The New Era of Streaming Ad Tech

Early to Programmatic, Early to Everything: Sarah Harms entered ad tech in 2010, right as programmatic was being dismissed as plumbing for publishers. That timing gave her a front-row seat to every major shift in digital buying, from WPP's buildout of Xaxis to running Microsoft's DSP and curation business after the Xandr acquisition. 🚀

Roku Is the TV You Want: Roku is the largest TV operating system in the US, and The Roku Channel is the number two ad-supported TV time spent publisher in the market. For advertisers, that combination of operating system scale, logged-in audiences, and addressable inventory is rare. For consumers, it is simply the interface they see every time they turn on the TV. 📺

All TV Will Be Streamed: The convergence of linear and streaming is no longer a prediction. Sarah sees CTV collapsing the barrier to entry for advertisers who were historically priced out of television, opening the TV buying ecosystem to millions of new entrants and fundamentally reshaping how inventory is negotiated and sold. 💡

AI Has a Trust Problem to Solve: The industry is moving faster on AI than consumers are ready for, and Sarah thinks the platforms that win will be the ones that treat AI-generated content as a quality question, not just an efficiency play. Roku's position is clear: be a safe, responsible destination for premium content, whether that content is AI-assisted or not. 🤖

Failure Isn't A Dirty Word: Sarah believes failure is how you build confidence. She's bombed interviews, faced setbacks, and built her career by treating failure as information and an opportunity to build bridges. She thinks confidence does not come from getting things right. It comes from knowing you can get them wrong and keep going. 🤝