Vanessa Vera is a senior advertising ad sales manager at Microsoft, where she oversees global revenue growth across the Microsoft Casual Games portfolio under Xbox Games Studios. Prior to moving into the gaming space, she was a strategist for top Fortune 10 companies, bringing business goals from concept to reality across Microsoft Advertising solutions. With over 15 years of industry experience, Vanessa launched her career working with integrated agency teams for top CPG companies such as Coca-Cola and Campbells Soup Company.
Vanessa prioritizes inclusion by creating a sense of belonging and infusing work culture for all employees. As a first-generation Latinx-American, Vanessa has supported defining diversity within interview loops, advocating to senior leadership for diversity requirements, improved measurement goals, created best practices for manager communities, influenced recruiting playbooks and improved the standardization of job description writing. Most specifically, she led an internal interviewer bench project, currently being leveraged by Microsoft leaders. The interviewer bench introduces more inclusion into the hiring process by being intentional on having representation from the interviewer side – helping to disrupt unconscious bias.
She spearheaded an engineering language change (blacklist->blocklist) that was added as guidance as MSFT’s global ‘Writing Style Guide’, co-led a re-design for algorithm changes to improve the experience on Bing for Spanish-language users in the United States, and was awarded a Powerful Moments award and recognized as the Sales Employee of the Year from Microsoft Advertising. She currently is a Communications Lead for Microsoft’s HOLA NYC team, a member of the IAB Games Committee and is a mentor coach to America Needs You. Vanessa earned a B.S. degree in Public Relations from the University of Florida. She recently completed her first half-ironman and is an avid reader, fitness enthusiast, and grill master.
Words of Wisdom: Hard work beats talent when talent doesn’t work hard.
