Disrupting Display Advertising With Social, Mobile, And Beyond At Disrupt NYC

Brands may be pouring money back into online display advertising, but that doesn’t mean that display advertising works or won’t be replaced by something else in the next few years. Will it be social, mobile, or something else? At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC, we’ll get into this debate with three of the best operators in online advertising: Facebook’s new VP of Global Advertising Carolyn Everson, Medialets CEO Eric Litman, and Right Media founder Mike Walrath. Update: RadiumOne CEO Gurbaksh Chahal, who sold behavioral ad targeting startup BlueLithium to Yahoo for $300 million, will also be joining this panel.

Media companies and brands still don’t understand the power of social advertising, and Everson is going to explain it to them. She left Microsoft in February to join Facebook, and before that was head of sales at MTV Networks. Social ads are more about getting consumers to share a brand’s message on their own—turning consumers into brand ambassadors—than pushing the message in front of as many eyeballs as possible. Call it social targeting.

As computing goes mobile, that changes the prospects for brand advertising as well. On the one hand, tablets offer a more magazine-like experience for both content and ads. But beyond that, they bring location into the mix, which may turn out to be the most important targeting factor of all. Medialets powers the ads on many tablet publications, including The Daily, and is built into Adobe’s creative suite. Litman is taking on Apple’s own iAds on the iPad, and winning. He will explain how he does that.

Walrath was instrumental in making ad buying more efficient by creating an exchange for display ads with Right Media, which he sold to Yahoo for $850 million. But now he thinks that measuring clicks and impressions is the wrong focus for brands. His new startup, Moat, is trying to address that deficiency. Until it does, online display is going to have a tough time taking away advertising budgets from TV, which he think is still a pipe dream.

You can read the full list of announced speakers here. We have many more special guests to announce as May 23rd comes closer. If you haven’t purchased your tickets yet, make sure you do so here. If you are coming with us, we have a couple of great partnerships in place to help you find the perfect New York accommodations. We’ve partnered with Oyster.com who is providing a Disrupt hotel reservation list, plus your very own Disrupt Concierge Service for all Disrupt conference attendees. Oyster.com is also giving an additional 20% off room rates. You can read all about it here.

If you’d like to become a part of the Disrupt experience and learn about sponsorship opportunities, please contact Jeanne Logozzo or Heather Harde for more information.

Carolyn Everson
VP of Global Advertising Sales, Facebook

Carolyn Everson is the Vice President of Global Advertising Sales at Facebook, where she leads the global advertising team focused on top strategic accounts and global agencies. In addition, she oversees media strategy, advertising sales, and account management. Prior to Facebook, Carolyn was the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft’s Global Advertising Sales and Trade Marketing Teams. Carolyn led the company’s advertising business across Bing, MSN, Windows Live, Mobile, Gaming, Atlas and the Microsoft Media Network. Carolyn spent seven years at MTV Networks. Her last role was as Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President of U.S. Ad Sales for MTV Networks where she oversaw strategic planning, operations and finance for MTVN’s U.S. Ad Sales department. She also was responsible for MTVN’s Direct Response business and the cross platform, cross brand strategic sales and marketing group called Generator. Carolyn has also worked at Primedia Inc., where she was Vice President and General Manager of several digital businesses, and held business development positions at brands including Zagat Survey and Walt Disney Imagineering. She is a board member of the Effies and dmg. Carolyn holds a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts and communications from Villanova University where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. She also obtained a master’s degree in business administration from Harvard where she was a Baker Scholar.

Eric Litman
Charmain and CEO, Medialets

Eric Litman is Chairman and CEO of Medialets, the most widely deployed rich media ad platform for mobile. He is a pioneer of the Internet’s commercialization, and as a co-founder of Proxicom, helped to build one of the first, largest, and most successful publicly traded interactive agencies. Eric most recently served as Managing Director of WashingtonVC, an early-stage fund and incubator. Previously, Eric held senior executive roles in high-growth Internet businesses, as founder and CEO of Viaduct Technologies, a global Internet and mobile interactive agency. He was also instrumental in building digitalNATION, a web hosting and services provider, from its launch through its $100m acquisition by Verio Internet/NTT (NYSE: NTT). Eric began his career with technical and software engineering positions at GEnie, a pre-Internet online service provider, and NeXT Computer.

Michael Walrath

Investor, Advisor and Founder of start up and expansion stage companies. Formerly Founder, President and CEO of Right Media Inc. Walrath founded Right Media, Inc., (formerly Right Media, LLC) in 2003. He served as CEO until the company’s July 2007 sale to Yahoo. He had a successful career at DoubleClick (and later MaxWorldwide) where he served as Director of direct marketing and Senior Vice President of strategy and development. In 2001, he was responsible for the creation of DoubleClick Direct, its direct marketing offering. He has been a Director of Meteor Games, LLC since December 15, 2010. He served as a Director of Interactive Advertising Bureau Inc. He was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2007. He holds a B.A. in English from the University of Richmond.

Gurbaksh Chahal
CEO, RadiumOne

At the age of 16, Gurbaksh dropped out of high school to pursue his dream as an entrepreneur and started his first company, ClickAgents. It was one of the first ad networks focused around performance based advertising. Eighteen months later, he sold it for $40 million to ValueClick. In January 2004, Gurbaksh founded his second company, BlueLithium, this time with an insight into sophisticated new ways that data, optimization and analytics could help Web advertisers with behavioral targeting. BlueLithium was named one of the top 100 private companies in America for three years in a row by AlwaysOn, and in 2006, it joined Google, Skype and Salesforce.com in being named Innovator of the Year. In 2007, Yahoo acquired BlueLithium for $300 million in cash. At 28, Gurbaksh is already leading his third start-up, RadiumOne. RadiumOne is the first Real Time Bidding (RTB) enabled display audience network with social and mobile capabilities. Through its proprietary and patent-pending “Social Retargeting” technology, RadiumOne allows companies to take advantage of the ever-increasing amount of “social” data on the Internet to zero in on the consumers most likely to be receptive to their messages. This helps not only companies, since they can make efficient use of limited Web advertising budgets, but also potential customers, since they are presented with messages more relevant to their needs. RadiumOne is headquartered in San Francisco, and is funded by several prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalists. Satellite offices are in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and London.