From Decks to Desks

Sunny Youn is a tech evangelist with Wall-Street discipline and Madison-Avenue storytelling. The MIT Sloan MBA and Ivy League liberal arts major has worked for Amazon, WPP, and Publicis, translating data into decisive advantage for the world’s largest advertisers. Sunny made the step from agency to platform side in 2021 when she jumped from GroupM to Amazon, engaged as Global Head of Agency Analytics to support ad tech integration. She also runs the podcast “Culture by Numbers” – where data geeks meet pop culture. Sunny recently accepted a job at Meta in their future of spatial computing bet on Virtual Reality as a Principal Technical Program Manager and will be relocating from NY to the Bay Area HQ in the coming weeks.

In our conversation, she shares candid advice for agency professionals considering the client- or platform-side. Her career philosophy? “Learn and be curious.” For Sunny, embracing change is both inevitable and strategic.

One of the biggest mindset shifts she noticed moving to a hyperscaler like Amazon was the imperative to think big. Unlike agency life, where you’re solving for one client at a time, platform roles demand scalable solutions - think automation, global impact, and ruthless efficiency. Her team, for instance, built a self-service tool that spits out data-rich PowerPoints for 50,000 accounts across 16 countries... overnight. Humanly impossible. Python-assisted? No problem.

The takeaway? Automation isn't the enemy - it’s how you free up your brain (and your team) for bigger, thornier, more strategic work.

Summary of Sunny’s advice for agency pros making the jump

1. Treat Your Job Search Like a New Business Pitch

• Think of yourself as that new business pitch.

• Do your homework, research the employer, and research the client.

• Perform an assessment of your strengths and weaknesses to find an angle where you can differentiate yourself from other candidates.

2. Master Portable Skills (Focus on Critical Thinking and Writing)

• The most portable skill valued by hiring managers is critical thinking.

• Ironically, Sunny's "secret sauce" was her writing skills. Platforms like Amazon famously eschew PowerPoints in favor of written six-page PRFAQ documents.

• You must be able to write efficiently, get straight to the point, and be discerning with information, avoiding superfluous details.

• Strive to write in simple language, similar to "five year old language," and eliminate "Alphabet soup" (acronyms). The goal is to ensure the written document is translatable to multiple functions (engineers, marketers) and survives a meeting that people may not have been able to attend.

• While technical subject matter expertise in specific agency systems is often not useful or portable, understanding agency processes end to end and maintaining relationships are crucial for bridging the knowledge gap on the tech side.

3. Focus on Outcomes and Quantified Results

• When pitching yourself, do not focus on the action taken ("what you did"); instead, focus on the outcome and results. Start with the result.

• Quantify your results with numbers, such as generating a 175% increase for a client (rooted in context) as this makes more of an impact.

• Reposition your accomplishments by understanding the how and the why, not just the what, as senior executives question this progression.

4. Prepare for the Interview Process

• Be ready to frame your career stories using the STAR process (Situation, Task, Action, and Then the Results), as this is a famous mechanism used in interviews.

• Platform companies value solving hard problems that no one wants to solve. For example, Sunny noted that her unglamorous work on privacy regulations like GDPR and CCPA at Amazon was highly valued because it simplified a difficult process for everyone else.

5. Target the Right Roles

• Look for non-tech offers which focus on relationships and generally do not require coding exercises.

• Titles that transition well include Account Strategists and Sales Development Managers.

• Analytics and Media Manager roles (which are effectively data science roles) and Technical Program Managers (TPM) are also suitable. A TPM's job is to keep projects moving by coordinating resources, escalating issues, and ensuring timelines are met, rather than performing the engineering work itself.

• Business Development (Biz Dev) and Partner Management is a definite area where big tech companies (TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, OpenAI) seek integration with agencies, offering a straightforward path for agency candidates who understand the buy side.

6. Be Patient and Persistent

• Sunny advised people to build yourself time. It took her 15 months to secure her current role, which required daily discipline in outreach, cold calling, and reaching out to friends of friends.

TRANSCRIPT

Michael: Let's start with a headline. So if you had to give your career move a headline, how would you describe your journey from Agency World into Amazon and now into Meta.

Sunny: Always be open to new adventures and new ideas. And yeah, so I think “Learn and Be Curious” is something that I've taken with me throughout my career because nothing is more constant than change. And I certainly didn't expect to even land in the agency world. When I was a bright-eyed bushy-tailed graduate in economics and math and ended up in advertising, my real dream job was actually working on Wall Street, where I did work on quantitative bond derivatives at Goldman Sachs. But I realized that I had a creative interest and also a strategic planning hat, and so agency was an area where I thrived and really enjoyed the journey. So I would say for the agency folks out there who are looking across the landscape for new opportunities, if you've ever worked on a new business pitch, think of yourself as that new business pitch. You are pitching yourself for the next great opportunity. Do all your homework, research the client, research the employer, do an assessment about your strengths and weaknesses, and find that angle and opportunity where you can differentiate yourself vs. everybody else.

Michael: Okay, when you were still on the agency side, what did you think life looked like inside the platforms, and what turned out to be very different once you got in there?

Sunny: Well, on the agency side, I was the managing partner at Wavemaker, working on a few accounts, and as a data analytics lead, a lot of it was about reporting and crunching the numbers, making sense of it. What I did find out at a hyperscaler at Amazon is that working on one or two accounts was not enough. You always had to think big. It's not enough to solve it for one or two accounts; you have to hyperscale because everything was built to be faster, more efficient, more scalable across countries and across clients and industries.

Michael: Agency people believe that the environment is fast. So I'm intrigued by your faster comment there. How does that manifest in terms of the feeling of speed?

Sunny: I have a very good example of how it's faster because certainly in agency land, you're always working on a new pitch or a new deck and sort of collaborating with many different functions on how to perfect the pitch. Well, at Amazon, I worked on a project to generate data-driven insights for a few major global CPG clients. And once we had that story nailed down, we had what was called an automation and scaling team, which is a bunch of software developers. And in three months, they developed a self-service portal so that 50,000 accounts in 16 countries could download customer-specific data-driven PowerPoint that were downloadable for any account around the world. So that story was amplified 50,000 times.

Once we locked down the formula, it just took software teams a few months, and there was literally no need to create a PowerPoint. The PowerPoint was generated through Python coding. So you simply had to drop down the client name and the region, and there were some pre-calculated reports for quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. How do you stack up versus peers? What modules or views in the analytics world did you want? So these were all broken down into formulaic frameworks that salespeople at the edges could pull up on demand.

So that's what I meant by hyperscaling, because the speed meant that no human could do 50,000 accounts in 16 countries overnight. And now we democratize and self-serve the content creation based on data from Amazon's first-party data that anyone could pull up, and you didn't have to know the code or be a software engineer.

So that's what I meant about thinking fast. And those were always evolving. It wasn't a once-and-done. We were always adding to the library of insights with new approaches and new stories. We were telling stories based on the data that we would in the agency world spend a lot of heavy lifting capturing, processing and then coming up with an insight and recommendation at platforms and services. This is done at scale, scale because on a daily basis, you can have a report pulled up or even automated and then sent to the sales teams so that they can distribute the content that's already been pre-approved by legal PR.

So all of the templates with the images had to come from a creative team that was already pre-approved. So the content library and legal language were set, and the data just had to be inserted. So you'd have a sentence that says, okay, this particular category, your brand grew at X percent, which was ranked i” So we just had these blank spaces, and the data would just populate, but the story was already there, so it was really hyperscaling.

Michael: That's a great example. I want to reflect on some, you know, and this is not to say all agencies are like this. I've seen some very well-organized, peaceful agencies. But I also recall a sense of panic and rushing, and you know, that a different sort of faster, that's not the good kind. Are you saying that that also exists in the platforms as well, that sort of rushing?

Sunny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the part that was automated was just the table stakes, so that everyone was reading off of the same notes. Right. And that was part of the challenge on agency land, because what the sales team sees is different from what the investment teams, the programmatic team, and the analytics team see. At least here, there was a single source of truth because they all came from the same source. And so we didn't have to worry about rejiggering the report format. It was already pre-populated into a template. So the rush in the last minute was customizing it still for the client presentation. So that doesn't go away.

And just like AI is doing today, increasing productivity by standardizing and creating templates of things that take a lot of time, but are pretty much very well structured and coded so that you can take time off having to collect the data, manage the data, check the data. All of that gets automated. So it really frees up people to be more strategic and focus on higher-value functions.

Michael: Which parts of your agency toolkit turned out to be your real unfair advantage in Big Tech?

Sunny: So ironically, even though Amazon is part of Big Tech, my secret sauce was my writing skills. They do not use PowerPoints at Amazon; you have to famously write what's called a PRFAQ, which is a six-page document of what you would write as a press release, as though your product were already completed. And they actually have a writing course; there's actually a writing bot.

So you can submit your written draft, and it'll score your writing on a scale of 0 to 100. And it'll cut out and say this sentence is too long, it's too vague. They have what's called ‘weaselly words’ that say something but don't really say anything. So I think what I took with me was the critical perspective on writing, and that is something any agency person can bring to any platform or software service, because it is certainly interchangeable and portable. Knowing, you know, 20 different systems, I believe at GroupM we had like 18 different platforms.

That wasn’t really helpful because those also change even within the agency. Right. Frequently, the pendulum would swing, and you'd have another acronym that you'd have to learn. But that subject-matter expertise wasn't as valuable for me as having critical thinking and being able to write efficiently, with a headline that clearly states the problem you're trying to solve. Having defensible paragraphs, everything had to be very discerning because if it was superfluous information you didn't need, didn't help. People don't want to read long documents. You needed to put together what was relevant and up front and answer the question because there's no fluff. You just have to get to the point.

Michael: Would it be rude of me to ask you your best and worst scores spat out from that system, Sunny?

Sunny: Oh, I was terrible. And I think I got a 13, and at the end, I think I got an 86.

So we try to talk in five-year-old language. Not, not college, not grad school. Yeah, even high school is kind of Iffy, because my manager tossed out my document saying there are too many acronyms, too much Alphabet soup. She's like, just tell it straight like it is.

And so that was, to me, actually the hardest skill, because as someone who is quantitative, I wanted to show off all my knowledge. But when you have VPs who are helicoptering in and don't know all the acronyms, it really is much more useful to describe the function and the purpose and the outcome rather than the fantastic gizmo that you've developed.

Michael: It's super interesting that you say this, because when AI first commercialized as ChatGPT was released, I put a post up on LinkedIn, that was talking about the Flesch–Kincaid Reading Score, which is exactly aligned to sort of grading writing in service of age groups and different reading levels. My favorite score in FKRS is around the late 60 to 70 score. Sunny, do you have a POV on where to set the parameter?

Sunny: Yeah, I think that's about right. 70 is probably good.

Michael:  If you set it up to like 85, you literally get like three-year-old legible, sort of.

Sunny: Then it lacks the content and substance, like, what are we actually building? So the purpose of having something well written is to have it distributable to engineers who are going to build something, to marketers who then have to build a story out of it, and amplify. So having everything on the same page that is translatable to multiple functions is something that we really, really try to master, at least at Amazon, because the written document survives a meeting that people might not have been able to attend. So it really is the one artifact that you can leave behind that people can look at very quickly and make decisions from.

Michael: Yeah. So if somebody's sitting in an agency today, Sunny, with the word analytics or media in their title today, what do you think are the most portable skills that hiring managers on the platform side really value?

Sunny: Yeah, I do think it is about critical thinking. It is about, well, accomplishments. So one of the things that I reformatted or repositioned myself was not about the what, but the how and the why. And this is something that Jeff Bezos himself would talk about.

When you're early on in your career, it's about proving that you've got the long hours, the chops, and the skill set to do what you need to do. But then it's the why and the how that leadership and senior executives start to get questioned more on. So I would say that it is about having an understanding of the why and the how and then articulating that.

Michael: And if you're an agency person opening up a job description for a role at like an Amazon, Meta, or Google, what sort of thing should they pay attention to in order to qualify themselves in, or rule themselves out?

Sunny: Solving hard problems. At Amazon, solving hard problems that no one wants to solve is actually valued. So I wouldn't say that you should disqualify yourself if you aren't working on a flashy project. It's about framing. What was the situation, the task, the action you took and then the results. So I mean, it's famous. The STAR process is part of the interview mechanism. So I would say you have to have a couple of those STAR stories lined up so that it just rolls off your tongue.

Michael: Okay. Were you partnering with agencies? Sunny, when you were on the platform side, did you work with any agencies?

Sunny: Absolutely. I mean, I'm global head of agency analytics, so I worked with a team of what grew to be 150 account teams servicing all of the holdcos in their various regions. And so it was a startup experience within Amazon because it was an area that had not previously been paid attention to. Yeah, so I would say yes, there were certainly some growing pains to get it off the ground. We didn't get it right at the get go, for sure.

Michael: What surprised you the most about partnering with the agencies when you're on the other side of the chair?

Sunny: I think the biggest, well, it probably shouldn't be a surprise, but agencies are a behemoth.

In the first six months, I think I spent most of my time educating Amazonians about what an agency is, what a HOLDCO is, what an OPCO is, and what the whole media planning process was.

I mean, there was just a vast gap in knowledge about things that people take for granted, having been in the agency world. So I put on my teacher's hat most of the time, and we finally had to have one recorded session. I, like the head of agency sales for one of the holdcos, went through and did a diagram about how agencies are structured and organized, and, you know, how decision-making is made. That didn't solve everything, but at least there was a baseline for institutional knowledge.

Michael: Yeah. What are the most common mistakes that agency people make when they try to pitch themselves into platform roles, either on the resume or in interviews?

Sunny: Not focusing on results. A lot of time it's: oh, I worked on this action; I helped synthesize data across 80 different brands… And it doesn't matter what you did, it matters what the outcome was. So start with the result. As a result of creating contextual targeting for a nonprofit client, we were able to generate 175% increase and provide a case study with The Trade Desk. This is actually a real case study that I presented at Amazon. So when I was interviewing. So numbers quantified about the results make more of an impact than saying, you know, I worked with a team of 90 people. Well, geez, I mean, Amazon has two pizza teams, so working with a large team isn't going to win you any brownie points. If anything, they might raise questions about what were you actually doing… Also they value high velocity decision making. So. So if you have 90 people, no fast decision can be made.

Michael: Which titles work, in your mind from agency side, and which don't work quite so well.

Sunny: So at Amazon and as well as other big tech platform software companies, they're tech hires and non tech hires. So non-tech hires don't have to go through a coding exercise. It's about relationships. So account strategists are part of that. Development managers, sales development managers, SDM. So you start with an account, then you grow into managing other accounts and then into more leadership roles regionally for particular products. So you could be promoting Amazon Prime Video, or you could be promoting sponsored ads or the live stream. So I think that that's an area where agency folks are much more successful making a transition because it is a non-tech role.

So it is about a relationship. I had a former co-worker at a prior agency who's now a strategic partnerships lead at Google, and it makes a lot of sense. She was VP of Programmatic there, but she knew all of the ecosystem of vendors in the programmatic space. So that made a lot of sense for Google to hire her for strategic partnerships because of her relationships on the tech side.

I think that unless you worked at product development or tech development within an agency holdco, it'll be harder to find I think SDE software development engineers to transition from agency to SaaS.

Where I was able to enter in? Well, I was a principal technical program manager, managing the agency analytics program. I was responsible for revenue and product roadmaps for agency-facing products. So I think that it was helpful that I was in data analytics. So the types of titles are Analytics and Media Manager, which are really data science roles. There is Technical program managers or TPM. There are PMTs, which are Program Manager, Technical Product Manager, which are very different. A PMT is creating the strategy, vision, and roadmap for a new product that would take months if not years to manifest.

But a TPM is actually what I'm going to do at Meta: keeping things moving along and working with cross-functional teams to ensure timelines, dates, and resources are available to maintain momentum and meet their targets. So that too, while technical, you're not actually doing the engineering. It's about coordinating and negotiating, escalating, identifying risk trade-offs, deciding whether to escalate, and having risk mitigation policies in place in case something goes flat.

So those are the titles that I'm familiar with where I think that agency folks can make a transition. So you're either sales, I mean, figuring out how to sell Google, Meta, Amazon into agencies, or you're working on products specific to where agencies are going. So there's a whole adtech team that is essentially doing solutions development with agencies. So if they're working with any of the holdcos to do API integration to build functionality from a vendor.

I just saw WPP signed an agreement with Pinterest for Pinterest API trends integration. So that means that the core functionality of the SaaS in this case Pinterest is now being sucked in and infused directly into agency platforms.

That is a dream that every SaaS company wants to achieve. So if you have the inroads to work together to make that announcement at Cannes or trade shows, that's a successful partnership, a successful strategy, and something that gets the SaaS companies more tightly integrated with agencies. So that's another role I think an agency candidate could look into fairly straightforwardly.

Michael: That is absolute dynamite gold. Is that reminiscent in any way, Sunny, in terms of the construct of like a publisher JBP?

Sunny: Principally, it's the same. I mean, all of those big tech SaaS are publishers, right? They have content that they're looking to distribute and monetize through ads. So. And agencies control the buy side. So all of that is the sell side. So I mean, I used to work on Wall Street. You're either on the buy side or the sell side. If you're on the buy side, you're a portfolio manager.

On the sell side, you were creating bonds or equities or mutual funds. So similarly, agencies are on the buy side. So you're very familiar with the process for adding something into the mix. Yeah, getting that RFP. So on the flip side, you think of it: you're joining a vendor that's trying to get into the RFP, win the RFP, and secure multiple multi-year RFPs with strategic partnership agreements. So, yeah. I think Biz Dev is definitely an area where all big tech SaaS companies are going to be looking to integrate with agencies. It could be anyone. TikTok, Snap, Pinterest, OpenAI.

Michael: Right. We're just about to hit 2026, but looking ahead a few years, do you think we'll see more senior agency people move into platform roles, or do you think that window is actually getting narrower?

Sunny: I don't know about senior, but I think that everyone's got to embrace AI. I think the agency’s role will still be needed because vendors don't know how to orchestrate creative, storytelling, data, and measurement into one. And agencies have that core role of doing that on behalf of brands and marketers. So I think there would still be a growing role for agencies. However, the way that they do it, you know, the why and the how is going to change, and that's unpredictable. So I think critical thinking and strategic vision will still be valued in the marketplace.

Michael: Okay, that's a wrap. Sunny. Thank you so much for being with me today and sharing some of your insights. This is going to be useful to agency-employed readers who are, you know, thinking about change. Any final words of wisdom for ex-colleagues and folks considering a different path?

Sunny: Build yourself time. It took me 15 months to get to this dream job, and every day was a discipline of doing outreach, just cold calling, reaching out to friends of friends. So I would say - give yourself time.