Xandr's Catherine Williams: Mathematician, Storyteller, Leader

Xandr39s Chief Data Scientist Catherine Williams agrees Her team of nearly three dozen mathematicians and analysts are all about that data and those insights solving problems like making ad campaigns more effective for brands maximizing inventory efficiency and fighting fraud And storytelling is a part of her milieu too telling the stories of those solutions to Xandr39s internal and external customers in a way that makes complex analyses simple to understand and to act uponamp160How Williams got to Xandr is another story worth hearing It starts with a Colorado girl who liked math and logic Her brother older by 10 years introduced her to what she calls quotcool math ideasquot and puzzles and games before she started school That whetted her appetite for a future in math or science and when she got to college she planned a career in medicine But the homework she enjoyed the most and the classes she wanted to keep taking were the ones in math and it soon became clear that she was going to be a mathematician ultimately landing in a teaching role at Columbia in NYIt was there where the life lesson continued Williams realized that while she loved teaching and research university life was more solitary than she preferred One of her connections in the tech world introduced her to the team at AppNexus where the parts of her personality that had been underutilized in the academic world her pragmatism and social skills and ability to code would come to the foreground At AppNexus she led the datascience and marketplace development teams and came to realize that her academic background uniquely prepared her for being a leader within an organization itself focused on solving important worldchanging problemsAnd when AppNexus was acquired by ATampampT and the Xandr brand was born Williams was appointed to lead data science across the larger entity which also includes her former AppNexus datascience teamamp160 Williams39 role requires a technical understanding of what39s possible with the data today and the ability to connect that with a strong sense of the business opportunity and internal and external customer needs She sees it as a communication role fostering collaboration between her team and product managers and engineers interpreting for the business folks who can39t be as immersed in the dataWilliams is mindful of gender balance within her group quotIt39s something that I39ve spent a lot of time thinking about and worked hard on over the years so I39m happy to talk about it I think our gender stats overall for data science are remarkably good and balanced compared to the tech industry overall Women make up almost half of the Xandr Data science teamquot She credits being conscious of gender throughout the hiring process and mentions studies that demonstrate that having a balanced team produces better outcomes because of the diversity of thoughtAnother thing she learned from her time in often egodriven academia was how critical it is to create an environment where people feel safe about asking questions quotSometimes I39ll lead by example and ask a 39dumb question39 to demonstrate that that39s okay I want our team to be as truly informed as they need to be so that they can knowledgeably share with their clients like agency executives and arm them with the information those clients need to have so that they in turn can gently and completely educate their own clients at brandsquotamp160Williams believes that her work at Xandr is helping change advertising for the better talking about specific brands that have used machine learning custom algorithms and their own inhouse modeling in conjunction with Xandr39s ad marketplace to dramatically improve direct marketing resultsShe39s also proud of her work supporting Girls Who Code and AppNexus39s development of the Women39s Leadership Forumamp160 And her pride in her niece following in her footsteps as a college sophomore double majoring in math and computer science is equally apparentI asked about the biggest challenges her organization facesamp160 quotThe opportunity that we39re paying attention to right now is taking the paradigms of TV and digital and putting them on the same algorithmic footing to make the TV world more automated and intelligent and digital ads more modern and meaningfulamp160 It39s early days yet and we39re just focusing on speaking the same language sometimes fitting the pieces together and seeing what data needs to connectamp160 We39re going to be taking advertising to the next level that39s the challenge right nowquotClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Xandr's Catherine Williams: Mathematician, Storyteller, Leader

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Xandr's Catherine Williams: Mathematician, Storyteller, Leader

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