AdFest 2025 Welcomes Zach Lain as Speaker

Zach Lain, Director of Global Data Partnerships at PepsiCo, will bring his deep expertise in building and scaling data strategies to the AdFest 2025 Fireside Chat Building Bridges: Impactful Data Strategies in a Fractured Landscape. In this conversation, he’ll share how brands can balance privacy and performance while creating future-proof data infrastructures—exploring the role of clean rooms, the power of effective partnerships, and the biggest challenges in bridging privacy requirements with marketing performance.

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Zach is the Director of Global Data Partnerships at PepsiCo where he oversees the cross-brand and cross-market licensing, piloting, embedding, scaling, and optimizing of all new data assets entering the organization. This includes wider media use cases of advanced consumer targeting and activation; first party data generation and enrichment; digital shelf analytics; and ad verification; as well as support for supply chain, agriculture, sustainability, R&D, and other teams across the enterprise. He plays a central role in building PepsiCo’s consumer data strategy, creating opportunities to further understand snackers and soda buyers in increasingly new and novel ways. Prior to PepsiCo, Zach led data supply at a European CDP, and before that, held a variety of roles at Dow Jones, including a year working directly for the CEO and Publisher of the Wall Street Journal. Zach has a law degree from Peking University in Beijing, a master’s degree from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Chicago. He has been to 94 countries.