Katie is a partner in McKinsey’s Media & Entertainment and Marketing & Sales Practices. She helps leading media businesses—particularly video- and audio-content owners, distributors, and intermediaries—strengthen existing advertising businesses and create new businesses. On the other side of the media transaction, she helps marketers, as buyers of media, improve the performance of customer-acquisition and media-advertising spend, informed by analytics and the latest products and capabilities of the personalized and data-driven media world.
Currently, Katie is building out the firm’s media-buying offering for marketers. Her focus is on the full-funnel strategy for customer experience—from awareness to conversion and across channels (such as TV, digital video, search, and social)—with sophisticated targeting and personalization.
Examples of Katie’s recent client work include the following:
- helping a global mobile-advertising business expand its growth by restructuring the go-to-market organization (programmatic and direct sale), revamping the go-to-market strategy and value proposition, and creating a lead-generation engine
- developing a TV network’s growth-and-cost transformation, including organization, operations, product, channel, and analytics for sellers to improve deal making, across its core businesses (linear TV, advanced TV, and digital video)
- transforming a major publisher’s advertisement-sales function, including revenue and cost-opportunity planning, a full organization restructure, and advertisement-technology-asset diligence
- leading an agile marketing war room by serving as scrum master and directing sophisticated digital-media-buying strategies that delivered increases of three- to fourfold in advertising-campaign tests launched and of hundreds of millions of dollars in annual sales
- creating build, buy, and partner assessments and developing product-strategy plans and business cases for media companies to improve existing advanced-advertising businesses or launch new ones
- directing M&A diligence and deal work across advertising technology for strategic buyers (such as TV and publishing) and financial sponsors
- designing strategy and product work, including measurement, attribution, demand-side platform, supply-side platform, and server, for leading advertising-technology companies
- developing a digital application and a media strategy for a leading company that distributes through e-commerce, branded stores, and retailers
Katie joined McKinsey as a business analyst, then left to earn her master’s degrees. Prior to returning to the firm, she worked for a private-equity and venture-capital company on investment in growth-stage businesses in technology, media, and telecommunications and in information services. She also cofounded a not-for-profit organization that helps entrepreneurs in emerging markets raise capital and grow businesses.