Usama Fayyad, a former Microsoft research and Yahoo executive who previously co-founded the Bellevue advertising startup AudienceScience, has been named chief scientist at Adknowledge. The Kansas City-based company claims to be the fourth largest advertiser marketplace behind Google, Bing and Facebook, with more than 10,000 advertisers in the marketplace.
“Adknowledge has a unique network that spans hard-to-reach
channels in the online advertising market today, where the reach of traditional search advertising is weak and has low relevance,” said Fayyad in a press release. “Adknowledge has a distinct opportunity through advanced analytics and targeting technology to deliver even more relevant ads to audiences using the pay-for- performance model. This will help advertisers secure high quality leads cost-effectively and publishers achieve significantly higher yields while delivering relevant messages to consumers.”
Sounds a bit like Bellevue’s BlueKai. That company, which operates a marketplace where organizations trade advertising data, was also started by a former AudienceScience executive: Omar Tawakol.
Backed by Technology Crossover Ventures, Adknowledge has been growing aggressively through acquisitions over the past three years.
Fayyad, the former chief data officer and executive vice president at Yahoo, also serves as an adviser to Seattle mobile analytics startup Ground Truth. He holds 20 patents and has published over 100 technical articles in the fields of predictive analytics, data mining, artificial intelligence and database systems.
By: John Cook
Source: Puget Sound Business Journal / PDF