ai-advertising
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Arthur Leopold Is Teaching Advertising to Follow the Crowd
He learned early that attention moves faster than institutions. Now the former Cameo president is building Agentio to help advertising money catch up with the creators who already have the crowd.
Jeffrey Matisoff
Jeffrey Matisoff is North America CEO and Managing Partner of The Brandtech Group, the self-described world's number one generative AI marketing company. Named to the regional CEO role in early 2026, he runs Brandtech's largest market and leads its pitch to help brands turn AI into a competitive advantage through tools like the Pencil Gen AI platform and its 'Share of Model' work on how large language models describe brands. Matisoff joined Brandtech in 2021 from WPP, where he was global president of EightBar, IBM's dedicated agency, and he helped lead the acquisition and integration of digital marketing company Jellyfish. His career spans two decades in media and creative, with earlier stops at Accuen, PHD, and Universal McCann.
Jonathan Heller
Jonathan Heller is the chairman, founder and co-CEO of Firsthand, a New York AI startup building Brand Agents - AI representatives that talk directly to consumers on behalf of publishers and brands. An adtech lifer, he co-founded the online video advertising platform FreeWheel in 2007 and sold it to Comcast for roughly $360 million in 2014. At Firsthand he is reuniting with his old DoubleClick colleague Michael Rubenstein to argue that generative AI is not a better ad-serving engine but an entirely new medium for reaching people.
Hikari Senju
Hikari Senju is the founder and CEO of Omneky, a San Francisco generative AI platform that creates, analyzes, and optimizes personalized ad creative at scale. A Harvard computer scientist and son of celebrated Nihonga painter Hiroshi Senju, he began building in generative AI in 2018, five years before ChatGPT made the field mainstream. His mission is to lower the cost of effective advertising so that any founder with a compelling idea can reach customers without a million-dollar budget. Omneky has raised over $13 million from investors including SoftBank and AIX Ventures, and in 2024-2025 Senju pivoted the company toward agentic AI that autonomously plans and runs campaigns across Meta, Google, and TikTok.
Tadas Jucikas
Tadas Jucikas is the founder and CEO of Genus AI, a generative AI platform that produces tens of millions of product images, videos, audiences and ad copy each month for direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where he decoded the behavior of microscopic worms and published in Nature Methods and PNAS, then spent years applying AI to human behavior for UK government departments and companies like Uber, EDF Energy and Tesco. He co-founded Genus AI with his brother Viktoras, raised $11M in seed capital, and also serves as founding dean at Turing College.
Andrew Kassian
Andrew Kassian is the CEO of Scalify, an AI-powered advertising platform that helps e-commerce brands plan, launch, optimize, and scale paid campaigns across Meta and TikTok from a single dashboard. Scalify's pitch is blunt: you should not need to become a media buyer to run profitable ads. Its tooling generates ad creative from product images, builds lookalike and interest audiences automatically, applies rule-based optimization that pauses losers and scales winners around the clock, and consolidates cross-platform performance data so founders can make spending decisions without exporting spreadsheets. Based in Miami with company operations tied to London, Kassian sits at the intersection of small e-commerce operators and the increasingly automated, AI-driven future of digital advertising.
Amanda Richman
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.
Danielle McMeekin
Danielle McMeekin is Vice President and Head of Global Media Sales (also titled Head of Global Performance Sales) at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's worldwide media and performance sales strategy. Based in Orlando, Florida, she brings over two decades of experience in digital advertising, having risen through sales leadership roles at Yahoo! before joining Microsoft. A recognized voice on the future of search and AI-powered advertising, she co-authors thought leadership on conversational search, multimodal discovery, and generative AI's transformation of performance marketing. She received Microsoft Advertising's Client Obsession FY25 Award for her work building powerful partnerships with clients and partners.
Kya Sainsbury-Carter
Kya Sainsbury-Carter spent over 20 years at Microsoft, most recently as Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Advertising, where she led a global ads business generating more than $18 billion in annual gross revenue. She oversaw the division's transformation through AI-powered and agentic advertising, expanded retail media, and enterprise partnerships before departing in May 2026 - with LinkedIn's Matt Derella named to succeed her.
Lynne Kjolso
Lynne Kjolso is VP of Global Partner and Retail Media at Microsoft Advertising, where she leads the company's retail media strategy and global partner ecosystem. A philosophy PhD turned digital advertising executive, she has spent over 15 years at Microsoft shaping search, retail, and commerce media. Named to Ad Age's Tech Power List 2024 and The List 2025, she is a leading voice on retail media standardization, gaming as an advertising frontier, and the intersection of AI and commerce.
Vidhya Srinivasan
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
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.