The Fourth Wave
A career at the intersection of media research and marketing effectiveness, from Yahoo and Pinterest to BuzzFeed, Vox Media and now Uber Advertising.
"the digital experience has to create consumer control"
Edwin Wong is Global Head of Measurement at Uber Advertising, where he leads how the platform proves effectiveness for advertisers. He is known for working at the intersection of media research and marketing effectiveness, and for arguing that context and consumer control matter more than raw data volume.
Wong began as a psychology major focused on understanding people, then joined Holland Partners, a consultancy he says was born out of the UK, where as the youngest person in Los Angeles he worked on brands and communications for the likes of Yahoo and eBay in the early 2000s. That led to roughly a decade at Yahoo looking after the search business from marketing and research perspectives, before he moved to Pinterest to build out its business analytics practice as the company began connecting with advertisers and considering how the digital space affects the physical one.
Over the following decade Wong worked at journalism companies BuzzFeed and Vox Media, where he became passionate about how content and information flow with consumers through podcasts, particularly in his last role at Vox Media. He now leads global measurement at Uber Advertising, a platform he describes as connective commerce, and where he says the ability to see the sale lets his team look at incrementality that other platforms cannot.
our algorithm isn't driving the feed. It's actually delivering on a need.
"as much as we have fragmentation, the context and that, you know, signal I think becomes really important"
Wong argues that the answer to fragmented media is not more metrics but sharper context. He points to Uber's everyday utility, hundreds of millions of monthly riders and billions of trips, as a source of signal marketers can trust. In his telling, source destination and real intent cut through the noise where reach alone cannot.
"it's probably not hard to measure. It's hard to break through."
Wong rejects the idea that brand impact is unmeasurable. Working with Adelaide and Kantar, he says Uber correlated attention with brand consideration to give chief marketing officers both an implicit and explicit read on the consumer. The real challenge, in his view, is breaking through rather than proving the effect.
"there are so many new tools now that, that make everyone a researcher, everyone an expert, everyone a coder."
Wong is wary of tools that flatten the craft of research. He warns of a potential loss of expertise and a growing need for curation, arguing that a strong base of knowledge and the ability to ask the right question still separate a researcher from an assistant. He favours smaller, constantly refreshed data over crawling the whole web.
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