Angela C. Kinsella is a Northeastern alumna who is now working as a Senior Account Strategist at Google, where she works with small to medium-sized businesses to help them grow their customer base by advertising to relevant audiences. In her role, based in Los Angeles, she serves as a consultant to optimize clients’ marketing investments as well as identify opportunities for growth, manage risks, and build actionable plans to help clients meet their goals. She works with a broad range of marketers to improve their advertising across Google platforms, like YouTube and Google Ads – and as a result, expand their customer base. While the job is a bit of a change of direction for Angela, who was formerly working with larger-scale clients, such as Bank of America or Target, she describes the day-to-day as extremely rewarding.

“The fact that we are working with smaller and medium sized businesses means we can truly help them grow, sometimes from the ground-up, and watch them transform over the course of our partnership,” explained Angela, who studied Communications at Northeastern. “In some ways, my role at Google is the opposite of my past positions in that I am no longer focused on big branding initiatives, but rather customer acquisition and traditional lead generation.”

While most of Angela’s current clients are based in the Southwest, she collaborates with her colleagues from across the country – another unique aspect of her job at Google.

“Google Ads is a dynamic ecosystem and our team is fortunate enough to collaborate with teams all over the world” explained Angela. “This supportive work environment was especially helpful during my first few months here as I was on-boarding and learning the ins and outs and beginning to work with my clients.”

Angela has only been in her current role for just shy of a year , but she is no stranger to working with Google. At Leaf Group, where she worked for years in sales and revenue operations, Angela collaborated with Google on the client side as a technology partner.

“I have always worked with Google in some capacity,” said Angela. “At this point in my career, I was fortunate enough to officially join the Google team and have the opportunity to grow my experience and strengthen my skills, while also building new ones.”

Angela’s time at Leaf Group uniquely positioned her to succeed in her role at Google by allowing her to focus on not just how to sell ads, but how to tell an impactful human-centered story. This is the side of advertising, after all, that really interested her from the beginning.

“After my time at Northeastern, I was accepted into multiple graduate schools, but decided to go right into advertising because there were so many applications to understanding how people communicate, which is one of my passions,” said Angela. “I find it fascinating to gain a nuanced understanding of audiences, and their reactions, patterns, and behavior.”

This focus on communications and the social aspect of the industry was also explored and developed during her Northeastern co-ops at Elevate Communications, Boston Neighborhood News Network, and XY TV, a lifestyle television station.

“These positions gave me a good first taste of what it was like to work in a professional environment, working with a manager, understanding business relationships, learning how to project manage, and more,” recalled Angela. “They gave me more of a real-life environment than simply doing coursework in a classroom, and were crucial in my forming of foundational skills as an employee.”

While these co-ops helped Angela hone in on what she loved doing, on the flip side, they also gave her insight into what she did not want to do. Ultimately, despite being a film minor, she decided she did not want to go into the television and film industries specifically, but was able to apply the knowledge she learned from her classes and co-ops to her current and past roles in advertising.

Now, working in a field and an organization she loves, she is so glad she followed her passions – and her calling to the West Coast! Angela has been living in Los Angeles since her graduation from Northeastern, when she and her now-husband (also a Northeastern graduate) decided they simply could not tolerate the Boston winters any longer. After packing up and driving across the country, they ended up making LA their permanent home.

We look forward to hearing how Angela’s role develops and grows at Google. To see how the Google team is impacting the types of smaller businesses that Angela is working with, check out their Economic Impact Report here.