• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, November 29, 2023

Vidhya Srinivasan -- an ad exec who previously led product and engineering for Google's core search, maps, and shopping formats -- will step into Jerry Dischler's role to spearhead Google's advertising efforts around the Chrome web browser as the company phases out third-party browser cookies.

“After more than 15 years on Google’s ads business, Jerry Dischler decided to take on a new challenge,” Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Knowledge & Information at Google, wrote in a statement. “Our ads business helps millions of businesses thrive and we’re grateful to Jerry for his many accomplishments in this area.”

Dischler led Google’s focus on new ad targeting and measurement techniques designed to work for advertisers, consumers, and satisfy regulators.

As the company moves further into consumer privacy and implements changes based on artificial intelligence, Srinivasan will oversee all ad services, including ad formats on YouTube and programmatic advertising.

In September, during Google's antitrust trial Dischler told the U.S. Justice Department that for some queries, the company may have increased prices as much as 10%. He also said that in 2020, search ads earned the company more than $100 billion. The Justice Department said Google’s ad revenue growth has consistently been in the “high teens” since 2012.

Raghavan called Srinivasan “a seasoned leader” with deep technical expertise, in advertising as well as in all types of technology.

Shashi Thakur will step into Srinivasan’s previous role, supporting ads for Google’s core business and reporting to her. 

Thakur previously worked on many of Google’s core products -- including Search, Discover and Shopping during his 17 years with the company -- most recently on long term strategy in Raghavan’s Knowledge and Information organization.

He spent 13 years working on Google Search, and during that time played a key role in how Google evolved the search experience with the rise of mobile.

For example, he led the engineering and product teams that brought the Google Knowledge Graph to Search, and developed the product experiences in search across various verticals including sports, music, movies, jobs. He also led the engineering and product team that built Discover as the query-less home page for Search. 

Srinivasan joined Google four years ago from Amazon Web Services, and also worked at IBM. At Google, she supported generative AI (GAI) features for Google ads and AI-based tools such as Performance Max, as well as ad measurement tools and Google Analytics.

In July, Srinivasan told MediaPost that she had aspirations to become a doctor, and then while in school fell in love with technology.

“There were no doctors in my family,” she said. “All engineers. I was probably about eight or nine years old when my grandmother said, ‘when I’m old I want to be helped by my granddaughter, so we need one doctor in the family.’’ Srinivasan took biology and computer science later in school and never looked back.