Zefr appoints Emma Lacey as senior vice president EMEA

Zefr has announced that it has bolstered its EMEA team with the appointment of Emma Lacey as Senior Vice President, to drive responsible marketing in walled garden environments for brands operating across the region.

Zefr welcomes Lacey, who has over 15 years’ experience leading successful commercial teams across a range of media and adtech businesses, including AOL, Sky and Blis. Prior to Zefr, she was part of the EMEA leadership team at OpenX, working as Senior Director of Buyer Development to secure strategic partnerships with agencies and brands.

In her new role, Lacey will focus on bringing Zefr’s suite of pre-bid and post-bid targeting and measurement solutions for Facebook, YouTube, and most recently TikTok, to EMEA. She has observed that one of the biggest hurdles brands still face is understanding how to reduce their reliance on legacy open web technologies which prove ineffective for video advertising.

“With video experiencing yet another seismic upturn in consumer interest, brands cannot afford to be left behind by continuing to use outdated suitability strategies that put them at risk of limited reach and opaque insights,” she commented. “Being part of the Zefr team will allow me to work with brands to develop accurate strategies that are effective at scale within walled garden platforms.”

Lacey further explains that this challenge is in fact two-fold. Profitable brands advertise across many platforms and channels; therefore, leveraging reliable and repeatable classifications of brand suitability is key for efficiency as well as brand alignment. Currently, there is a lack of consistency in definitions and standards used across the industry which has made it harder for brands to build and measure their suitability strategies.

Lacey hopes to communicate the importance of these standards, such as those set out by the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM), to offer marketers greater transparency into the video advertising process; allowing them to expand the reach of brands into emerging media channels while lowering costs.

She added, “Only through widespread adoption of these standards and taxonomies will the advertising industry truly be able to put brands in control of their content adjacency.”

Speaking about her appointment, Rich Raddon, Co-Founder and Co-CEO at Zefr said, “We’re incredibly pleased to welcome Emma Lacey to Zefr for our next era of EMEA growth. She joins the team at a critical time where brands and agencies need more sophisticated and accurate partners for their walled garden investments. Those advertising across video platforms such as TikTok need to reduce their overdependence on keyword blocklists and other obsolete tactics and adopt a more robust brand suitability toolkit to create better customer experiences. Emma will be instrumental in educating partnering brands on how to execute this safely and successfully using a proactive video-specific approach.”

Zefr’s Cognition AI engine combines audio, text, and video frame-by-frame analysis with scaled human review and moderation. Backed by years of video training data, Zefr’s machine learning approach goes far beyond just text and creator analysis, combining video-level analysis with scaled moderation specifically mapped to the GARM industry standards. Zefr’s tech stack was built specifically for complex environments such as those within the walled gardens, as traditional approaches to brand safety in the open web, such as applying semantics and keywords, were insufficient for the highly dynamic and nuanced world of channels such as video.