Top Women in OOH Spotlight 2024: Lucy Markowitz

by Amber Larkins, OOH Today

We recently posted our annual list of the Top Women Driving Growth in OOH for 2024. Today’s spotlight is Lucy Markowitz, Senior Vice President, General Manager, Vistar Media.

Markowitz leads sales, client services, DSP & Supply partnerships at Vistar Media. Markowitz and her teams are responsible for cultivating relationships with agencies, brands, publishers, and DSPs. They ensure impeccable service across all aspects of the marketplace. Previously, Markowitz led hedge fund and investment bank sales at Dataminr. Markowitz holds a BS in International Finance and Marketing from the University of Miami in FL.

She had a chance encounter with Vistar’s CEO, Michael Provenzano, which led to her learning more about Vistar Media’s opportunities. More than that, it opened her eyes to the vast amount of OOH that people intersect every day of their lives, such as the Diablo IV campaign that ran when Canadian wildfires were making the New York City skyline look like a scene from hell.

As she learned more about the tools used to streamline the buying and planning process, her eyes opened to OOH’s possibilities. She started to notice that publishers had screens everywhere. Markowitz saw how OOH could contribute to the digitization and transformation that drives cities, including providing important information between advertisements, such as train times, or offering free Wi-Fi and revenue opportunities for small businesses.

Driving Growth in OOH

Markowitz believes that a marketer’s role is to drive a brand’s value through greater awareness or actual sales.

“My role is helping those marketers rethink OOH’s role in solving their business challenges,” Markowitz said. “It encompasses the whole picture: better creative, better targeting, better measurement across all of OOH, alignment with all their other channels, and discovery and execution that are simpler, faster, and better.”

Running Vistar’s marketplace helper her understand the value propositions that their publishers have and to help them find ways to share their stories with marketers. This creates a community within the groups on either side of the market.

Markowitz has had great success at Vistar. Over the past ten years, she’s celebrated achievements such as selling her first seven-figure buy and reaching nearly $1 billion in gross revenue sales across the organization.

Vistar has seen many successes in her time with the company, which she is happy to have contributed to. She was there when the company executed its first award-winning dynamic campaign and acquired Sage & Archer in Europe. As the company succeeded, her role expanded past sales across the entire marketplace for the US.

“At the end of the day, these are not successes that I have alone; they are all done with a team of ambitious, incredible people that I get to work alongside and learn from daily,” Markowitz said.

But to get a larger share of advertising dollars, Markowitz says there are four actions the out-of-home industry needs to take:

1. 1. 1. Embrace being a community

      2. Provide more standardization

      3. Boost the channel as a collective

      4. Not pretend to be a medium we’re not but highlight the myriad of attributes that make OOH similar to these other growth channels like retail media and CTV

Overcoming Challenges in OOH

When she started at Vistar in 2014, she was new to ad tech and selling programmatic, which was challenging.

“I sold myself to Vistar as a teammate who could “sell something people didn’t know existed and didn’t want,'” Markowitz said.

Every day was about getting that call to go through, getting a hit back on an email, and hustling to tell Vistar’s story of WHY it could drive value to a marketer.

She had many people hang up the phone on her. Many didn’t respond or provided defiant ‘no’s.

Vistar and Markowitz persevered and found those willing to try programmatic OOH. Now, programmatic OOH is a hot topic in OOH, and Vistar is one of the larger players in the business.

Promoting Women in OOH

One of the things Markowitz loves about the OOH industry is that there are so many badass women for her to look up to and learn from. She believes that women need to stop believing they are “one of one”, there can be multiple women at the top. She also thinks imposter syndrome is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Markowitz said that women need to look out for one another, boost each other up, and provide honest feedback across hierarchical levels. This can help women gain insights on how they can position themselves to get on a similar path to success.

“I’ve been known to ‘fan girl’ and reach out to other women who I aspire to emulate,” Markowitz said. Markowitz is happy to work with so many amazing women who she admires. These women have taught her not only about being a better employee, but also a better person in the broader sense.

She loves the idea of seeing more women shine, but also believes diverse perspectives help create growth.

“The best person should get the job, not just because of gender, sexual orientation, or cultural background,” Markowitz said. “We should strive to get people into power who don’t all think the same way so we can question and push one another to think differently.”

“I think overall women are showing up in more and more leadership positions and being seen on a more equal footing to men, which is incredible,” Markowitz said. “That being said, there are still very few CEOs both in advertising and elsewhere.”

She thinks that the tide is changing due to more transparency, pay equality, better healthcare, parental leave policies and a reduced stigma on being an outspoken woman is helping to forge new pathways.

But to get more women into positions of executive leadership in OOH, women need to ensure that their doors are always open to give other women advice, guidance, and support.

“Women should continue urging their executive teams to prioritize merit and ensure they consider a diverse pool of candidates, not just a ‘rinse and repeat’ of the same types of people,” Markowitz said.