JOANNA O'CONNELL
VP/Principal Analyst, Forrester

Joanna serves B2C marketing professionals and is an industry expert on programmatic advertising. As vice president, principal analyst leading adtech coverage, Joanna explores the fast-evolving digital advertising ecosystem with a focus on helping marketers make the right organizational and technology decisions to power customer-obsessed marketing. Specifically, she covers several core components of a modern buy-side tech stack including demand side platforms (DSPs), ad servers, dynamic creative optimization (DCO), and the like, as well as looking at the intersection of service and technology in programmatic media management.

Joanna has nearly 20 years of digital marketing experience and has been a pioneer throughout her career. She began at digital agency Avenue A as a media planner and buyer in 2000 and, in 2008, launched Razorfish’s agency trading desk, ATOM Systems, to bring programmatic expertise to the agency and its clients. Joanna joined Forrester in 2010, serving interactive marketers and covering adtech and programmatic advertising as a principal analyst. In 2013, she moved to leading trade publication AdExchanger, which further deepened her adtech expertise, and in 2015, she joined programmatic tech company MediaMath as CMO, where she led a global marketing team for two years.

Joanna holds a B.A. in psychology from Vassar College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa with general and departmental honors.