Ivan Fuyala

Ivan Fuyala is Head of Ads and Pro Seller at Trade Me, where he and his team have spent the last seven years figuring out how to turn the browsing, searching, and watchlisting habits of millions of Kiwis into advertising that actually works. He leads the team behind Trade Me's ad business while obsessing over how first-party data, AI, and smart product design can help marketers reach the right people at the right moment — not just spray impressions and hope for the best.

Before Trade Me, Ivan spent four years in New York at Vevo, the world's biggest premium music video platform, where he sold video advertising to Fortune 500 brands across 14 markets and learned that no matter how good your data is, you still have to tell a compelling story to get a media buyer's attention. Before that, he was at Nielsen in Manhattan, where he worked with Google, YouTube, and Facebook to build some of the first tools that proved digital advertising actually reached real humans — including cross-platform measurement products that helped shift hundreds of millions in ad spend. He's also built and scaled SaaS products from scratch, run a national media measurement business, and sat in enough agency boardrooms to know that what marketers really want is pretty simple: proof that their money did something.

With 20+ years across digital media, ad tech, data, and eCommerce — spanning New Zealand, the US, and global markets — Ivan brings a practical, no-nonsense perspective on what's working in digital advertising right now and where the smart money is heading next. He's particularly passionate about how classified and marketplace platforms can use their unique data signals to outperform the walled gardens.

When he's not staring at dashboards, Ivan can be found somewhere in the New Zealand bush hunting or on the ocean with a fishing rod — arguably the only two activities where poor targeting has even worse consequences than it does in digital advertising.