A Modern Love Story: Consumers & Tech…. and the Role for Brands

Erin Hennessy is the Executive Director of Insights for The New York Times’s advertising department. She leads a global team within Ad Innovation responsible for exploring new solutions in measurement, unearthing a deep understanding audience and content insights, and keeping a pulse on cultural trends. Her passion for understanding people underpins her ability to strategically connect partner needs with meaningful solutions in data.

Erin has been in the media research field for over a decade servicing fortune 500 accounts helping them to turn data into actionable insight. Since joining The Times in 2016, she has accelerated the growth of the team and the role that data and insights plays in The New York Times’s advertising department.

Farhad Manjoo became an opinion columnist for The New York Times in 2018.

Before that, they wrote The Times’s State of the Art column, covering the technology industry’s efforts to swallow up the world. They have also written for Slate, Salon, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal. To their chagrin, their 2008 book, “True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact World,” accurately predicted our modern age of tech-abetted echo chambers and “alternative facts.”

Farhad Manjoo was born in South Africa and emigrated with their family to Southern California in the late 1980s. They live in Northern California with their wife and two children.

Allison Murphy is senior vice president, ad innovation at The New York Times Company, a position she assumed in February 2019. In this role, Allison leads the development and delivery of The Times Company’s ad innovation strategy, directing cross-functional teams responsible for accelerating the Company’s development of market-leading ad platforms and products. She is also responsible for the Company’s advertising mission, a cross-functional team that spans product, tech and data to accelerate digital advertising.

Prior to this role, Allison served as vice president, ad innovation, since November 2017 and vice president, products & news partnerships since 2017 where she oversaw teams that ideate, build and execute unique products and packages to bring to advertisers – working in close concert with The Times’s newsroom and digital product teams.

Allison was previously chief of staff to the chief revenue officer, developing strategies and operational plans to grow The Times’s revenue across the subscription and advertising businesses. She began her career at the company in its central strategy & development team.

Before joining The Times, Allison was a strategy consultant for mission-driven organizations at The Bridgespan Group – an affiliate of Bain & Company. Allison has an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and holds a B.A. and an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia.