Young Innovator Nominee: Andrew Sandoval, The Media Kitchen

Why he is nominated: Andrew deserves this award because he’s great at a lot of things and excels at two very important things.

He has a vision for where the future will take us and he’s also good at operationalizing that vision. Over the last year he’s improved the way we buy programmatic media and he’s helped us take social in-house and leverage 3rd party self-service buying platforms as well as the native platforms. Over the last year we’ve activated DMPs for a number of clients helping them unlock the power of their own data and Andrew’s processes and approaches to managing DMPs led to new client wins and sizeable revenue. As we’ve been brining social buying in-house and ceased relying on MDPs, we’ve retrained our staff to buy social themselves. Now our staff knows how to buy programmatic media and social and they’ve realized new skills and a whole new career path.

Andrew is driving this retraining and reinventing our core capabilities. As our capabilities have improved so has our organic growth, that’s growth from existing clients. Next year, we are going to manage and invest a lot more in social and that investment will drive even more agency revenue. Andrew describes a world dominated by social and search and a team structure that’s multi-model, able to buy across devices, and he’s insuring the agency has the skills and tools to deliver. For those reasons he deserves any award that recognizes innovation.

The Young Innovator Award celebrates excellence and innovation by young professionals. See the other nominees and their backgrounds and check back to learn who has won this prestigious honor from The Advertising Club of New York and Google, with support from The Drum.