When she was a kid, Vidhya Srinivasan, Google’s vice president and general manager of ads, was sure of one thing: She wanted to be a doctor.
She had a large family in India—lots of cousins and older relatives, including her grandmother Vatsala. The household had plenty of engineers already. Besides, Vatsala liked the idea of a physician granddaughter who’d be on hand to care for her.
But Srinivasan’s plans were in trouble before she was even out of high school.
“I took biology,” she said, “and hated it.”
Fortunately, Srinivasan had also taken her first coding class. “That completely changed my mind,” she said, recalling the rush she got watching the results. “I could write programs and get them to do things I wanted. I had so much power and control.”
Today, Srinivasan has more power and control than her younger self thought possible. In November 2023, Google tapped her to run its advertising division, the golden revenue goose of a company that grossed nearly $306 billion last year.
The power of the office alone has been enough to make Srinivasan, 44, the focus of attention. So has the timing of her promotion. Google may stand at the summit of the tech world, but winds blow hard at the top.
Google faces multiple challenges to its dominance in digital advertising. It’s contending with criticism from both regulators and industry experts that the Privacy Sandbox, its privacy-friendly replacement for the third-party cookie, isn’t up to scratch. And as AI plays an increasingly powerful but largely opaque role in ad tools like Performance Max, critics charge that Google has a trust problem.
These tensions meld with digital’s relentless march forward to make Srinivasan’s job among the most demanding in adtech.
One of Vidhya’s biggest challenges is restoring advertiser trust.
David Deal, veteran branding and marketing consultant
“Digital advertising is complex and constantly evolving, and leadership in this space requires lifelong learning,” Prabhakar Raghavan, Google senior vice president of knowledge and information, told ADWEEK. “Vidhya is exactly the type of leader that Google and the industry need at this critical moment.”
But Google needs more than a digital whiz kid; it also needs a diplomat.
“There’s a lot of mistrust between the advertising community right now and the Google ads platform, and that’s a shame,” said Search Engine Roundtable founder Barry Schwartz, referring to the revelation, made in the course of the Department of Justice’s antitrust case, that Google had secretly raised ad rates. “Advertisers always had an inkling that something was off,” he said.