After taking the reins from Ken Mandel at Yahoo a few weeks ago, Susanna Lee is embracing her new role as head of Yahoo Asia-Pacific’s display advertising sales and marketplace with great relish. “With Ken’s departure, this was a natural migration for me into the role because I’ve been working on display advertising since I joined Yahoo,” she says.
Lee joined Yahoo in 2007 in Sunnyvale, where she worked on the product development team, before moving on to product marketing. Prior to joining Yahoo, she was VP marketing at BoardVantage. In assuming her new role, she relocated to Hong Kong, and will travel regularly to Singapore to meet with advertisers and ad agencies.
“Ken has a lot of close relationships with the trade, and my objective is to continue that, if not to deepen those relationships,” she says. “In display advertising, we would continue in our effort in building engagement with consumers, by offering personalised content and in-depth understanding about their needs to engage with them more.”
“Asia is a developing market and there are a lot of advanced solutions that we have from the Americas that we can bring here,” she says, adding that she can leverage a lot of what she’s done while she was in the US. “We will service our advertisers, agencies and consumers, to bring more innovation in display advertising into the market.”
Mobile is a big area of focus for Yahoo, Lee says. Most people in Asia will experience the internet for the first time on mobile, making it especially important for the region, she says, adding, ”Mobile is where the users are, and we’ll work on how to help advertisers find the people they want to talk to.”
