The Connected Layer
Twenty-two years across ad ops and programmatic, now setting the direction for Yahoo’s global DSP across Canada, the UK, Australia and Singapore. On the second great pivot of digital advertising and why the DSP is becoming a connected intelligence layer rather than another interface to log into.
“DSPs will become a connected intelligence layer.”
Alice Beecroft is Senior Director of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Yahoo DSP, leading direction across Canada, the UK, Australia and Singapore. Twenty-two years in digital advertising, present at the launch of real-time bidding and now at the pivot to agentic communication. A software engineer by training who chose the front of the platform over the back, she also serves as global co-lead of Yahoo’s Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group.
Alice started in 2004 at OTPmedia as Head of Ad Operations, a decade before programmatic became the industry’s default operating model. A trained software engineer who had decided back-of-house was not for her, she stayed at OTPmedia for over six years before joining Burst Media in 2010 as Head of Ad Operations, then moving to Millennial Media in 2011 as Head of Operations Europe, where she stayed through the acquisition by AOL in 2015.
Inside AOL she rose through VP Operations EMEA, Head of Mobile CS&O International, and (post-Oath rebrand) Senior Director Product for ONE for Advertisers International, then to Senior Director Global Business Strategy, driving DSP client direct and ATD growth across EMEA, LATAM and APAC. The same business kept changing names around her: Oath became Verizon Media became Yahoo via the Apollo acquisition. The work stayed the same shape, building international DSP product strategy from ideation through to commercialisation.
Since March 2022 Alice has been Senior Director of Global Strategy and Partnerships at Yahoo DSP, evaluating emerging vendors and technologies across measurement, identity, retail media, targeting and planning, and shaping go-to-market positioning across four regional markets. She is also global co-lead of Yahoo’s Neurodiversity Employee Resource Group, having been promoted from London ERG lead. She has spoken at AppNexus Summit, IAB AdBlocking, and IAB Advanced Ad Ops Workshops on programmatic, mobile and native advertising.
“Customers will no longer come into the DSP UIs.”
“I was there at the beginning of RTB. I am now at the beginning of agentic communication.”
Alice frames her career around two industry-wide pivots: real-time bidding (which brought automation into the buy and the sell at the same time) and the agentic shift now underway. Through 2026 and 2027 her view is that buyers will stop logging into DSP interfaces and that systems will talk to other systems directly. The DSP becomes a connected intelligence layer between agency stacks, identity, supply, retail media, measurement and creative, with humans still in the driving seat as the governance layer.
“Context is more than what is on the page. It is mindset, moment and motive.”
Cookies are not gone and Chrome’s reversal did not lift the foot off the addressability accelerator. Deterministic IDs at scale (Yahoo carries 345 million globally) underpin modelling for frequency, attribution and audience extension. But the channels where cookies were never going to work (CTV, audio, digital out-of-home, commerce) demand contextual signals that read mindset, moment and geo as well as the words on the page. Alice’s thesis is hybrid by design, with the channel mix dictating the balance.
“Channel 4 on YouTube. Netflix on Amazon. The lone wolves are coming together.”
For years the walled gardens looked like fortresses. The events of the last fourteen months have changed that calculus: Channel 4 distributing through YouTube, Netflix carried on Amazon, Netflix-Spotify partnerships. Measurement has matured enough to show clearly which players are creating ROI, and that pressure is bringing the silos to the table. Alice’s view is not that walled gardens disappear, but that the bar for staying solitary keeps rising.
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