Life At Nexxen with Joeyee Li

Welcome to Life at Nexxen, a series spotlighting our employees – from their career journeys and go-to advice to the rituals and activities that make up their days here at Nexxen.  

This week, we sat down with Joeyee Li – a senior manager on our business strategy team – who walked us through everything from her day-to-day life at Nexxen to her favorite restaurants in New York. Here’s what she had to say. 

Starting at the top: What’s your current role and how long have you been at Nexxen?  

My current title is Senior Manager, Business Strategy. I actually came to Nexxen by way of Unruly, pushing on six years.  

Six years is a long time! What led you to Unruly in the first place?  

When I first joined Unruly, the NYC office was small, only about 30-40 people. The culture was very welcoming and the focus on human emotions and reaction to an ad via UnrulyEQ was very interesting to me. Over the years, I discovered that I wanted to go down a different path and had the opportunity to pivot to a more strategic role with a macro view of the business, getting me to business strategy. 

And have you always worked in ad tech? 

Essentially, yes – though I didn’t know ad tech existed until my first internship.  

I studied economics in college, and during my last semester, I had a friend who worked at AOL. At the time, their supply team was working to build out AOL Marketplace. I joined as an intern for their account management group, then joined full-time as a yield analyst.  

What is your favorite part of the job? 

The people, hands down. I work with many teams, and everyone I’ve worked with excels at what they do. They’re not only smart and ambitious, they’re also fun and supportive.  

As far as your day-to-day goes, what’s usually on your to-do list? 

It varies and can sometimes be ad hoc. If we have a new project, for instance, I’ll help build out workstreams and reports. I’ll also talk to different teams to figure out how the project fits within their org. An example of that would be the ad server, which we acquired three years ago. We had to figure out how to integrate that team into our exchange, how the pub and product teams would work with the ad server, etc. I helped navigate who to pull in and talk to regarding different elements of that project. 

And what is your favorite thing to do outside of the office? 

I like eating, so finding new recipes to cook or new restaurants to try is exciting. I also enjoy exploring different neighborhoods. 
 

Lovely. Do you have a favorite restaurant in New York right now? 

I get asked this a lot, but there are just so many restaurants here! I try to eat at different places, so it’s very rare for me to go back to the same restaurant. If I had to choose, it would probably be East Harbor for dimsum or Brooklyn DOP for pizza.