Katy Loria has spent more than 20 years selling screens that people chose to look at. Cartoons at Nickelodeon. Movie screens at Screenvision. Streaming television at FreeWheel. Every stop, the same assignment: walk into a market that is changing faster than the sales team, and rebuild the sales team.

Now she is doing it at GumGum, a contextual ad company that raised its last big check on the promise that cookies were dying. Then Google decided they weren't. GumGum now calls itself The Mindset Company, and Loria's job is to sell a mindset to buyers who mostly still buy audiences. In September she said GumGum would "be back with the proof points." That is the sentence this profile is about.

Loria will tell you she didn't plan any of it. "I always say it's somewhat accidental. I can't really claim that I mapped it out from the beginning," she told Warren Zenna on the CRO Spotlight podcast in September 2026.

She studied English and mass communications at Indiana University and took a master's in advertising at the University of Georgia. Then she went into ad sales at MTV Networks, and the path followed the usual arc: seller, sales manager, leader. "There's sort of a natural progression, right or wrong, into management," she said. "I really enjoyed the mentoring aspects of people management."

She spent close to 20 years at Viacom, most of them selling across the Nickelodeon Kids and Family portfolio. She started by running East Coast linear ad sales, and her own bios credit her with helping fold the digital and linear sales teams into one "360" selling platform. By the end she led national sales for ViacomCBS, according to FreeWheel's later announcement.

That integration job is the first draft of everything she has done since. Two sales teams, two products, one client, and one person responsible for making them talk to each other.

Around 2014 she left Viacom for Screenvision Media, the cinema advertising network that sells the ads before the movie in roughly 40% of U.S. theaters. She became chief revenue officer, with national and local ad sales, sales planning and client solutions under her.

Cinema was a hard sell to TV buyers who treated it as a nice extra. Loria's pitch, in her own conference bios, was that the moviegoing audience was a replacement for the audience TV was losing. She helped build cinema's premium video strategy, which positioned a 40-foot screen as a place to find viewers who had stopped watching linear.

The numbers worked. Screenvision doubled its revenue and tripled its profit between 2015 and the start of the pandemic, Adweek reported. In 2017 she was promoting a sales bench that included Christine Martino, who ran national sales and later became CRO herself. "We're excited to recognize their enthusiasm as well as their accomplishments with these well-deserved promotions," Loria said at the time.

Her sales team also partnered with the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media on a recurring preshow feature highlighting films certified for gender balance. Darryl Schaffer, Screenvision's exhibitor relations chief, credited the work to "our sales team, led by Katy Loria."

The recognition followed: Adweek's 50 Most Indispensable People in 2016, Celluloid Junkie's Top 50 Women in Global Cinema, and board seats on the Cinema Advertising Council, the Video Advertising Bureau and SAWA, the global cinema ad association. She also sat on the board of The Picture House, a nonprofit community theater in her hometown of Pelham, New York. In 2019 her bio closed by calling her the mother of "movie-loving 13 year old twins and far too many pets." She has been a mentor with She Runs It for years.

Then, in March 2020, every theater in America went dark. Martino later said Screenvision had entered that year with "the largest Upfront that cinema had ever seen." By the time cinema came back, Loria was gone, with a stint as interim CRO at Adweek between Screenvision and her next job.

In July 2022, Comcast's FreeWheel named her U.S. chief revenue officer, taking the seat Mark McKee held before he became general manager. FreeWheel is the plumbing for premium TV and streaming ads: the ad server for networks, plus a marketplace where buyers and sellers trade. Her remit was "growing both the sell and buy sides of FreeWheel's marketplace."

McKee said the hire was about "connecting this new TV ecosystem to enable its addressable and programmatic future." He praised her "tremendous sales presence, focus on the customer, and solutions-oriented approach to sales."

She arrived just as free ad-supported streaming took off. "By our own viewing reports, 50% of OTT audience is coming from FAST channels and nearly a third of the ad views," she told Beet.TV in March 2023. She called it a "triple win" for viewers, publishers and advertisers, and then added the warning that has followed her since: "If we don't get it right, we'll lose our viewers."

Ahead of Cannes Lions 2023, she told Beet.TV the industry had to avoid a "lift and shift" of cable's habits into streaming, and called out ad repetition, latency and slate as the problems that drive viewers away. To Jack Myers on FreeWheel's beach in Cannes she pitched scale: "The growth of addressability is increasing scale at breakneck speed."

She hired well. FreeWheel brought in Kris Magel, the former Initiative president and dentsu media clients chief, to run global agency partnerships, reporting to her. "Kris will drive greater collaboration and synergies between our publishers and our agency partners," Loria said.

Cablefax named her one of its Most Powerful Women of 2024. She left FreeWheel in 2025, and the next company that called had a strategy problem and needed a seller to fix it.

GumGum was founded in 2008 in Santa Monica and built its business on computer vision: reading the images and video on a page and placing ads that match. For most of its life the pitch was simple. Targeting people will get harder. Targeting content won't.

Investors bought it. In April 2021, Goldman Sachs Growth put in $75 million, still GumGum's largest round. Goldman's Allison Berardo explained the bet: "Cookies are being phased out and consumer privacy regulations are becoming more stringent." GumGum has raised about $134 million in total, according to Tracxn.

That thesis expired on April 22, 2025, when Google said it would keep third-party cookies in Chrome. By October it had retired most of the Privacy Sandbox. The deadline that every contextual company had sold against for five years was gone.

Seven weeks after Google's reversal, GumGum replaced its CEO. Phil Schraeder, there for 14 years, gave way to Marcus Startzel, a veteran of Millennial Media, AppNexus, Amazon and AOL. Board member Mark Suster of Upfront Ventures called him "customer-obsessed and a natural leader." Startzel's first message: "GumGum isn't just a contextual company. We're a mindset company."

Three months later, on September 16, 2025, Startzel hired Loria as global chief revenue officer, reporting to him. "She brings an exceptional track record of building and scaling revenue organizations across some of the most competitive corners of the media and advertising industry," he said. "Her deep expertise in CTV and omnichannel sales, paired with her commitment to customer-obsessed growth, will accelerate GumGum's vision."

Loria's line: "This is a pivotal moment for digital advertising as brands demand smarter, privacy-safe ways to connect with consumers." Privacy-safe was the right phrase in 2021. In late 2025 it was a harder sell, because the browser that most of the web runs on had just decided privacy could wait.

Loria describes the product better than the press releases do. "I think about it like the weather," she told Australia's B&T in March 2026. "There's temperature, humidity, wind. Those are all signals. But what you actually care about is the condition when you step outside. That's mindset."

The sports version: "If my team wins, I'm in a completely different mindset to when they lose." And the summary: "It's not just the history of who I am, but where I am at that moment."

On the CRO Spotlight podcast she drew the line between the old business and the new one. "The foundation of GumGum is really contextual targeting. We've been at that for 18 years and probably do it as well, if not better than anyone else." The new layer adds device, recent behavior and environment to decide "is this the right moment to serve you an ad because you'll be receptive." And when it isn't: "Let's not bid on that. Let's move on and find the next right moment."

She insisted it isn't a reinvention. "It's an evolution. It's not a pivot."

She took a swing at the identity-first model that runs most of programmatic. Targeting on demographics, she told B&T, "is sort of assuming that because you know broad demographics that you know the right advertising to serve. We're living and breathing, and we don't live in a static world."

That is a good pitch. It is also a pitch that every buyer will answer with the same question: show me.

The podcast is the best look at how she runs a sales organization, and it is unusually candid.

On the job: "You're really in charge of the machine that drives revenue and not just the number itself." At GumGum, she said, that machine includes sales, an agency partnership team, a client strategy team that handles RFPs and bespoke pitches, rev ops and account management.

On what a CRO actually does: "It's to get the obstacles out of the road, right? So my job is really to have the right people in the roles around me, and listen to them and understand what their blockers are and push those boulders off the road, and then be the wind in their sails."

On hiring people who want her job. A colleague once warned her that one of her sales leaders was after it. "I thought, 'Yeah, of course. She damn well better want it.'" Then: "That's the kind of leader that I want to hire, and if it makes you a little uncomfortable, then that's okay too."

On the quarter: "I've never been anywhere where this wasn't the most important quarter ever." And the warning attached to it: "If you're optimizing every decision for this quarter, you really run the risk of accidentally training an organization the wrong way."

On AI selling for her: "I believe to my core this is a relationship business." And the best line of the hour: "I don't need AI making my sellers more efficient at doing work they shouldn't have been doing in the first place." She expects "an agentic buying world in 2027," and she hedged it with a joke: "Humans will always be an important part of the equation until AI decides that we're not."

She also said GumGum is "really in a conversation internally" about whether marketing should report to revenue. Her view: "Marketing owns what we sell and how we talk about it," while "revenue owns how we sell it."

Loria has now been at GumGum for a little over a year. Her own framework for that milestone is worth quoting, because she offered it before anyone asked about her.

Asked how long a new CRO gets before the board wants results, she said it depends on the job, and then described one version of it: "I'm going to spend my first 12 months in the job, you know, really building the system." She also said a new seller "probably takes, you know, three to six months to ramp," and that some years are "a building year," when "this isn't going to be the year that you knock revenue out of the park, but that's okay because you're building for next year."

Here is what GumGum has shipped in that year.

Attentive Lift, built with brand lift firm On Device, launched globally in late 2025 to tie attention to brand results. In Australia, managing director Matt Coote told B&T that eight partners were live, more than in any other market. His next line was the honest one: "Now it's our job to go and validate that by delivering positive outcomes."

Mindset Agent launched on July 15, 2026, turning a campaign brief into a custom segment that buyers activate inside The Trade Desk. Trade coverage noted that no detailed performance figures were disclosed.

GumGum Sports Media launched on September 9, 2026. It uses Relo Metrics, GumGum's sponsorship measurement unit, to spot when a sponsor's logo appears in a live broadcast, and VideoAmp to build household audiences of the people who saw it. Relo's Dylan Cox said the goal was to "reach verified fans as they continue their digital journeys."

At POSSIBLE in Miami in May, Loria hosted GumGum's CTV session with Digitas media tech chief Rob Auger and Archer Meat Snacks marketing head Andrew Thomas. On the podcast she closed with a promise: "Watch this space for more on that story and we'll be back with the proof points to really show that where we're headed is the right direction and that it's working."

A year in, the products are out. The proof points are still coming.

GumGum is private and publishes no revenue. Third-party estimates are wide: Similarweb puts it at $100 million to $200 million a year, and StartupHub estimates about $83 million. Both are estimates, not company figures. It employs roughly 500 people in 19-plus markets.

The market around it has changed shape three ways.

First, the cookie didn't crumble. Every contextual vendor sold urgency for five years. Chrome now keeps third-party cookies with no deprecation date. Contextual has to win on performance alone, against audience targeting that still works the way it always has.

Second, contextual is a feature now, not a company. IAS and DoubleVerify bundle contextual segments with verification. Peer39, owned by Samba TV, sells contextual data into CTV. Seedtag competes on the same pitch. GumGum's answer is that it does more than classify pages: it has creative formats, attention measurement and sports data in one stack. That is real differentiation. It is also more things to sell.

Third, the partner is also the pipe. GumGum's flagship AI product activates inside The Trade Desk. The Trade Desk's Jay Goebel praised the launch, saying AI lets advertisers "move beyond static assumptions." But every dollar that runs through a DSP's segment marketplace is a dollar the DSP can price, package or replace. Loria saw that dynamic from the other side at FreeWheel, where she ran both the buy and sell sides of a marketplace.

Then there is CTV, which is where Loria came from and where GumGum says it is growing. Its job listings call CTV "a growth area for GumGum." GumGum and TVision reported that its in-video CTV units drew 30% higher attention than standard ads. That is a vendor study. In CTV the buyers, and Loria's old FreeWheel clients, have spent three years asking for outcomes, not attention.

Strip it down and her career is one repeated assignment: sell a screen the buyer underrates, at the moment the old screen is losing its audience. Nickelodeon as kids moved online. Cinema as cord-cutting began. FAST as streaming budgets tightened. Each time she rebuilt the sales organization around the new pitch, and each time the people around her stayed and got promoted.

She is also unusually honest for a CRO. "She damn well better want it." "The most important quarter ever." "Work they shouldn't have been doing in the first place." Those are not lines a PR team writes. Buyers notice.

And GumGum has given her real products in a year: an agent inside The Trade Desk, a sports audience product built on a decade of sponsorship data, and attention tied to brand lift. Very few contextual companies can claim all three.

What her résumé cannot promise is the proof. GumGum's mindset pitch rests on measures it built or co-built. Its biggest growth market reported eight live partners and said validation was still the job. Its biggest new product launched without performance data. And the external deadline that made contextual urgent is gone.

Loria says the proof points are coming. Her own rule says the first year is for building the system. She is now in year two.

This profile was reported from GumGum, FreeWheel and Screenvision press releases; Loria's interviews with Beet.TV (2023), Jack Myers, B&T (March 2026) and the CRO Spotlight podcast (September 2026); trade coverage in Adweek, StreamTV Insider, ExchangeWire, PPC Land and Box Office Pro; and Google's public Privacy Sandbox announcements, covering 2017 through October 2026. GumGum is privately held and does not disclose revenue, client counts or Mindset Agent results; revenue figures cited are third-party estimates, and the TVision and On Device findings are vendor-commissioned. Exact dates for Loria's Viacom and Screenvision tenures are not public beyond her own bios. ADOTAT has no financial relationship with GumGum, FreeWheel, Screenvision or Katy Loria. ADOTAT published a critical piece on a FreeWheel-sponsored Advertising Week session on Oct. 7, 2026. GumGum did not review this piece before publication.