Nancy Lazkani Named a Top 20 Dynamic CEO
Congratulations to our fearless leader, Nancy Lazkani for being recognized as one of the Top 20 Dynamic CEOs of 2020 by CEO Magazine. Your innovation and relentless efforts to do what’s best for our clients and our organization, inspires us all.
(As published in the September 2020 issue of THE CEO Publication)
A Reinventing & Innovating Leader
Nancy Lazkani, Founder & CEO of Icon Media Direct has an incredible drive to succeed and equally a drive to do what’s right. This combination creates someone who will aggressively push clients, partners and employees alike to grow, and does so with the utmost integrity. This identity creates a relationship and bond that is irreplaceable when clients are entrusting Icon with millions of dollars for marketing. Relentless in her pursuit of ROI for Icon’s clients, she is almost always uncomfortable and never complacent, pushing innovation and staying on the cutting edge of marketing technology to ensure that irrelevance and obsolescence are two words that don’t find their way in to the Icon dictionary. This resilience and fearlessness in taking calculated risks has allowed Icon to remain the gold-standard in performance marketing for over two decades. “Icon Media Direct, is not a company that manufactures a product, but our DNA is to partner with our clients as though we are part of them,” says Nancy. “The effort is relentless but, in the end, we are a service-based organization that relies on people to help our clients succeed.”
Being a single mom of any status comes with many unique challenges, but being a single mom as a CEO with 100% ownership of her media company, Nancy beat almost insurmountable odds along her path, intent on setting an example for other women in business.
Regardless of the proverbial “glass ceiling”, boundaries were invisible to her. She started her career as a media buyer and was addicted to seeing immediate results from her media placements and then optimizing on those actions to give her clients the best and most profitable outcome possible. She developed a skill and expertise that led her to media mogul status. In 2000, Icon was born and filled the gap of what is now one of the most explosive media categories in today’s marketplace. Nancy has earned her medals of honor within her field of expertise and has been successful at reinventing and innovating the business to become one of the premiere direct response media agencies in the industry today.
“We operate with the mindset that there is no “status quo”. Today’s media environment is so dynamic that we are constantly innovating, finding ways to improve our technology and departmental efficiencies, so that we can be smarter, faster and better to steward our client’s campaigns,” adds Nancy. “One of the main tenements at Icon is that we don’t operate in silos. Our teams work together to individually and collectively strive to challenge the process.”
As per Nancy, there are several areas of technological adoption for the agency, a big one now is the burgeoning OTT/CTV landscape which has evolved tremendously over the past 3 years. Icon has had a seat at the table, partnering with industry leaders like Hulu and Roku to develop new products and capabilities, thus resulting in exclusive beta opportunities for its clients. Another big area of technological focus is measurement and attribution. “Our Data Science teams are constantly refining and developing measurement tools to ensure we’re providing the most accurate and actionable performance metrics,” says Nancy. “From developing our own proprietary Media Mix Models that can measure each media channel’s incrementality and impact on overall business, to partnering with industry leaders to leverage ACR technology; Icon’s focus remains driving new innovation in technology to strive towards a single point of truth with campaign performance.”
While television has been at the core foundation of Icon’s expertise, there is an evolution of the way television content is being consumed. Icon has been there, following consumer behavior and TV viewing consumption not because they read articles about the space, but because they saw consumer results that show proof of those shifting habits. While Television is still without a doubt the largest scale medium for reaching the masses, streaming content (OTT/CTV) is also becoming the next generation platform for viewing content. People follow content and Icon is following what and where consumers are responding to that content. “We continue to work internally with our data science team and with other technology partners to enhance the linear TV and CTV attribution methodologies that could completely revolutionize linear TV measurement; providing clients unparalleled visibility into the total impact of TV and its role in turning consumers into customers. It’s an exciting time.” adds Nancy.
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