During college, I interned at a startup—Spring Rewards—in Chicago. Spring offered consumers an easy‑to‑use loyalty program for their favorite local businesses and gave merchants a data‑driven marketing platform. I added value by uncovering insights via SQL and Excel that helped Spring and its merchants grow revenue, improving internal operations such as the billing process and database taxonomy, and marketing the Spring brand—for instance, by handing out flyers on the streets.

Upon graduating from college, I worked for five years at the digital marketing firm PMX Agency, which later became part of Assembly Global. I began on the Programmatic Team, where I learned the ad tech landscape and mastered the use of digital ad buying platforms such as those from Google and Amazon. After growing the team from the ground up to a point where I personally managed over $10M in annual media spend and shaped the agency’s audience strategy, I shifted to the Strategy Team in search of a more holistic role. There I defined the agency’s new cross‑channel media planning process and helped clients translate customer insights into more strategic media channel mixes, enabling many to grow their businesses.

While in the agency world, I contributed various forms of thought leadership—appearing on a panel discussing the future of Amazon advertising, authoring a MediaPost article on Apple’s role in ad buying, and offering guidance on how marketers should navigate trends such as the COVID pandemic and increased privacy regulations.