Doohers and Shakers: Gabby Stoller

The latest guest in our long-form interview series - Doohers and Shakers - is Gabby Stoller, Chief Revenue Officer at Big Happy, the creative-first, performance-powered adtech platform that transforms everyday screens into unforgettable experiences. Gabby stepped into the CRO role this year, having joined Big Happy as GM of DOOH in mid-2025. Before that, she spent over four years at Walmart Connect, where she headed a sales team shaping the retailer's omnichannel strategy and worked closely with suppliers including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Danone, Chobani, Kraft, ABI, Diageo, Mars, Nestle and Mondelez. A seasoned sales and media leader, Gabby built her career across Vistar Media, Placed, Verve and The New York Times, with deep roots in programmatic and location-based advertising. We hope you enjoy the read!

You moved into the CRO seat at Big Happy this January, after eight months as GM of DOOH, and before that you spent years building revenue accountability at Walmart Connect. What does the CRO remit actually cover day to day, and how has your approach to revenue leadership changed moving from retail media into ad tech and DOOH?  

The CRO remit is overseeing Revenue and Marketing at Big Happy. My time at Walmart gave me the best foundation in financial discipline, pipeline hygiene, and true accountability across all the data points a sales org needs to function at its highest capacity.

Day to day, my focus is on: providing the team with the tools to continue to elevate and succeed; being present with client directs, agencies, and partners; crafting strategy, GTM, and events alongside marketing; working cross-functionally with leadership across each division to problem-solve and build; hiring and recruiting; and expanding our client base.

Ultimately, my job is to make sure Revenue and Marketing are operating as one connected engine rather than two separate functions, so that everything from pipeline discipline to brand storytelling is pulling in the same direction. I care most about building a team and a process that can scale with the business.

What's the most rewarding part of the CRO role at Big Happy so far?  

We became an omni-platform as a full organization in January 2026, and seeing the team's intellectual curiosity as it relates to DOOH — embracing this channel and driving adoption across the company with both our existing and new brands — has been incredible. It surpassed all of our revenue expectations, and we achieved company milestones in just the first half of 2026. What's been especially exciting is watching brands choose Big Happy as their DOOH partner, trusting us to bring their storytelling to life in this channel, and watching our own team build real fluency in this channel.

I've also loved seeing the team continue to grow, and all of the promotions along the way. The Revenue Org team inclusive of marketing and sales shows up every single day with such intention, focus, and hunger; seeing that level of commitment and dedication to the company, and the love for what we do, is so rewarding. That kind of energy is contagious, and it's a big part of why we've been able to move so fast without losing quality or care in the work. The culture here is a 10/10, and that's something we want to always protect as we scale.

Big Happy's platform is built around cinematic, story-driven 3D creative. In your view, what are the drivers of standout DOOH creative performance?  

Authenticity, minimal text, and treating each 3D canvas as a blank slate rather than a template — customized to the specific venue and screen.  A generic asset dropped onto a 3D format breaks the illusion entirely. And there's real science behind why the format itself performs: 3D triggers the brain in a way flat creative can't, the illusion of depth and objects breaking the frame creates a genuine moment of surprise and a double-take that makes the message stick, rather than something people scroll past without registering.

Is there a campaign Big Happy has worked on this year that stands out as your favourite, and what made it work?  

I love the launch of our 3D DCO DOOH product - it's a real category-defining moment. DCO isn't new to DOOH, but it is new for 3D, since it's a totally different file type. In traditional DOOH, it's flat templates or basic HTML5 swaps; our technology adjusts custom 3D motion content without losing visual quality. I've loved what our long-lasting Big Happy partners have been doing with it — ice cream brands triggering creative based on weather, retailers surfacing distance to the nearest location, and brands using weather to predict certain conditions and adjust accordingly. Those are my favorite campaigns.

You spent years embedding measurable accountability into retail media at Walmart Connect, working with suppliers like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Mondelez. What did that experience teach you about what OOH and DOOH still need to do to earn the same level of trust from advertisers? 

Data storytelling is irrefutable, and I truly have such a passion for it. One of the biggest misconceptions about DOOH and OOH is that it isn't measurable — that simply isn't true. Education is one of the biggest pieces of work we're doing right now, helping clients understand exactly what's available and how to use it: brand studies, foot traffic, and sales lift studies are all readily accessible tools for proving impact. The methodology may look different because it's a one-to-many medium rather than a one-to-one channel like digital, but the measurement still exists, it's rigorous, and it's only getting more sophisticated as the technology matures. That's one of the many reasons DOOH and OOH deserve a bigger seat at the table from a media mix perspective. The data has always been there, we just need to keep telling that story louder and more clearly.

You’ve just announced a partnership with Veridooh that brings independent verification to Big Happy's digital out of home (DOOH) campaigns, giving advertisers the same accountability they expect from digital and mobile advertising. Why was this important for Big Happy right now?

Big Happy's main mission is to normalize the use of custom creative across mobile and DOOH. Our ad platform empowers us to be the "Pixar of digital advertising." However, great creative deserves to be seen. There was such strong adoption of verification in digital, and now that the same level of tools are available for DOOH, it felt like a no-brainer for Big Happy to get behind it. Big Happy's creative is jaw-dropping and truly one of a kind; it can't be replicated at the same quality and turnkey nature. We want it to be seen, to make the impact the brand is looking for, and that extra layer of validation gives brands the confidence to trust this channel the way they already trust digital.

Advertisers increasingly expect the kind of delivery proof in DOOH that's standard in digital and mobile. Where is the market still lagging, and what needs to happen for verified buying to become the default rather than the exception?

Education that the tools exist, like measurement from a performance perspective, is the next wave. Right now, a lot of the conversation with brands still starts from a place of skepticism, simply because they haven't been shown what's actually available. Once they see verification, attribution, and performance measurement working in DOOH the same way they've come to expect in digital, the hesitation tends to disappear quickly.

Adoption takes time, but look at what's happened in digital: the amount of available tags and tracking mechanisms has grown tremendously over the years, and that took time too — it wasn't built overnight, and plenty of brands were skeptical of digital measurement in its early days as well. The same evolution will happen here. DOOH is simply earlier in that curve, not fundamentally different in its trajectory, and the channel is catching up faster than people expect because it's building on infrastructure and best practices that digital already figured out.

What foundational shifts would be required for the OOH industry to turbo charge its growth?

Out-of-home is one of the oldest forms of advertising — billboards and posters have been part of the marketing landscape for over a century — yet it remains one of the least tested channels by brands today. While digital, social, and search have evolved rapid testing cultures, DOOH has had far less experimentation.

That's changing, and the opportunity lies in embracing what's now possible:

• Creativity over convention: moving beyond a single asset and instead building dynamic, contextual, and CGI-driven creative that takes advantage of the format's scale and visibility.

• New technology, targeting, and measurement: leveraging data-driven targeting, real-time optimization, and closed-loop measurement to bring DOOH up to the same standard of accountability as digital channels.

• A willingness to test bigger: running larger, bolder tests rather than small-scale pilots, so results are statistically meaningful and directional insights are trustworthy.

• An appetite for new partners and new approaches: being open to working with emerging vendors, platforms, and formats rather than defaulting to the familiar.
  

The brands that will win in this space are the ones willing to treat DOOH with the same rigor, creativity, and experimentation they'd apply to any other channel.

What do you see as the biggest trends and technological advancements shaping the future of OOH over the next 5 years?

The next five years come down to two things that have always been OOH's biggest question marks: can you prove it works, and can you make people actually stop and look.

On measurement, the technology and standards are catching up. Brand studies, foot traffic, and sales lift studies already exist — the real shift now is standardization and adoption.

On creativity, 3D and CGI-native content triggers the brain differently than flat digital ever did — it creates a genuine double-take, a moment people actually stop for. And it's not staying niche. More brands are normalizing 3D creative at scale, not as a one-off spectacular but as a real part of how they show up across their whole OOH footprint. Timelines are a big reason why: what used to take months of bespoke production is compressing fast, so brands can move at the speed of a campaign instead of planning a year out for one hero placement. As turnaround shrinks, 3D stops being the expensive exception and starts becoming part of always-on strategy, not just the big annual bet.

What important truth about OOH advertising do very few people agree with you on?

That OOH shouldn't be boxed into "awareness" as its only job. Most people inside the OOH industry would actually agree with me here — but that's not who needs convincing. It's brands and marketers outside the channel who still default to treating it as a brand-awareness play and stop there, and that undersells what it can actually do.

OOH should be tied to real performance KPIs just like any other channel: foot traffic, sales lift, online conversion, the same measures brands hold digital to. Treating it as awareness-only is actually a missed opportunity, and it's part of why the channel doesn't get the share of budget it deserves.