How Joshua Lee helped EDO move from movie marketing to measurement for all advertisers

Joshua Lee was a software engineer at Airbnb for a year but wanted a role with more responsibility. So he teamed up with a group of college roommates from Harvard in 2015 to join EDO as one of the company’s first employees. Since then, he’s guided EDO’s transition from helping movie studios predict and optimize box office performance to helping all kinds of advertisers measure the performance of their media buys based on people’s online responses. See all of Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 honorees here As chief technology officer and head of product, Lee, 32, leads technical work with such clients as Netflix, NBCUniversal and Paramount. For the latter two, that means automating cross-platform outcomes measurement on thousands of campaigns to help brands increase return on investment. In the early days at EDO, Lee helped entertainment companies do what he called “data science arbitrage,” which included such things as analyzing how actors’ appearances on talk shows performed compared to paid media in driving box office results (generally quite well). Applying similar approaches to track how people respond to ads across many categories made EDO a go-to measurement tool for a wide array of advertisers. Among Lee’s accomplishments has been developing a “micro-cohort” model that tracks real-time ad response for privacy-focused streaming networks without using individual subscriber data, cookies or other personally identifiable information. If you could have dinner with one person, alive or dead, who would that be and why? I listen to a lot of podcasts, and one of the podcasts I love is “The Tony Kornheiser Show.” I just think he's such a unique and interesting individual. Part of it is because I love sports, but part of it is there’s something magnetic about just listening to him. That’s who came to mind for me. What are the two top social media sites you use on a regular basis? I’ve never used a lot of social media. But the top one would probably be Instagram. LinkedIn to some extent. What’s currently on your bedside reading list? I don’t read a ton right now, but I would say the book that I finished recently that was very memorable was “Pachinko.” What was the last show you binge-watched? I’ve been watching “The Rings of Power” because I just love “The Lord of the Rings.” At what age do you hope to retire? I joined EDO to really challenge myself and try to become a really strong technology leader. And I feel like I’ve been able to do that and learn those skills at EDO. I’m also, at the same time, very interested to try that at other places in the future. And so I don’t really have a set plan in terms of retirement age right now. See all of Ad Age’s 40 Under 40 honorees here

How Joshua Lee helped EDO move from movie marketing to measurement for all advertisers

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