Search data exchange Magnetic announced the hiring of former AOL and Tumri exec Mike Peralta as the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Read the release.
Peralta discussed his move to Magnetic and the company’s strategy.
AdExchanger.com: With your experience, there are many places for you to go next in your career. Why did you choose Magnetic?
I was drawn to Magnetic for the same reason its clients buy from the company – Magnetic is making it easy for advertisers to utilize the power of search for all kinds of advertising, and that’s an impressive feat. Research shows 98% of the time people spend online is away from search engines. I’m hoping to help advertisers understand the power search data has outside the search engine because I think search re-targeting in particular has huge potential due to its transparency and high efficacy. I’m truly honored to be a part of the Magnetic team and I look forward to raising awareness of its mission within the advertising community.
How is the COO at Magnetic different than your past sales-oriented roles? What personal challenge were you looking for?
I’ve had experience across all aspects of building a business from revenue generation to operations but I’m particularly excited about my role at Magnetic because I’m teaming up with a great founder and technologist and we have a tremendous opportunity to build a business, a team and a culture from the ground up. Of course I’ll be working very closely with our customers to ensure that our products and services provide the highest value.
Can you see a day when Magnetic will offer media in addition to search re-targeting data?
Magnetic actually already offers media and data for certain advertising clients. We partner with more than 90 agencies, ad networks and DSPs, and while our business is still largely based on selling data, we also began offering media plus data recently to advertisers that preferred to streamline the process around running search re-targeting campaigns. We work with the same ad network partners that buy data from us to offer media directly to advertisers so the process is easy. So far it’s been a great way to satisfy all parties and we’ve seen amazing results already.
Given your experience at Tumri, has providing multi-variate testing, creative services run its course as a business model? Is it a feature, rather than a product, for example?
We’re still early in the personalization life cycle. And if what we’re seeing in targeting is an indicator, I believe that we’re going to see even more creative ways to use high intent data such as search retargeting data along with dynamic messaging to get us even closer to providing the right message to the right audience. And knowing when to do so.
By John Ebbert
