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Ashley McCollum
Roblox Advertising Exec - Transformative Business Leader, Brand Builder (Former Tasty, BuzzFeed Exec)
Ashley McCollum is the Head of Immersive Media Solutions at Roblox, where she leads the strategy and education for brands and agencies to help them find success with new media offerings on the platform.1 She joined Roblox in January 2023, announcing her new role on LinkedIn.2
McCollum has a diverse background in digital media and has been recognized as an innovator in the field. Her career highlights include:
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Previous roles:
- SVP of Revenue & Partnerships at Westbrook Media
- Early employee at BuzzFeed, where she helped grow the business for nearly 8 years
- Built the food brand Tasty, which became the largest single franchise on Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram
- Started her career at NBC as a Page and later joined the NBC News Marketing & Communication team
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Achievements and recognition:
- Named in The Hollywood Reporter 35 Under 35 (2021)
- Featured in Forbes 30 Under 30 (2017)
- Recognized as one of Adweek's Women Trailblazers (2017)
At Roblox, McCollum has been instrumental in developing the platform's advertising capabilities. She recently announced that Roblox's video ad platform is now open to programmatic demand, allowing buyers to place programmatic video ads on virtual billboards in Roblox's immersive environments.3 She has also been involved in partnerships with Integral Ad Science for viewability and invalid traffic measurement, and with Kantar Context Lab for brand lift measurement.3
McCollum is actively involved in discussing the future of immersive media and metaverse marketing. She has spoken about Roblox's commerce ambitions and how the platform is navigating the complex regulatory landscape for digital advertising, including the decision not to serve ads to audiences under 13.34
Highlights
Roblox video ads are live! Takeaways from Roblox's first-ever Newfronts:
▶ Roblox video ads are now available to all to enable advertisers to reach our massive 13+ GenZ audience without friction!
🤝 PubMatic will be Roblox’s first programmatic partner.
🛍 Walmart announced they are powering an early test of real world commerce on Roblox.
👏 We announced Integral Ad Science as our first third party verification & viewability partner and Kantar as our first vendor for brand lift.
✅ Including Industry-standard targeting and controls including genre targeting, brand suitability and an audience estimator in our Ads Manager.
📈 We released our first measurement results from Roblox video ads alpha: --75% of Roblox users say they are more likely to notice brands that advertised on Roblox vs. elsewhere. --When averaged across the brands in our test, Roblox video ads generated statistically significant increases in all key metrics — brand awareness, ad awareness, opinion, consideration, and recommendation.
👍 Established ad publisher guidelines including requiring the developer serving ads to be 18+, ID verified and meet our engagement standards in order to ensure more brand safety for our advertisers.
LinkedIn vs Reality…
Last week was my longest trip away from my 7.5 month old. He’s changing so much every day I was so worried I’d miss an important moment like crawling or (finally) saying “mama.” Tears were shed, but Beau knew I needed a little extra love and fell asleep on me as I said goodbye before leaving for the airport & and waited until I got home to get his first tooth!
You can be excited about a work opportunity and sad to be leaving your family at the same time. Shoutout to all the spouses (Ben Megargel) and caretakers who make it all possible. ❤️
