RAMONA GONZALES BELIEVES IN
DIGITAL ADVERTISING & AD TECH THAT PRIORITIZES CONSUMER TRUST, HIGH-QUALITY CONTENT, AUDIENCE ENGAGEMENT & ZERO NET CARBON GOALS
CAREER OVERVIEW
Ramona is an adaptive and energetic media executive with a highly-diverse and dynamic career that has spanned print editorial, content strategy and user experience, marketing, digital media ad sales and operations, revenue management, analytics, measurement, data management, large-scale ad tech integrations and product development, and consumer privacy leadership.
This progression through specialized roles has endowed her with deep insights and advanced skills in each discipline, enhancing her ability to lead and motivate multi-functional teams, build and nurture vendor partnerships and relationships, identify and solve complex problems with a data-focused mindset, and drive the adoption of solutions that prioritize and significantly enhance user experiences, consumer privacy, operational efficiency, and revenue growth. Conversely, this extensive experience in all things digital has provided her with a holistic and comprehensive perspective of the advertising landscape—past, present, and future.
Her wide-ranging experience includes roles at publishers, agencies, and technology companies, alongside consulting roles for major digital publishers and technology providers, including industry trade organizations like the IAB/IAB Tech Lab, the ANA, and the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA). Through these roles, Ramona has been instrumental in developing and establishing numerous standards, guidelines, technical specs, and principles that shape the current digital advertising ecosystem and supply chain. Her contributions include areas such as ad verification, viewability, measurement, digital video, podcasts, automation (OpenDirect), programmatic advertising, updated terms and conditions, and the consumer privacy program YourAdChoices.
Ramona is committed to helping shape, support, and promote wide-spread adoption of standards, practices, and self-regulation programs that elevates digital advertising’s capabilities, delivers consumer privacy controls and transparency, endorses legislation for social media, supports fact-based journalism on publishers’ news outlets, establishes safe, practical controls for AI usage, and invests in de-carbonizing the digital advertising supply chain.
EXPERIENCE
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Clients include major digital publishers, technology companies, and industry organizations. Many consulting engagements focused on large-scale implementations and integrations of ad servers, order management systems (OperativeOne), CRMs, data management, programmatic, analytics, and other technology stack platforms.
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Ramona’s deep experience as a publisher led to her first role at a technology company. She had a multi-hyphen role at Rapt, the media monetization company started by Tom Chavez and acquired by Microsoft the year after she joined the team. She was a sales engineer and performed demos of the complex tech solutions for prospective publisher clients. She spent two weeks at a time in the SF office working with the product team on enhancements to existing and new revenue management tools. But most of her time was spent traveling the country on advisory services engagements, including launching Shutterfly’s advertising business and major yield management projects for Cox Newspapers. She also represented Rapt (and then Microsoft) on IAB initiatives.
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As Director of Digital Media for the publishers of The Advocate and Out magazines, she led LPI Media’s digital media ad operations, P&L, strategic direction, business goals, marketing plans, and product development. She continued her leadership role after the acquisition by PlanetOut.com.
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As Director of Content Strategy at Ogilvy Interactive’s Information Architecture Group, Ramona led the assessment, definition, and organization of marketing and branding content for major clients. This included creating sitemaps and wire frames depicting content, navigation, interface, and functionality organization. She also recruited, hired, and managed team of content strategists and freelancers.
As one of the first two online producers at SesameStreet, Ramona conceived and produced diverse areas of the website and supervised staff, freelancers, content partners, and vendors.
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After graduating with a degree in Journalism, Ramona started her career at Parenting magazine and spent four years honing her craft as a writer, editor, toy editor, and fashion editor. When she was recruited to launch Latina magazine, she jumped at the chance to become the magazine’s first managing editor.
“Ramona is an iron fist in a velvet glove. And a real boon to the industry.”
— Randall Rothenberg, Former Executive Chair & CEO, Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB)
INDUSTRY WORK
During the first decade of her consultancy, Ramona managed the Ad Tech Advisory Board, Ad Ops Advisory Board, and led dozens of committees, task forces, and working groups that were focused on solutions for critical industry issues and challenges in the form of protocols, standards, guidelines, technical specs, best practices, principles, and implementation guidance. She feels privileged to have worked with some of the best minds in the ad technology and operations industry from Google, Meta, Microsoft, Disney, Amazon, The New York Times, Yahoo, NBC, Univision, ESPN, GroupM, and many more.
Prior to launching her consultancy, Ramona spent five years representing LPI Media/PlanetOut, Rapt, and Microsoft on IAB committees, working groups, and task forces.
She continues to consult for the Digital Advertising Alliance (DAA) on programs, guidelines, and marketing initiatives.
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Ramona managed the Ad Tech Advisory Board, Ad Ops Advisory Board, and led dozens of working groups and task forces focused on solving major industry issues in the form of protocols, standards, guidelines, technical specs, best practices, principles, and implementation guidance including:
— Ad Classification Initiative
— Ad Verification Working Group
— Digital Advertising Invoice Taskforce
— Digital Advertising Workflow Working Group
— Digital Audio Working Group
— Digital Video Working Group
— eBusiness Working Group
— Open Direct Working Group
— Podcast Technical Working Group
— Terms & Conditions 3.0 Working Group
— Viewability & Measurement Working Group -
Ramona led the working group that developed the first creative guidelines and implementation guidance for the YourAdChoices icon and ad marker. She continues to develop creative guidelines for new and future consumer privacy programs such as the icon and ad marker creative and implementation guidelines for CCPA, Political Ads, mobile apps, video, and CTV. She also provides marketing collateral (design and copy) services for the DAA’s annual summit and other conferences, as well as technology support and management (Google Analytics, Google AdWords, Facebook ads, Sales Force, Squarespace, Constant Contact).
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Ramona developed the Ad-ID Digital Advertising Go-to-Market Strategy to articulate the strategies and tactics necessary for widespread industry adoption and usage of Ad-ID by advertisers and their digital agencies. Ad-ID ensures every media asset is uniquely identified, improving the workflow between advertiser, agency, vendor, and publisher to improve digital media supply chain efficiency. (Advertising Digital Identification, LLC is a limited liability company of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and the Association of National Advertisers.)
“Your presentation was really superb. You brought it together effectively, efficiently, and elegantly.”
— Bob Liodice, CEO, Association of National Advertisers (ANA)
CONSULTING SERVICES
Ramona partners with her clients to design engagements that are customized for each organization's unique structure, culture, and revenue goals.
Publishers
A comprehensive strategy for proactively maximizing revenue and managing operational imperatives is critical to sustained growth. Ramona delivers strategic and technological solutions that are infused with revenue, data, and yield management principles and techniques, as well as best practices.
Regardless of the complexity of the engagement, her approach is simple: To gain a deep understanding of her clients' business challenges that includes rigorous, data-driven analysis and a detailed discovery process to support the development of executable recommendations rooted in the relentless pursuit of operational excellence and revenue growth.
Tech Providers
The digital advertising ecosystem is complex and cluttered. Ramona partners with her technology clients to develop a flexible strategic framework for navigating and competing in a constantly challenging and evolving marketplace.
Having intimately experienced both sides of the technology vendor and publisher relationship, she can seamlessly translate customer needs and requirements into innovative product capabilities that differentiates her clients’ technology solutions from competitors—but more important, delivers truly meaningful tools that simplify and drive profits for their customers’ businesses.