's 10-year history. Then she joined Wpromote's Board of Directors. Then Microsoft. Each step has added something the previous one couldn't offer - and each one has required reading where the industry is going before the industry knows it's going there.

The question she poses publicly - "Are we too busy to be better?" - is not rhetorical. In the current moment, with generative AI rewriting the rules of targeting, measurement, and creative, she's arguing that brands need both the short-term conversion and the long-term brand story. She calls the synthesis "the compressed consumer journey." At Microsoft, she has the tools to prove it: Bing search intent, CTV reach, first-party data, and AI that can do things the audience still can't quite name yet.

Richman also co-founded "Wild Women of the Web," a professional support network for women in advertising that started well before such networks were fashionable and continues today via WhatsApp. She has spoken at 4A's Transformation, 4A's Data Summit, MMA Global, ANA, and appeared on Beet.TV more than 16 times across five different company affiliations. Industry conferences know her name; so does the small group chat she built for the people behind the scenes.

At CES 2025, she sat down in the C Space Studio with journalist James Kotecki and made one point that cut through all the AI noise: "Nothing replaces human contact." For someone running a 700-person global sales team at one of the most AI-intensive companies on earth, it's a remarkably grounded thing to say. It's also, probably, why she still wins.