Women in Data Science Speaker Spotlight: Jasmine Coll

Meet Expedian, Jasmine Coll, Sr. Director, Marketing Analytics, based in our London, UK, office. We are so excited that Jasmine will be a speaker at the Women in Data Science Geneva 2024 conference, talking about the topic: The Optimisation Challenge: Allocating Billions of Marketing Spend to Maximise Returns.

We are also delighted to share that Jasmine was recently named in the top Women in Data® Twenty in Data & Tech list, as an award winner. Twenty in Data & Tech was created to showcase women in these sectors for their success, innovation, leadership or courage.

Global representation and parity are something we continuously work to advance at Expedia Group. To develop a more diverse and representative workforce, we set a binary gender goal to reach a 50/50 balance by the end of 2025 at all levels across Expedia Group. We want to increase our representation of women across our organisation, particularly in leadership roles, as we continue to power improved travel experiences across the globe.

Career Journey

I am equal parts proud and surprised to call myself Senior Director Marketing Analytics with over 10 years experience. I head a global team of inspiring Data Scientists at Expedia Group and our mandate is to accurately, comparably and scalably measure the return on every marketing dollar spent.

There was never a more reluctant maths student. Studying alone wasn’t as fun as socialising, and stuffy lectures too often lost out to engaging classes in dance, music and theatre. Never could I imagine my passion for people, collaboration and creativity could be sated in a world filled with numbers. Yet, once I started working, I was encouraged by managers and mentors alike to remember what this discipline is truly about: telling stories. Analytics became my toolkit to effect change, from influencing business strategy to quantifying decision impacts; it was a language I could translate fluently, a superpower to bring tailored and actionable insight to leadership.

I fell in love with Data Science whilst trying to avoid it, mistakenly judging a book by its cover and almost missing out on the dynamic and empowering career of a lifetime. I believe that the scope of Data roles is still so unbounded and uncharted – a place where true creativity can flourish through collaboration, and where thought-diversity invigorates advancement. There isn’t just one type of Woman in Data; I hope that we can update the book cover to represent all its varied voices, skills, and personalities within.

Questions & Answers

What’s been your proudest moment at Expedia Group?

My analytics colleagues inspire me daily – their diversity in thought, personality, and knowledge creates a motivational environment to work in. When I organised an analytics team-wide I&D hackathon, I was blown away by how our community was able to apply their classroom-taught skills to address real world inclusion & diversity issues. One standout entry built an inclusivity scoring model for each of our properties based on consumer reviews, another unveiled key applicant diversity insights based on education requirements within job postings.

Overall in my time at Expedia Group, it has been a challenging, yet extremely rewarding, experience to build a company-wide solution for marketing measurement from scratch. Our learnings feed financial and strategic decisions, ultimately driving sustainable growth for EG.

How does your work contribute to travel?

We want to ensure that our marketing spend is most effectively used to reach those who will most incrementally benefit from it. Not only does this drive focus on influencing new users to shop with us (e.g. through media advertising), but also allocates spend to retaining existing customers (e.g. through loyalty campaigns).

My team has published some great technical articles, covering Marketing Attribution, and Market Segmentation for Geo-Testing at Scale, which demonstrates some of the work my colleagues have been focusing on. You can read these articles, and more, on the Expedia Group Tech blog.

What is the best career advice you’ve received?

Be explicit about what you want. My approach was always to work hard, exhibit good behaviours, and hope that someone would notice. My mentor taught me not to expect others to be mind-readers and instead to take matters into my own hands, recognising that the act of having frank discussions about development is in itself a sign of personal growth and maturity. Without her encouragement to unashamedly voice my ambitions, I don’t think I would be where I am today.

What are some of your interests outside of work?

Outside of work I’m a a daily netball player, a monthly musical theatre patron, and an annual solo-backpack traveller.

1. Series 6 portraits of Women in Data by Sane Seven ↩︎

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