Sridevi Sarkar, a Media Account Specialist for YouTube Ads at Google, 2025 Innovator of the Year Awardee, ECDMA Senior Member, and Marketing Area Advisory Board Member, Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, India, is of the view that precision could increase the number of clicks, but real brand value is achieved by integration, telling stories, and creating a solid emotional bond.
Nowadays, digital advertising is no longer regarded as a component of the global economy. It is now a driving force. For instance, in 2024, the revenue from online advertisements was more than $259 billion. This is 15% more than it was in 2023, the IAB said in its recent report on internet advertising revenue. It should, however, be remembered that this figure is only numbers. The actual growth is in the thinking process of people. Over the years, the concept of performance marketing aimed at ensuring that the right person is targeted with the right message at the right time. Then clicks, app downloads, and how to reach customers at such a low cost were all that counted. Therefore, businesses were experiencing a huge problem in that they were always in search of the fastest outcomes across various platforms, devices, and geographical areas. Ultimately, the need to pursue short-term victories undermined the long-term goal of preserving brand value in the long run on digital platforms.
Sridevi Sarkar, a Media Account Specialist for YouTube Ads at Google, ECDMA Senior Member, and Marketing Area Advisory Board Member, Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, India, however, is of the opinion that this needs to change. She aims to help advertisers balance efficiency and emotional connection. In her roles with Google in India and Mountain View, she has had a chance to understand advertisers globally and develop strategies that can guide advertisers on Brand advertising online on YouTube. These methods are being used all over the world by millions of advertisers. Among them, worthy of note is her work on the YouTube Ads Digital Maturity Framework, OptiScore for Brand Campaigns, and Full-Funnel Budget Mixes in Reach Planner. These tools have helped a lot of advertisers manage advertising budgets worth billions of dollars efficiently and effectively, thus earning her the Innovator of the Year award recently.
Speaking of the YouTube Ads Digital Maturity Framework, this framework helped advertisers in different parts of the world stop using basic strategies and adopt more advanced approaches to advance in their digital maturity journey. “It provides guidance to plan, target YouTube Ads campaigns, and measure results across the three stages of the marketing funnel,” she says. “Now, it is being used as a guide by organisations that want to increase digital maturity in global markets.”
Other than these, Sridevi is also credited with creating the Customer Objective–Driven YouTube Advertising Methodology for Brand Effectiveness. It was the first structured methodology in digital advertising to directly connect corporate business objectives with YouTube campaign design and measurement. By systematically translating high-level customer objectives into marketing KPIs, creative design, and digital maturity mapping, it provided advertisers with a replicable way to align digital strategy with long-term brand goals.
This methodology is significant in the field of digital advertising because it addresses a long-standing industry gap—helping advertisers move beyond fragmented, short-term metrics like clicks and conversions. By providing a structured model that global brands have applied, it demonstrated how YouTube campaigns could be mapped directly to revenue and brand equity. Its adoption by advertisers across regions, including the U.S., Southeast Asia, APAC, and Europe, illustrates its importance in shaping how advertisers build brand effectiveness at scale.
Over the years, brand advertisers have been complaining about the lack of reliable methods to measure long-term results. Performance campaigns are packed with such data as clicks, conversion, and cost-per-action. Brand investments, on the contrary, rely on less concrete indicators that do not fare well in budget discussions. This lopsided attention has raised an industry debate: should digital advertising focus on efficiency in the short-term, or determine how to measure such things as trust, memory, and attention? For this reason, there was a need to tell advertisers how well their Brand Ads campaigns on YouTube are optimized. Sridevi and a team of product managers and engineers also worked on Optimization Score for Brand Ad campaigns. The goal was not about making creativity into numbers but rather making marketers understand how well their campaigns were set up and are being optimized for. That concept gave birth to the idea of launching OptiScore for Brand Campaigns, which has a potential to redefine optimization as a relationship between campaign setup and brand health over time.
Fragmentation is another major issue facing the industry today. For instance, advertisers were previously using different tools to plan awareness, consideration and action. This felt more like managing spreadsheets than understanding the behaviour of consumers. To bring all of them under one roof, Sridevi and her team turned planning into a process that better reflected how consumers actually travel along their journey.
Due to her numerous contributions to the industry, Sridevi bagged the Innovator of the Year award at the just-concluded annual session of the international tech and business conference of Cases&Faces held in Chicago on October 11, 2025. At the event, awards were given out to individuals who had demonstrated achievement, innovation, or leadership in areas such as entrepreneurship, management, creative transformation, and digital technologies. However, she caught the judges’ attention for driving innovation in YouTube’s Brand Ads ecosystem: developing frameworks now used by advertisers and saving them millions of dollars while transforming their YouTube and digital media presence.
In addition, she was recently invited to judge at the 2025 Global Recognition Awards. These contributions are in the areas of digital innovation, strategic development, and inclusive leadership across global platforms. Her appointment, therefore, is proof that she is an expert in identifying value-driven, scalable, and ethical impact across industries.
Her experience judging the awards provided a unique insight into the industry’s future. The submissions from global innovators clearly reflected a growing demand for the very human connection she has championed throughout her career. While her early advocacy was considered provocative, it is now a widely accepted truth. “The most successful brands understand that the future lies not in a choice between precision and creativity, but in their powerful combination,” she concludes.