Ad Age Insider

The senior vice president of digital revenue at USA Today Network sits down with Ad Age editor Brian Braiker to discuss Gannett's local play, working with Facebook Instant Articles and Google AMP, USA Today's push into VR, Kuntz's time at Gawker and the general perils of print.

As the global Instagram lead at Facebook Creative Shop, Kay is tasked with getting brands to adopt the Instagram Stories format. She discusses the challenges and opportunities brands see with the proliferation of ad formats – and the rise of ephemeral formats specifically. She also talks about her own career path from a legislative assistant in Canada, through stints in fashion, Hong Kong and agency life before landing at Facebook.

Since 2014, Neil Vogel has led the transition of About.com into Dotdash. Under his stewardship, the IAC-owned company has gone from an all-things-to-all-people approach to a publisher of discrete, focused verticals including Verywell (health), the Spruce (home), Lifewire (tech), the Balance (personal finance), Tripsavvy (travel) and Thought Co. (life hacking). We discuss the challenges and opportunities of that transformation – but first he talks about the life-changing experience, early in his career, when he hit the road for a year with the sole intent of getting bored. We also dig into his time at the Webby Awards, which he had a hand in founding and making the cultural touchstone it is today.

Jonah Disend is CEO and founder of Redscout, a branding a product development company with clients like Gatorade and Domino's that he founded in his New York apartment in 2000. We talk about how his love of theater informs what he does, how the advertising industry has not especially embraced the LGBT community -- and a certain bar mitzvah that he threw his company when it turned 13, four years ago.

Alain Sylvain is the founder and CEO of Sylvain Labs, an innovation and brand design consultancy. We talk about his background and the lack of diversity in media and marketing, his failures and his side hustles, which include launching a headphone brand and producing documentaries.

As chairman and CEO of Vox Media, Jim Bankoff oversees eight vertices including The Verge, SB Nation and Vox.com. We discuss what's next for Vox and his past life as a Web 1.0 executive at AOL before and during part of the fall.