Rakuten Advertising is the global affiliate and performance-marketing arm of Japan's Rakuten Group. Born as LinkShare in 1996 and acquired by Rakuten in 2005, it connects the world's top brands with publishers, creators and highly engaged audiences across 200+ countries. Today it pairs a pioneering affiliate network with AI-powered tools for fraud detection, partnership discovery and reporting, while pushing influencer and affiliate marketing closer together.
Amanda Richman is VP of Global Media Sales at Microsoft Advertising, leading a 700+ person omnichannel sales team from New York. A 30-year veteran of media and advertising, she has run agencies including Wavemaker US and Mindshare North America, winning Adweek's U.S. Media Agency of the Year at Wavemaker in 2020. She joined Microsoft in March 2024 to help brands navigate the convergence of generative AI, search, and connected TV advertising.
Vidhya Srinivasan is VP and General Manager of Advertising & Commerce at Google, overseeing a portfolio responsible for over $66 billion in quarterly revenue. A computer science graduate of IIT Madras and Georgia Tech, she spent a decade at IBM and several years at AWS - where she scaled Amazon Redshift into the cloud's fastest-growing data warehouse - before joining Google in 2019. At Google she has spearheaded AI-first advertising products including Performance Max, agentic shopping via Google's Universal Cart, and the integration of Gemini across search and shopping surfaces. She is one of the most consequential voices shaping how AI rewires digital advertising.
Omar Tawakol is a serial entrepreneur and AI advertising pioneer who turned audience data, voice AI, and now spatially-aware AI into three consecutive company exits. He founded BlueKai (acquired by Oracle for $400M+), Voicea (acquired by Cisco), and currently leads Rembrand, an AI-powered virtual product placement platform that embeds brands invisibly into video content. He holds board seats at The Trade Desk and LiveRamp, and in 2025 merged Rembrand with Spaceback to build an AI-powered ad factory that reaches across CTV, digital video, and display.