Guest
Emma Newman
Chief Revenue Officer, EMEA, PubMatic
More than two decades across digital media, a revenue leader who thrives on change and builds the business on trust.
About
Emma Newman is Chief Revenue Officer for EMEA at PubMatic, the pure play ad tech company she joined 12 years ago. She leads revenue across a complex, multi-market region and is known for pairing an aggressive view on AI and agentic advertising with an insistence that the business still runs on trust and human relationships.
Newman has been in digital marketing since 1999, almost always on the publisher side. Her career has run through large corporates that she describes as startups within giants: MSN under Microsoft, AOL as it was restructured coming out from under Time Warner with Tim Armstrong newly appointed as CEO, and Clear Channel UK as it set out to become a digital company. She says she thrives in that entrepreneurial environment, where she can take calculated risks and give her teams the safety to make mistakes and learn.
She joined PubMatic because she wanted to keep supporting publishers from inside a pure play technology company, convinced programmatic would become the way advertising was transacted. By her account PubMatic celebrates its 20th anniversary at the end of the year, having spent 14 or 15 years owning its own data centres and five years working with NVIDIA to prepare for an agentic world. Now running EMEA, Newman argues the industry is at a genuine inflection point, where AI is compressing the supply chain and delivering results she can prove, while trust remains the thing that actually closes deals.
Career25 years
- 2019 to now PubMatic Chief Revenue Officer (CRO), EMEA
- 2017 to 2019 PubMatic Country Manager, UK
- 2015 to 2016 PubMatic Vice President, Marketing, International
- 2014 to 2015 PubMatic Senior Director, Marketing, International
Show earlier roles: Clear Channel UK, AOL, Microsoft
- 2011 to 2014 Clear Channel UK Marketing Director
- 2010 to 2011 AOL Senior Director, UK Marketing
- 2009 to 2010 AOL Director, European Business Operations
- 2009 Microsoft Head of Business Excellence, Microsoft Advertising, EMEA
- 2006 to 2009 Microsoft Business Manager, Microsoft Advertising EMEA
- 2001 to 2006 Microsoft Regional Trade Marketing Manager
How Emma thinks3 convictions
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Vulnerable leadership
Newman built her approach inside fast-moving businesses where mistakes were the price of learning. She argues that unless a leader is willing to admit what failed, teams will not be open about what is and is not working. For her, creating a space of safety is how an organisation keeps moving at the speed the industry demands.
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Equity of opportunity
Newman is sharp about the difference between forced equality and genuine access. She will always hire the best person for the job, but insists on a diverse candidate pool and diverse interview panels so people can see themselves reflected. The goal, in her words, is equity of opportunity rather than quotas.
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Table stakes keep rising
Newman notes that everything the industry once promised, transparency, quality, trusted and data-safe partners, is now simply expected. The real competition is in doing all of it more efficiently and effectively. She treats rising customer expectations as the permanent condition of the business, not a one-off demand.