Lindsey Woodland, group VP of client data service at 605 and iSpot.tv, majored in math because she likes solving puzzles. “I still do math today,” said Woodland, who has a Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Missouri-Columbia.
Woodland thought she would be a teacher or professor. “After grad school, I realized that you can teach at any job,” she said. “When you lead a department or a team, you’re teaching them as you go, so it’s applicable in most careers.”
Woodland used math to come up with a solution to one of the television industry’s toughest questions: How well is my advertising working?
She started to address that question after one of her professors suggested she go to work for Prognos, which specialized in projecting sales for consumer packaged goods based on pricing and promotion. Prognos was acquired by Antuit.ai, a big data solutions business.
Woodland moved to 605, Kristin Dolan’s analytics company, in 2017 and got more involved in analyzing television and advertising.
“I felt like at my old company, we solved a lot of the math problems we were working on,” she recalled. 605 was a startup company that was planning to grow and offered more opportunities for creativity and personal career growth.
Woodland dug into the attribution issue. She found a lot of the solutions available at the time weren’t very sophisticated and did the math that proved to be the basis for 605’s attribution product, called 605 Impact.
Woodland said she used modeling and machine learning to calculate how clients’ advertising was performing and provide that information quickly enough for clients to adjust campaigns. She also created visualizations, making the data easier to picture.
“She’s really been the leading light when it comes to product innovation,” Tom Keaveney, president of 605, said. “The most noteworthy thing she’s done is when we talk about how ad dollars work.”
The 605 Impact product is one reason why iSpot.tv decided to buy 605 last year.
Figuring out the impact ad dollars have on various aspects of consumer behavior can be complex, and if clients don’t buy in the best data goes to naught.
But Woodland can do something many other data scientists can’t. “What makes her particularly special is the people skills that she has, and in particular that ability to make complex topics understood at any level,” Keaveney said. “And no academic qualification is going to give you that. That’s something you either have or you don’t have.”
605 sends her to speak at conferences and to explain to clients what the research says, the methodology involved and which strategies and options they should pursue.
Juan Solana, global director, measurement, advanced analytics and performance-driven marketing at General Motors, first worked with Woodland when he was with Walmart. When he moved to GM, 605 and Woodland “was one of the first vendors I brought on board in order to understand better the impact of TV on foot traffic,” he said. “She’s a very good translator between business and data science.”
Keaveney said Woodland’s people skills are valuable inside the company as well. “She nurtures her team,” he said. “They all adore her. She builds incredible loyalty, but also she’s very much focused on advancing them. I’ve seen her organization and I see a whole bunch of mini Lindseys coming through.”
Woodland also develops herself, asking to understand the company’s profit and loss statement and its strategy going forward. “This is somebody who can achieve a huge amount,” Keaveney said.
A Positive Presence
On top of that, “she’s just a good person to have around,” he added. “When she walks into the office, she just lifts everyone’s spirit. She always has a smile on her face.”
Since becoming part of iSpot, Woodland has become the 605er with the most visibility across the organization, according to Keaveney. “A lot of that is because she really felt we could do better together.”
“We now have access to our combined companies’ data, which is pretty great,” Woodland said.
Woodland has been playing golf with her family since she was a kid and was on the varsity team at her Division III school. Her people skills may not include the rule that you don’t beat clients on the links.
“I’ve heard that, but it’s hard,” she said. “Do you really want to let them win? I don’t know.”
