Join Zoe Soon, VP Experience Center at IAB and Jonathan Stringfield, Vice President, Global Business Research and Marketing at Activision Blizzard as they discuss Jonathan’s new book, “Get in the Game”, which is about the importance of understanding the unique ways consumers interact with games and virtual worlds and how marketers need to level up their businesses with Gaming, eSports, and Emerging Technologies in order to connect with these consumers.
Zoe Soon has 10+ years of experience building products in technology-driven businesses with a heavy focus on mobile. Six years ago Zoe flew 21 hours from Sydney to NYC for a 30min coffee meeting which led to her first job in NYC. Since then she’s worked with three major New York based media companies, The New York Times, Condé Nast and Business Insider on projects ranging from location-based apps to paywalls. Zoe began her career as a user researcher and UX design consultant working with three of the top five banks in Australia. She was then hired to establish a user insights practice at Fairfax Media, a leading Australian news and media conglomerate. Here she led the user research for the flagship news apps which won Best Mobile News Product at the 2012 Australian Mobile Awards and went on to become product lead for the news sites. In this role she launched a content paywall and a unified user data system to diversify revenue and enable more targeted marketing.
Prior to joining the IAB Zoe was General Manager of apps and email at Business Insider where she was charged with defining the go-to market strategy for these platforms. In this role Zoe launched Insider Inc’s first OTT apps across Apple, Amazon Fire and Roku offering advertisers cross-platform video digital distribution and access to an audience that generates over 2 billion views each month.
Zoe has a Masters in Organizational Psychology and lives in New York. She enjoys burning pancakes, Cuban salsa dancing and talking to strangers in line.
Jonathan Stringfield is VP Global Business Research & Marketing at Activision Blizzard and the author of Get In The Game: How to Level Up Your Business with Gaming, Esports, and Emerging Technologies. At Activision Blizzard he oversees a global team responsible for crafting legendary marketing experiences, conducting rigorous science to substantiate the unique power of gaming to advertisers, and supplying partner teams with evidence-based insights that drive innovation.
Previously, Jonathan was Director, Marketing Insights and Analytics at Twitter where he was responsible for all measurement and ad effectiveness research for the US advertising business. Prior to that, Jonathan was an early member of Facebook’s measurement solutions research team and led demographic research for Nielsen’s TV and media research services. Jonathan holds a PhD in Sociology, where his NSF-funded research focused on identity and audience conceptions among users of social media technologies.
