Taboola Leadership & Management

What does creativity have to do with building a successful career in sales and leadership? The short answer? Everything. I sat down with Daniel Horowitz, Managing Director of Taboola’s U.S. Large Customer Sales & Account Management team, to learn about how creativity has inspired not just his career evolution, but how it influences his every approach to sales, relationships, and leading with impact.

You’ve emphasized the importance of creativity in sales. Why is it so vital?

I was born into a family of artists. My dad’s a photographer, mom’s a designer, and my sister’s a creative director, so I constantly try to infuse creativity into everything I do, every email, every deck, every client event, how I respond, how I communicate, how I learn. That’s my ‘work-love language,’ and it’s helped me advance throughout my career.

I’m a strong believer that you can reach a finish line professionally, personally, in any industry by taking a million tiny steps or five audacious leaps. The second path is way harder, but it’s more creative and way more fun. My career is built on a portfolio of never-before-done, award-winning campaigns, and these are often born from a simple goal: to move beyond the standard stuff to big, transformative, innovative ideas that forge stronger, symbiotic client partnerships. That’s the work I’m looking forward to.

How can others apply creativity to their work in sales?

Creativity applies at macro and micro levels. A day-to-day pitch goes back to deeply researching the customer and creatively matching our solutions to their needs. Don’t use the same pitch for the same two FinServ clients. If you deep dive into everything a customer is doing–reading their earnings, news releases, digesting their social activity, and following executives, you can find interesting nuggets about their business and provide creative, custom-tailored solutions.

Knowing a client’s business and leaning into your interests to build relationships is a great way to apply creativity. For example, in 2024, I went to 50+ live music events. Sharing more about who you are and what you like and demonstrating your personal brand can lead to building stronger connections.

How do your interests and hobbies outside of work fuel your creativity at work?

My creativity at work is fueled by leaning into my passions outside of work. I love fostering animals, spending time outdoors, art in all forms, cooking, scuba diving, and traveling (6/7 continents complete!). I constantly think about how to utilize my passions and personality to build symbiotic, long-term customer relationships.

AI is only becoming bigger and more prominent. How can infusing creativity into your sales role help secure your position and set you apart?

AI can be used to better and more swiftly understand a customer heading into a meeting, their business goals, financials, and recent announcements. That said, sales is fundamentally about buying you, the person, and changing hearts and minds. I don’t see AI changing that anytime soon. Before you even make your product pitch, you need to pitch yourself creatively as someone clients genuinely want to spend time with. It’s why personal branding is so vital.

At their core, the best people in sales are the best in customer service, and they separate themselves by swimming against the current. If everyone’s using the same AI-generated blurb, it all becomes noise. Creativity and leading with your head and heart become essential to build genuine, long-lasting relationships; something AI can’t replicate. Creativity in sales is about building great rapport, finding unique ways to show gratitude, and demonstrating you care, whether through a custom-made solution or using old-school methodologies like sending a branded onesie to a client who is having a baby.

What inspiring learning resources do you recommend others check out?

1. Setting the Table,” by Danny Meyer, speaks to the power of hospitality in business. While the book is focused on the restaurant industry, its lessons are universal.
2. “Unreasonable Hospitality,” by Will Guidara, offers insight on how knowing a customer so intimately and creating a never-before-done “Dreamweaver”-type experience can help create lifetime memories and loyalty.

What do you want others looking to join the large enterprise team to know about your leadership style?

I’m constantly thinking about how I can lift myself and others simultaneously. As a lead-by-example leader, I care deeply about learning and development, and up-leveling my team’s skills across EQ and IQ lenses. My priority is to furiously help my team grow, hit our numbers, and challenge them to lean into their potential. Part of making that happen is simply being there for people as humans, taking mentorship seriously, and establishing a sense of community.

When you join this team, you’ll see this in action. We’re a team obsessed with the details, where operational rigor is a core part of our culture and empathy isn’t just a value posted on a website. This focus on consistent, high-quality execution, combined with a personal and human approach, is how we each grow and build the trusted partnerships our clients have come to love.

To learn more about why we are consistently ranked as a great place to work, check out the Taboola Life blog.  Visit our careers page and realize your potential with #TaboolaLife.

Taboola SKO - Now that's how its done! 3 Days in Madrid learning, teaching, connecting, Olé!

350 Taboolars from across EMEA came together to hear from our leaders, rally around our vision to be the most effective partner for performance advertisers and to support publishers to thrive in a zero search world. Not to forget the launch of our incredible new product roadmap (get excited!) 

We also dedicated the last day to managers, to develop key skills to support our teams and build our org.

Huge congrats to all of the nominees and winners for our annual sales awards and to our fab hosts who shared with us Spanish culture with an incredible flamenco dance.

I feel so proud to work for such a great company and being with my colleagues over these days is a huge motivator and reinvigorator! 

Special thanks go to all of the organisers, production crew and speakers that made it possible 🩷

When Campaign Asia-Pacific selects its annual 40 Under 40 list, they look for trailblazers who exhibit a rare mix of execution, discipline, and an unwavering desire to elevate the people around them. Serena Gao, our Country Manager for Thailand and Southeast Asia, embodies exactly that, which is why we’re incredibly proud to celebrate her official win this year!

Serena's recognition is a direct reflection of a simple truth: some leaders see targets on a map, and others see people, culture, and potential.

More than a personal milestone, this award shines a light on the high-trust, high-impact regional culture she has built, proving that hyper-growth and human-centric leadership can coexist.

Here, we’re sharing a look at Serena’s award-winning approach.

Ditching corporate silos for "Strike Teams"

When Serena took over the Southeast Asia region at Taboola, she knew treating a complex region of multiple languages and infrastructures as a one-size-fits-all market wouldn't work. To rewrite the traditional regional playbook completely, she pulled from a unique toolkit: her strategic foundation from a Thunderbird Global MBA combined with years of hyper-growth experience at Uber and ByteDance.

Applying those lessons, she dismantled rigid hierarchies and replaced them with "Strike Teams"—small, highly autonomous, mission-driven units engineered to handle specific local challenges. By giving individuals absolute trust and the freedom to make quick decisions without slow corporate approval chains, her team successfully navigated vastly different regulatory and media landscapes simultaneously.

That high-agency environment translated directly into unprecedented market share growth in just twelve months:

• Singapore: Skyrocketed from 10% to 85% market share.
• Thailand: Captured 100% of the digital publisher ecosystem, fully displacing the incumbent competitor.
• Malaysia: Grew regional presence from 40% to 70% market share.

This operational shift was so effective that it quickly caught the attention of global leadership as a blueprint for modern tech expansion:

“Serena represents the kind of leader global technology companies need. In SEA, she has built a high-performing business and a team capable of navigating the region’s unique cultural landscape... She is deeply committed to mentoring local talent, creating opportunities for her team to take ownership while fostering a collaborative environment.” – Chanan Fogel, VP APAC.

A culture where everyone wins 

For Serena, leadership isn’t just about hitting quarterly targets; it is about building a resilient ecosystem of talent equipped to build borderless careers. She invests significant time developing emerging professionals from multicultural and non-traditional backgrounds, pushing them to take true ownership.

And the incredible impact? Every single regional team member with more than one year of tenure swept the sales awards at the 2026 Sales Kick-off in Bangkok—an unprecedented achievement in our regional history!

“Serena is one of the most impressive leaders I've worked with in the regional adtech space. She has an outstanding ability to build trusted relationships across the industry and to bring people together in a way that creates real business and long-term value. Beyond her strong market knowledge and execution discipline, what makes her especially deserving of this recognition is the depth of her experience and the maturity of her perspective, both of which go far beyond her years. She contributes meaningfully not only to her own company's success, but also to the strength of the wider adtech ecosystem.” — Ronen Mense, President & Managing Director APAC, AppsFlyer.

High performance meets real well-being

Having personally navigated the intense pressure of hyper-growth tech environments earlier in her career, Serena advocates fiercely for sustainable performance. She entirely rejects the idea that you have to burn out to build a world-class career.

As a certified Pilates instructor, she fosters mental clarity and mutual trust through informal "third spaces" like Padel and Pickleball matches with her team and industry peers.

This focus on sustainable growth is a major reason why our Thailand office has been certified as a Great Place to Work for two consecutive years, with 80% of Taboolars explicitly noting that they are genuinely encouraged to balance their professional and personal lives.

Diversity is a strategy

Operating in Southeast Asia means navigating immense cultural complexity. Serena recognized early on that a monolithic team would be an operational liability. True regional understanding, AKA the "secret sauce" of sustainable expansion, can only emerge from a workforce that reflects the diverse markets it serves.

She intentionally built a multicultural regional team spanning multiple nationalities and professional backgrounds. This diversity directly drives daily operations, giving the team the cultural fluency needed to handle Malaysia’s multi-ethnic media ecosystem, Thailand’s distinct digital infrastructure; and Singapore’s institutional advertising environment simultaneously.

By actively hiring and championing professionals with non-linear career paths, she is actively reconstructing the traditional executive mold in the technology sector.

Protecting the open web

Beyond the metrics, Serena is driven by a deep conviction that credible, independent journalism is essential infrastructure for society. She works tirelessly to help publishers monetize and thrive in an era dominated by walled tech monopolies.

From launching generative AI solutions with the Bangkok Post to securing a landmark partnership with SPH Media (reaching 86% of Singapore’s population weekly), Serena is actively shaping how digital media operates.

For her, this commitment to equity doesn't stop with media infrastructure, it extends directly to the communities technology often leaves behind. She actively supports rural education development along the Thai-Myanmar border through the iCare Thailand Foundation, helping expand the pipeline of future talent who may one day participate in the digital economy.

“We are constantly exploring innovative ways to strengthen our digital offerings and deepen audience engagement. Taboola’s advanced AI capabilities and strong roadmap for publisher innovation made them a natural partner. Serena has been the architect of this partnership from the very first conversation. Her strategic vision, her understanding of what publishers truly need, and her belief in the enduring value of trusted journalism have been instrumental to our collaboration." — Kuek Yu Chuang, Deputy CEO, SPH Media.

Ready to realize your potential with us?

Serena’s well-deserved recognition is a perfect example of what happens when you combine global ambition with hyper-local empathy. More than growing a business, she reimagined how a modern tech team should operate.

Congratulations, Serena! Thank you for everything you’ve been doing to make the Taboola Life culture what it is!

Ready to realize your potential on a team that values agility, diversity, and impact? Explore the Taboola Life blog and our career opportunities across the APAC region. 

You know Taboola as a global leader in performance advertising, but what you might not know is that our success is driven by both our major global hubs and our strategic regional offices. Our Milan team is a standout example. A small, impactful group shaping the Taboola name in Italy and standing adjacent to other tech giants in the area.

Leading this charge is Chiara Ranno, Taboola Milan’s Country Manager, who is redefining what it means to lead in tech. She champions an agile, people-first approach that grants her team the kind of autonomy and impact usually lost in large companies. For Chiara, success isn’t only about the numbers; it’s about the agency of the people behind them.

Q: You joined Taboola after a successful career at Yahoo. What drew you to Taboola?

After the past few years in Business Ops and Strategy supporting international leaders across the EU and LATAM, I was looking forward to proving myself “on the field” in the market I know best: Italy. The Taboola opportunity was particularly interesting because it provided the challenge of a deep transformation and change management project. I’ve specialized in change management for years, so this was (and still is) an intriguing opportunity to align a global growth strategy with the local media landscape and build something durable.

Q: How does Taboola Milan’s “small but mighty” footprint give you an advantage against tech companies in Milan that are large, well-known, entities?

While the industry trend is to move ops & client services to remote hubs or rely purely on automation, we are integrating innovation and presence. We believe in the human factor. In Milan, we’re a team of about a dozen who offer a local enterprise client services team providing bespoke, data-driven consultancy rather than transactional relationships.

This attracts people who want to “own” their business as if it were their own company. That entrepreneurial attitude is what shapes our organization and differentiates us from the larger, more traditional companies nearby. We aren’t just a business entity; we’re local partners to the Italian media landscape.

Q: What’s the team’s core mission within the Italian media ecosystem right now?

At Taboola Italy, we bridge the gap between intent and discovery while respecting the user’s journey and premium-quality content. Our goal is to deepen our footprint within the premium Italian publisher ecosystem. We help publishers maximize yield, and marketers achieve meaningful connections through a foundation of trust and authentic user engagement.

Q: You view leadership as a “Counseling Practice.” How does that influence the daily culture of the Milan office?

I view leadership as a relational practice rather than a top-down hierarchy. I am actually graduating this June as a Counselor in Transactional Analysis, something that has fundamentally changed how I approach my work and my connections with others. An effective business strategy is inseparable from emotional intelligence.

We prioritize Psychological Safety. We operate in an “Adult-to-Adult” state where team members feel empowered to own their roles and their professional development. By fostering an environment where people feel safe to speak up and take risks, we build a resilient culture that naturally attracts the best talent in Italy.

Q: You’re focused on redefining the female narrative in the Italian tech sector. What’s your vision?

I want to move the conversation away from the “challenges” of being a woman in tech and toward the advantages of diverse, inclusive leadership. At Taboola Italy, female leadership isn’t an exception; it’s the standard. By lifting others through mentorship and advocacy, we collectively raise the bar for the entire industry. This is a place where ambition finds a platform.

Q: How does the team stay agile and aligned?

We stay aligned through weekly team meetings, which we call the “Beat,” but our 1:1s are where the real work happens. In these meetings, the employee is responsible for the agenda. They choose the topics and use methods like the STAR technique to structure their development. It ensures that everyone is an active participant in the office’s success, taking full ownership of their career path. We’re at the edge of technology, and while AI is part of most of our daily tasks, human interaction can bring a significant added value. While others focus on pure automation, we emphasise the partnership between machine intelligence and human intuition.

Q: Outside of the office, how do you disconnect and recharge?

I love to spend genuine time with friends and always love learning, but to re-center after busy days, I hike in the woods and practice Yoga and Pilates. I also spend a lot of time with Mino, my Jack Russell Terrier and our office mascot. He always helps me resurface my “inner child.”

Q: What should others expect when joining Taboola Italy?

Big changes require an open-minded attitude and a humble approach. My team succeeds through active listening, continuous upskilling, and genuine curiosity about what’s next. Whether it’s through a new partnership, a team milestone, or a thought-leadership piece, our team leads with integrity, strategic foresight, and a focus on the people who drive it. We position our local office not just as a business entity, but as a catalyst for transformation and empowerment where talent can thrive as humans and professionals.