Mary Ellen Coe is the Chief Business Officer of YouTube. Every partnership the platform signs with a studio, a league or a record label runs through her organization, along with YouTube TV, YouTube Music, YouTube Premium and the Partner Program that pays creators, artists and media companies around the world. It is one of the biggest sales jobs in the world.
She got an early look at the work as a teenager, standing up in front of judges at the MIFA State Finals with something to sell.
A Warrior in the early '80s
Coe competed for Walled Lake Western as a freshman and sophomore, reaching the State final in the 9-10 division both years: fifth in Informative in 1982, and fifth in Sales in 1983. Informative asks a student to make a room understand something. Sales asks them to make a room want something. Anyone who has watched a senior executive walk a room through a new product will recognize both.
Ann Arbor, McKinsey, Google
Coe graduated from Western in 1985 and from the University of Michigan in 1989. She spent the first eleven years of her career in marketing and brand strategy, then twelve as a partner at McKinsey & Company, where she advised consumer, media and technology companies and led the firm's Consumer Marketing and Sales practice in North America.
She joined Google in 2012 to run go-to-market strategy and operations, and in 2017 became President of Google Customer Solutions, overseeing the global ads business serving millions of small and mid-sized businesses. In 2022 she was named YouTube's Chief Business Officer.
She has served on the board of Merck since 2019, and earlier sat on the board of Whole Foods Market through its acquisition by Amazon. Asked about the jump from tech to pharmaceuticals, she has described her own surprise at the invitation:
> "When [then-Merck CEO] Ken Frazier reached out to me, I thought to myself, 'Well, pharmaceuticals, what could I add to that equation?' And we talked a lot about technology transformation, digital transformation, many of the themes that I had experienced in my over a decade of consulting, management consulting and in the tech industry."
It's part of a point she comes back to often when people ask her about breaking into media: that careers are long, that they rarely run in a straight line, and that the turns are usually where the growth is.
> "People will say, 'Well, I'd like to be a CEO one day,' and I always share that careers are long and they are not always linear. What are you finding inspiring? What are you passionate about? Opportunities present themselves, and being open to an opportunity that wasn't necessarily planned at the time can take you off on a new path of growth."
She has stayed close to Michigan as a member of the Ross School of Business's advisory board.
The part nobody's asked her about
We found no interview in which Coe discusses her two years in Sales and Informative at Walled Lake Western — her public story, told across interviews about her career, starts at Michigan and runs through McKinsey to Google to YouTube. It's easy to see why a business reporter wouldn't think to ask. It's harder to imagine that two years of building a case in front of judges, on a topic or a product she had to make a room care about, taught her nothing about the job she has now.
On record
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