AdGear has flown in a new senior manager from Australia to lead its client team in Toronto.
Joni Joyner joins the Montreal-based programmatic tech company from Sensis, an Australian publisher and tech group similar to Canada’s YPG. She led its performance media division, with oversight of all paid search, social and display media products.Before that, she was a product director and ad ops manager at Adconion, a global ad network (with wide reach in Canada) that was recently subsumed by Amobee.
Joyner says she met AdGear’s leadership team last year and was immediately impressed by how client-focused their services were. Rather than being “just another ad server,” she found the company really approached each client as a unique business with unique problems.
“It isn’t about having a DMP or a DSP or an SSP. We keep throwing these [terms] around, but it should really be about saying, ‘What problems are you trying to solve? Where are your opportunities?’ and then building something that’s going to make sense for the business,” she said.
“There isn’t one thing out there that solves all the problems.”
She said that with her background as an ad tech user, she’ll help the Toronto team better understand what clients’ challenges are and what they’re looking to accomplish.
“I think on the technology side, there are so many great technology businesses that maybe don’t quite understand the problems they’re trying to solve,” she said. “There is a gap that’s yet to be bridged.”
Joyner will lead a team of seven in Toronto, where AdGear has been working to expand its business. Founded in 2010, the company has 35 employees across its Montreal and Toronto offices, and counts Cosette, Simons and YPG’s Mediative as clients.