One Lesson at a Time: Kristy Quagliariello’s Journey to Programmatic Preeminence

Kristy Quagliariello’s first exposure to the business world came at age 12, when she started taking occasional shifts as a cashier at her father’s in-ground swimming pool company. She might not have been dealing with contractors or defusing thorny customer situations, but the early visibility into the workings of a small business had a major impact on her professional ethos.

Ironically, the work for her father had little bearing on Quagliariello’s future path. That’s because, as she recalls with a snicker, “He never really believed in marketing or advertising.” Still, watching him sustain a business through good times and bad – the company recently celebrated its 50th anniversary, with her father still at the helm – installed in Quagliariello a deep appreciation for the rigor of what it takes to thrive in a professional environment of any kind.

“He built the business entirely on word of mouth, reputation and relationships,” she says. “He treated customers well and delivered quality work, and the growth followed.”

It’s easy to trace a line from this early experience to Quagliariello’s current role as VP, programmatic media, at Klick Health. In between, she found inspiration and/or a paycheck at restaurants, hockey teams, ad-tech providers, network-owned ad agencies and internet giants.

“Each stop along the way built on something else I learned before,” she says.

‘Scrappy and resourceful’ 

Growing up in the tourist mecca of Niagara Falls, Quagliariello initially set her sights on pursuing a career in architecture. Upon reaching high school, however, she realized that “math wasn’t [her] strongest skill set” and switched gears, ultimately majoring in communication at the University of Buffalo. Two internships she held during this period, one with the Buffalo Sabres and the other with New York City-based DeVries Public Relations, further honed her focus.

During her time with the Sabres, Quagliariello worked with the writers covering the team and represented the organization at community events. “Best unpaid job ever,” she says. At DeVries, she supported the agency team managing Procter & Gamble brands Crest Whitestrips and Fixodent.

“Right after Sex and the City, everyone wanted to be a PR girl. I romanticized that role,” Quagliariello says. “It gave me a taste of the hustle and the big-city life.”

What it didn’t do was sell her on that life, so Quagliariello moved back home and received a MBA degree with a focus on strategic marketing management from Niagara University. She then went to work at search retargeting and programmatic marketing firm Chango as an optimization manager, staying with the organization following its acquisition by Rubicon Project in 2015. She recalls her first few years with the company fondly. “It taught me to be scrappy and resourceful. I was wearing so many hats.”

There was nothing startup-like about Quagliariello’s next destination: AOL Canada, where she spent a year as a programmatic account manager. “I needed to adapt to working at a big organization,” she says. “I didn’t have the good fortune to be able to talk to my engineers face-to-face. I had to become more strategic and solve problems myself.”

Quagliariello further broadened the foundation for her eventual Klick work when she joined OMD Canada as director, programmatic, in April 2018. There, she managed large-scale pieces of international business, including projects for McDonald’s and Pepsi, and assembled a thriving programmatic team. She learned how to lead. 

But during Covid, Quagliariello started to feel that her work had settled into a repetitive groove. “It was increasingly procurement-driven. I didn’t always feel empowered to make decisions that aligned with what I believed was important for clients,” she says. “I felt like I was just a note-taker at the end of the day, and just doing what leadership told me.”

Getting to know pharma

A colleague provided an out. Leah Venturina, who worked alongside Quagliariello at both Chango and OMD, mentioned an open director-level position at Klick. While Quagliariello wasn’t entirely certain about wanting to continue in an agency environment, Venturina’s enthusiastic endorsement (“she was like, ‘No, it’s different here’”) helped sell her on the opportunity.

Klick’s vaunted independence didn’t hurt, either. “That meant greater autonomy and faster decision-making. I felt like I would actually be able to make decisions and not be told that I had to run with a certain partner,” Quagliariello explains. The modest size of Klick’s programmatic group at the time – it has since more than tripled in head count – also presented her with another chance to build a team to her own specifications.

The more immediate challenge, of course, was that Quagliariello had minimal pharma-specific experience. While she considered Klick’s health-and-health-only mission one of the job’s primary selling points (“the whole team knows healthcare and that’s their specialty. They’re not working on a Pepsi campaign on the side”), Quagliariello was keenly aware of how much ground she’d have to make up, and how quickly she’d have to do so.

Venturina nonetheless describes the initial fit as easy and natural, and says that Quagliariello immediately distinguished herself as both a colleague and a client whisperer. “What truly sets Kristy apart is her ability to make highly technical data and ad tech understandable for people who don’t work in it every day. That’s a skill not many people have.”

Quagliariello recalls the transition as harrowing but ultimately rewarding. “I felt like I was drinking through a fire hose,” she says. “It’s one thing to know programmatic, but you need three to six months to dig into the nuances of pharma… My first year was a lot of information-collecting, and I still feel like I’m learning every day.”

That openness to new information and activity manifests itself in Quagliariello’s life outside the office. She boasts a 1,500-day streak on Duolingo and has set a goal of reading or listening to 40 books this year. She has traveled to more than 50 countries and, after having been “indoctrinated from birth” by her father, is a card-carrying member of the Bills Mafia.

Quagliariello also likes to remain as physically active as possible. “I’m the best version of myself when I’m active,” she says. To that end, she recently added pickleball to her list of athletic pursuits, cracking that she’s “getting ready for retirement in 20 or 25 years.”

She hasn’t spent too much time pondering her next professional step. Five years and one big promotion into her Klick tenure, Quagliariello remains enamored with her work and the place where she does it.

“I feel genuinely lucky to be surrounded by such a smart team,” she says, adding that Klick’s programmatic group defines itself through its independence and focus. “A lot of agencies and holding companies are very much driven by investment decisions or procurement decisions. Our strategies are driven entirely by our client objectives.”

Venturina envisions Quagliariello someday leading large digital teams and setting the strategic course for the entire organization. “She has both the leadership presence and strategic mindset to operate at that level,” Venturina says.

Quagliariello allows that she could see herself in a chief client officer-type role – which, she believes, would play to her strengths as a collaborator and strategist. Beyond that, she’s happy to let the future unfold as it will… with one exception: “Personally, I hope my dream of owning a villa in Italy becomes a reality.”

This profile is part of the solli Elevate series, celebrating the Next generation of Pharma Media Leaders. View all profiles here.