The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Christa Stephens/Beachfront:
Christa Stephens is a client success leader with a proven track record of delivering valuable insights and innovative solutions to leading media owners. Currently, Christa serves as the director of Client Success at Beachfront, working closely with connected TV publishers and TV programmers to help them drive operational efficiency and achieve meaningful revenue growth. With a knack for technical problem-solving, Christa seamlessly shifts from nuanced operational details to the big picture implications of revenue trends and TV ad monetization. Having spent much of her early career in a tactical advertising operations role, she possesses an unrivaled, in-depth set of knowledge spanning a range of technical topics, such as how ad systems communicate and how complex bidding algorithms work. This knowledge serves Christa well as she helps leading media owners navigate the seismic changes unfolding in TV and video.
What her colleagues are saying:
"Christa is a compassionate leader who continues to help our partners and team navigate the rapidly-converging TV landscape. With a broad yet detailed understanding of connected TV advertising operations, Christa is uniquely capable of tackling both nuanced monetization challenges and more significant macro trends impacting today's media owners and programmers. Her infectious enthusiasm and resolute commitment have an invaluable impact on our team, clients and the broader CTV advertising industry." - Tom St. John, head of partnerships at Beachfront
"Intellectually curious and always determined, Christa is an experienced and skillful operator who brings a tremendous amount of value and insight to our team. Through spirited collaboration and empathy, Christa continues to solve key challenges and deliver exceptional business outcomes for our clients and partners. Beyond these impacts, Christa's lively sense of humor and kindness are highly-regarded among our team at Beachfront." - Chris Maccaro, CEO at Beachfront
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
Hulu, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Discovery+.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
My biggest career highlight so far has been launching Beachfront's Unified Decisioning product. I worked closely with our product and development team to understand the ins and outs of our new product and train the Beachfront team. On-boarding the first client required constant communication internally and externally to ensure everything was running smoothly as we integrated and ramped up. To help bring the product out of the beta stage, I worked closely with our publishers to understand their challenges in CTV and push our product to the next level, providing them with the operational tools and support they needed. As I was aiding publishers in navigating the world of unified auctions and ad pods, I was able to learn so much about streaming, SSAI, and ad pod optimization tactics. Taking lead on a new product at Beachfront was a career highlight that gave me the ability to indulge in my passion for education and shape a new solution for publishers in the CTV space.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
The biggest learning experience in my career has been jumping into addressable TV with Open Addressable Ready (OAR) advertising. OAR created the work-flow standard operating specifications that can be used to deliver addressable ads on particular smart devices, similar to traditional TV environments. Through innovating Beachfront's Unified Decisioning technology, we are able to support both polling and signaling for linear addressable campaigns. Coming from an all digital background, I needed to quickly learn about campaign management in the TV world. As an operational stakeholder, I worked closely with my development team and the OAR team to test and run one of the first OAR campaigns. I worked to understand both the Beachfront OAR support and the OAR specifications to help identify issues and highlight them to both teams. As we continue to grow these opportunities, we are expanding campaign targeting and reporting, and finding new ways to optimize performance across the board. Beachfront is still working today to push this new standard forward by expanding across additional smart TV devices and educating the programmers about this interesting new opportunity to bring addressable TV to their fingertips through Beachfront's Unified Decisioning.
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
During Covid, many publishers jumped in or seriously expanded their CTV footprint. The growth has been extremely exciting to watch, but I believe now is the time to start cleaning up the streaming TV user experience. Enabling operational tools like unified auctions, deduplication, and competitive separation are a few ways publishers can start to create a user experience in streaming that more closely resembles the traditional TV experience. Also expanding OAR-enablement across all smart devices will help programmers and publishers to see the full potential of bringing all of your TV inventory into one platform. The challenge in all of this will be helping publishers understand and utilize the tools in a way that works best for them to provide a great user experience and maximize revenue.