By Marty Swant • May 8, 2025 •
Uber’s ads business now has an annual run rate of $1.5 billion — up 60% from its where it was a year ago.
To bolster its case with advertisers, Uber Advertising has brought on its first head of measurement science, Edwin Wong, to fine-tune performance and help unlock even more ad dollars. In his new role, Wong will analyze performance insights while working with measurement partners, advertisers, and Uber’s marketing team.
His appointment was announced Wednesday (May 7) as Uber reported quarterly earnings, which showed its ads business has tripled in value since it launched three years ago. He’s no stranger to this kind of challenge. With previous roles at Yahoo, Pinterest, Buzzfeed, and most recently Vox Media, Wong has built a career helping digital ad businesses at scale during pivotal growth phases — often by putting measurement front and center.
Uber, it seems, is ready to do the same. It’s added more measurement features and now works with nearly two dozen measurement partners. Five of those — Comscore, Happydemics, DISQO, VideoAmp, and Kochava — were added in the first quarter of 2025.
On his third day in the role, Wong spoke with Digiday about how Uber’s combination of mobility, delivery, and commerce offers advertisers a unique value proposition — and that each experience requires its own approach to measurement and messaging.
“If you’re on your way to [Madison Square Garden] to watch Harry Styles, what is that experience going to feel like versus when you are actually waiting for a delivery or trying to get a service from the other parts of Uber? Each of those things are different and I think deserve its own story by way of data to help articulate the value proposition for a consumer and how they connect to that advertiser,” Wong said.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
We’re kind of at this sort of inflection moment where it’s about impact in the real world that is going to really define space over the next little while. And so unlike consumptive [content] experiences, I really do think [Uber] is a connective and community [platform] because it is about being on the go, buying things that you actually need, getting things delivered. As a result of that, the global nature and the new experience that Uber will become and means to people creates an interesting place to do measurement and to understand where people are headed.
When we talk about the ad model and the consumption model of the 1970s, it was about leaning back. Then we talked about leaning in by way of mobile and then the metaverse was actually about being in. What’s interesting about this value proposition for Uber Advertising and just Uber in general is that immersion is actually real in real life. It’s not even about this concept of intent, but doing. It’s this platform of doing.
The word “intent” is so often associated with search and now is a part of discussions about generative AI and social. What does that mean for measurement?
When you’re in the middle of going somewhere, when you’re in the middle of ordering and what you might order, the local nature of it and all of those things actually creates a signal not just for the marketplace and the merchants, but also the pairing and the connection that you actually have. And then the immediacy is quite interesting driving into that doing. If you think about just the metrics that we think about as advertisers often, this whole notion of attention and this whole notion of even just the consumption experience, most of us are looking at a flicks of less than a second going through to the next thing.
Anytime you’re in that proof phase, it does mean that it’s time we’ve arrived and let’s see where we go next. This is a new and interesting value proposition that is quite different in the marketplace. How do you leverage data to not just talk about the effectiveness of what you do on the platform, but what is the platform? What does it mean? Why is it important? Why should advertisers pay attention? Being able to actually use data to illustrate is exactly what I’m here for.
How do you see proprietary measurement working alongside a lot of third party verification partners like IAS and DoubleVerify?
These newer measurements or newer metrics are going to be a critical piece… We have new metrics that we can see how we think about recall, how we think about attribution and sales. There is a competitive advantage here. It’s only Day 2.5 and I’m still trying to figure out our partners and how we’re actually representing ourselves in wrap decks and things of that nature.
I know it’s your first week, but what’s your early take on Uber’s approach to a privacy-safe way of combining attention metrics with first-party data?
There could be really interesting signals you can actually pair to create greater attention. A lot of it is about how to think about the user experience and how it can actually pair in a way that doesn’t actually hurt privacy. [For example] when consumers are waiting for an order of food and it is prime time, knowing whether or not an entertainment advertiser could say, ‘Don’t miss this episode of White Lotus,’ because that’s what everybody’s talking about. Little things like that are first-party in nature but are actually privacy compliant. Those are things every platform needs to think about.
What’s your philosophy on measurement and how has being a board member for organizations like the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF) shaped your approach?
We see data as numbers in a spreadsheet. I see it as behavior in a database that you can actually understand and create patterns allowing for people to truly understand people … You start to humanize it and it becomes a lot more meaningful when you’re talking to people about these numbers. They’re actually not numbers, they’re people transacting, they’re people getting somewhere, they’re people buying something. They’re people wanting your ads or not wanting your ads. Those are things that I think are critically important, and that sort of digital humanism around numbers is a core philosophy of just how I think about my role and why I love what I do.
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