Ep 149: From Amazon to AI-Powered Commerce with Marissa Ramirez of ShopSense AI

AdTechGod (0:00)

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Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, your window into the world of advertising technology and the people behind it. I'm your host, AdTechGod.

Welcome to the AdTechGod Pod, where I speak to the female leaders of our industry. Joining us today is Marissa Ramirez. She's the Chief Commercial Officer at ShopSense AI. Marissa spent a decade at Amazon, where she held various leadership roles across Amazon Publisher Services and Amazon Ads. She helped build and scale things across both the publisher and agency business. She's a friend of the Pods. I'm really excited to have her with us today, and I think you'll truly enjoy this conversation. Marissa, thank you for joining me.

Marissa Ramirez (1:15)

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

AdTechGod (1:18)

Thank you.

I was looking at your background before the interview, and you spent quite a bit of time at Amazon. And it was not a short stint, and then you moved into the startup world. So I would love to hear from you, your career journey, what got you into Amazon, and then what enticed you about ShopSense to join.

Marissa Ramirez (1:39)

Yeah, totally. So I guess how I initially got into AdTech was similar as a lot of other folks that are here. There was a kind of a lucky accident. So I'm originally from Southern California, grew up in San Diego, went to school in LA, and throughout high school and college, all of my internships were in traditional media and marketing and PR. And when I was looking for jobs upon graduating, I knew that I wanted to change. I wanted to leave Southern California, and I wanted to explore non-entertainment industry. And my resume got into the hands of Andy Levy and Brian Quinn, who were with a company called Cox Digital Solutions.

And they thankfully called me up to move to the Bay Area and start working within AdTech. So within a couple of weeks of graduating, I was learning about real-time bidding. And at the time, the industry and the company were both going through a big transformation period.

Cox Media Group had acquired Adify, which became Cox Digital Solutions, and Adify supported Vertical Ad Networks. And in 2011, when I joined, the industry was kind of moving from the network model to a real-time bidding model. And so there was a ton for the company to kind of evolve in, and there was a lot for the industry in terms of its evolution as well. And there wasn't really a playbook. There wasn't any guide on what success looks like or the path to follow. And it was like drinking from a fire hose. And I'm so grateful for that opportunity because I met great people. I learned so much. And I really was able to develop the skill of getting comfortable with ambiguity and being able to make progress through ambiguity. And I'm so grateful for that because it's a skill that I've had to call on multiple times throughout my career, something that I used heavily at Amazon. I then joined Amazon in 2014 when the ads business was still really nascent. And I joined A9, which is a lab or was a lab based in Palo Alto, that owned Amazon Search product and AdTech. You know, 75% engineers and I was in business development. And my role was to support the organization as it brought new products to market and scaled those products. So I got to work on really cool things like helping Amazon expand into off-site media through header bidding, the launch of Amazon Publisher Services and Transparent Ad Marketplace, expanding those programs internationally, bringing deals product into the Amazon DSP.

So yeah, there was a lot of growth over those 10 years at Amazon. I'm so, so incredibly grateful for my time at Amazon. I had an amazing experience there.

AdTechGod (4:35)

The tenure at tech companies, Amazon, not just Amazon, but even Meta and a lot of other companies, usually is not 10 years.

It's definitely this two to three to five year range and people move quickly, or they move to something else. I want to ask you, specifically for Amazon, what kept you there? What kept you engaged, happy and working? Because 10 years is a really long time to be at one place.