Harte Hanks, Inc. announced that Sharona Sankar-King, a highly experienced strategy, business, and operational excellence leader, will be joining Harte Hanks as Chief Customer and Data Officer, a key new position on the senior leadership team. Ms. Sankar-King is coming to Harte Hanks from her years at Bain & Company, where she served as an Expert Partner and global leader in Engagement & Marketing. She will be based in New York, reporting directly to Kirk Davis, Harte Hanks' Chief Executive Officer.Over the course of her tenure at Bain & Company, Sharona served in Bain's Customer and Advanced Analytics practices, supporting clients across industries to help them deliver on their customer engagement and marketing ambitions.

In this senior role, she was responsible for leveraging her expertise in B2C and B2B marketing, customer experience, marketing technology, and data analytics to fuel growth strategies and customer-centric transformations for large-scale, high-profile C-suite clients. In addition, Ms. Sankar-King served as an expert advisor to Bain's Private Equity clients, helping them navigate the customer data, mar-tech, and ad-tech landscape. Most recently, Ms. Sankar-King co-authored a Harvard Business Review article on Generative AI approaches.

She has become a highly sought-after expert in helping companies set their Gen AI ambition, identify high-priority use cases, mobilize efforts, and accelerate business value from this new and transformative technology. Before joining Bain, Ms. Sankar-King spent two years as Executive Vice President, Head of Marketing Science - impacting data-driven creative strategy, measurement, content development, and production for BBDO (Omnicom). In this role, she launched the Marketing Science Practice, a Center of Excellence supporting creative strategy and execution.

Before BBDO, she served as Managing Partner, North America Lead for digital media optimization & advanced data analytics for MEC (now called Wavemaker) at GroupM, part of WPP, overseeing a portfolio of Fortune 500 clients. Prior experience includes positions of increasing responsibility at Experian, Digitas (Publicis), Foote, Cone, & Belding, Time Inc., and Hearst Book Group. Ms. Sankar-King earned her Master of Applied Statistics from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Pennsylvania State University.