Influential Woman · Advertising

Maura Forsyth

Audience Analytics & Strategy Manager, Initiative

New York City, NY

Her Story

About Maura

I started my career in advertising at an advertising agency where I held two roles, first as an associate media planner and then as a media planner. I got to learn a lot about how the media world works, like how we select partners and publishers that align with a client's brief, how audience targeting works, and all of that. Then I took another job in publishing and switched industries at that time. I worked at Penguin Random House for 4 years as a consumer insights analyst, and the reason I made the switch was because I was really interested in pursuing more of the consumer psychology that marketing and advertising have. I really wanted to focus on that, and I also really like the product since I like books a lot, so that was an interesting job for me. About 5 months ago, I made another move into a new job as an audience analytics manager back at another advertising agency, also in media planning, but I'm on more of the analytics and strategy side of planning those campaigns currently. My day-to-day involves solving problems or answering questions like what are the top media publishers that a certain segment would be interested in, or how do we rebrand a particular brand or author. I dig into the data and information, put together a deck or Word doc or Excel depending on the request, and it's really important in this field to make sure you actually have a point of view and you're not just presenting data. You need to think about what the next step should be and then present that to an internal or external team and make decisions from there.

Her Interview

Ten minutes with Maura

01What do you attribute your success to?

I'm very interested in the work, and I find psychology and consumer behavior extremely interesting. I like solving problems, and I like pattern recognition, so those are all the major attributes of my job that I really enjoy. I think that being able to see the excitement in what I do, and something that's intellectually interesting, is something that I do like to spend my time on. Being able to just spend a lot of time learning and growing, because I enjoy it, has been the biggest asset.

02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?

The advice that I would give to someone in this particular industry, the insights world, is to be open to new experiences and to try to stay curious about the information. When you do something over and over again, you have to make sure that you don't just go to the same data source that you always go to. I think it's really good to experiment and to think about what's my hypothesis, what else do I want to answer, and take that kind of initiative into your work. The most important thing is not just being like, here's the answer, here's what I'm going to do. It's kind of like thinking, what else could I be doing, what else could I dive into, and how else can I put my own kind of stamp on this work?

03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?

I think the challenge for the industry of marketing and advertising is that people have very busy lives and have a lot of different sources for entertainment, whether that could be social media or anything. When you're in marketing and advertising, you need to be able to reach them and engage them quickly, and think about what are they actually going to be interested in. I think it is hard to reach people when they have such busy lives, and so I think you just have to get more tactical and more creative about what kind of work are we putting out there that actually will engage people and interest them.

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