Customer Service & Success, Digital Media, and Product Dev Leader

Aaron Wood

+1-571-***-**** **********@*****.*** www.linkedin.com/in/aaronwoodstats

PRODUCT, SERVICES & OPERATIONS LEADER

Expertise in Creative Solutions, Project & Service Delivery, Customer Focus and Building High Performing Teams Accomplished digital media, product, business development and leadership professional with a strong track record of building cultures of empowerment, creativity, and innovation, driving new, successful products and delivering outstanding customer experience. Adept at cultivating and leading high-performing, multi-disciplinary, customer focused teams who are not afraid to take on challenges, experiment, learn, and deliver the best possible solutions. Experienced in driving rapid growth, leading large-scale integrations, and founding teams and products to solve new challenges. Proficient in collaborating with stakeholders, diverse audiences and varied interests to move things forward, improve customer experience, and innovate. Technically savvy, able to quickly assess needs, build acumen and acclimate to new demands. CORE COMPETENCIES

Digital Media • Leadership • Business Process • Product Development • Customer Experience • Client Solutions Blockchain • SaaS Platforms • Concept • Design • Partnerships • Team Building • Creative Services • Sales Engineering PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

SWARM 2018 – Present

Product and Business Development Consultant, Swarm Operations, LLC (2018 - 2019) Concepted, defined, built and iteratively delivered an innovative, 1st of its kind infrastructure to lower barriers and increase access to investment opportunities as well as to broaden the sphere of financial inclusion and real-world asset ownership using blockchain technology. This product suite is an open, decentralized, and permissionless technology platform with an extremely novel, stake-based access and participation framework. This accomplishment involved deciphering a complex, emerging market landscape and envisioning, defining, and prioritizing which solutions to construct and address from a product perspective. Additionally, the business development efforts include finding the right initial partners, integrations and collaborative experiments to complement these efforts and build out co-operative solutions to address a new, emerging market.

AOL 2000 – 2017

Head of Creative Client Services, AOL Media (2015 – 2017) Led a mature, nimble and wildly talented digital creative concept, design, technical solutions, production and operations team with a flair for both the usefully fancy and the blissfully simple along with a deep commitment to inspired customer service. This bold contingent excelled through full service delivery of both scale and custom rich advertising experiences across Mobile, Video, Desktop and Xbox. Further, the group was an essential partner to advertisers, agencies, sales, AM, product, development and publisher operations. The organization was held in extremely high regard as it delightfully managed to support sales and produce creative experiences for over $300m of revenue for the company.

Rapidly aligned 6 separate creative and client production service groups from reorgs, acquisitions and partnerships into a single organization in just over a quarter while maintaining key specializations and without disrupting customer experience and production integrity.

Integrated XBOX advertising services group which operated as a separate, supported entity and built cross-team and cross-org relationships, interdependencies and support to solidify the transition.

Introduced a Creative Advisory Program to drive both original and customer led solutions. This drove the organization to better utilize resources, reduce operational drag, and improve work value, challenge and exposure of the group leading to 25% increase in client activity.

Transformed the model for engaging, deploying and measuring Creative Service solutions against the media ad sales business increasing sales 20%. This repositioned the group as an extension of the sales team, deepened relationships and improved understanding of clients' needs which led to greater investment in the organization.

Expanded Technical Services to offer much higher value consultative services to sales, clients and production.

Implemented the practice of deliberate integration of enhanced insights using data and consumer testing to make for better exposure, easier assimilation and more thoughtful usage across internal and external parties.

Promoted experimentation, learning from experience, communication across teams, and application of new learnings, insights, and recommendations.

Created an environment for cross-team and cross-org relationships, interdependencies, support and growth channels across the group including creative forums and tech summits. Focused on individual empowerment, mentorship and key decision making tools to improve and maintain morale and facilitate business operation. Director, Production Services – AOL Premium Experiences, AOL Platforms (2013 – 2015) Led a group focused on delivering rich creative experiences to advertising customers at scale and oversaw a major technical and business migration. Drove clarity and efficiency while deepening sales relationships and expanding service through 4 functional areas: Digital Production Management, Campaign Deployment Operations,Tech Services, and Ops Integrity.

Industry Work

2014-15 Co-chair of the IAB Display Ad Guidelines working group to build new industry specification for display advertising to lay a better framework for HTML5 and Mobile technology.

Received a 2015 IAB Service Award and was featured in press, with AOL, as an HTML5 thought leader.

2013-14 Contributing member of the HTML5 Ad Standards working group.

2013 Contributing member of working group that produced the IAB Digital Ad Ops Certification Test. Accomplishments

Delivered a major tech platform, ops and business migration of $45m of revenue and over 130 campaigns in 2013 with almost no delivery disruption.

Increased the adoption of existing Rich Media business stream in 2014 and grew to $90m in revenue.

Drove additional product development efforts launched 5 successful new solutions (AdWeek NYC 2013).

Collaborated to create large scale custom campaigns that combined media & content solutions with creative experience & distribution adding ~$7.5m in revenue.

Led efforts on the customer facing & sales support fronts to commercialize the creative platform for enterprise.

Improved operational channels of innovation sprint efforts for rapid deployment of new concepts and solutions.

Combined dynamic creative solutions into the groups’ solutions adding $10m in revenue. Director, Service Delivery & Creative Production, Pictela, a division of AOL Networks (2011 – 2013)

Built out a completely new team and then served as its leader for creative production, operations and customer service inside the rapid growth Pictela organization after being acquired by AOL. Industry Work

2011 - Developed the specification adopted by IAB for the Rising Star award winning Portrait ad format. Contributed to the specs for the rest of the Rising Star solutions suite as part of Ad Display Guidelines working group. Accomplishments

Expanded and aligned infrastructure and resources to support rapid growth from a $3m to $32m to $45m in 2 years.

Achieved integration, expansion of product, and scaling of Project Devil solution (IAB Rising Star: Portrait format).

Introduced Production Support framework and improved customer and publisher issue resolution time by 50%.

Created product operationalization protocol & process and successfully advocated for its adoption across the business. Improved new solution launch efficiency and reduced post launch support issues by 75%.

Added customer service and support framework for enterprise solution with evolving customer capacity. Sr Implementation Solutions Engineer, AOL Media Networks (2007 - 2011) Developed solutions, specifications, support and QA protocols for emerging ad products, ad technology integration, and custom digital advertising opportunities. Was recognized for 3 awards during this time and was rated as Top Performer multiple times.

Led implementation efforts and framework for Project Devil - an IAB Rising Star award winning ad format (Portrait). Led operational growth efforts to expand to all properties.

Improved operations and ad product implementation, delivery and support.

Generated new production support and troubleshooting framework for the whole advertising business. CERTIFICATIONS

Digital Marketing (6 Certificates across digital marketing concepts, practices, analytics, and channels) by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through Coursera Political Economy of Institutions and Development by Universiteit Leiden through Coursera IBM Blockchain Foundations for Developers through Coursera

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