Sociomantic Labs, a two-year-old DSP geared to e-commerce advertisers, has hired Google’s Jason Kelly as CEO. Kelly was the chief revenue officer at AdMeld, prior to that company’s acquisition by Google – and since then he has focused on integrating AdMeld with the Google stack.
Berlin-based Sociomantic Labs has grown organically, having accepted no investments according to a rep. Its headcount has spiked this year, from 20 to nearly 100. It now runs campaigns in “more than 45 markets across six continents.” No word yet on the timeline for its RTB push into Antarctica.
Offices include Amsterdam, Warsaw, Moscow, Paris, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. A New York City office is expected to officially open soon.
Among its competitors is European retargeting giant Criteo, from whom it claims to have poached a number of customers in EU countries; at press time it had not elaborated on which customers or in what countries.
According to a statement from co-founder Thomas Brandhoff, “We’re looking forward to seeing what Jason’s broad experience and leadership in the market will do for us within North America and globally.”
Prior to AdMeld, Kelly was with Time Inc. as VP, digital strategy and revenue management. Earlier he worked for Rapt and was involved in e-commerce related projects for airlines including Virgin America and Frontier Airlines.
He’s at least the second senior AdMeld exec to depart Google in recent months. Former CEO Michael Barrett left earlier this summer to join Yahoo as chief revenue officer. We hear the AdMeld brand will officially go away by Q1 2013 as the platform is subsumed into the Google/DoubleClick identity — or at least that’s the plan.
There’s more in the Sociomantic blog post on Kelly’s hire.
