Yahoo has been losing a lot of steam to Facebook in the advertising game, and now it’s lost one of its execs to it, too. Nanigans, the Facebook advertising company, is today announcing the appointment of a new COO, Marc Grabowski, a nine-year veteran of Yahoo and one of the first to depart after Marissa Mayer took over the CEO job.
The move is an interesting one, given that Yahoo has put a lot of emphasis on the display element of its advertising business, while Nanigans is more of an ad tech company, working in the still-emerging area of social media performance advertising, analysing and optimizing data about usage and viewers to drive installs, registrations, purchases and other engagement metrics. Nanigans says current traffic its ads are around 2 billion Facebook Ad impressions daily.
This appointment could be a sign of Nanigans going for more traditional formats — or Grabowski finally getting to flex some more tech/product muscle. Nanigans would argue both, perhaps:
“The depth of the company’s technology and intellectual property coupled with social being at the crux of the next frontier of online advertising are just two of the reasons why I’m excited to join this team,” said Grabowski in a statement.
“Marc understands all facets of online advertising, from sophisticated optimization techniques to the strategic opportunity that social advertising presents to businesses,” said Ric Calvillo, co-founder and CEO of Nanigans. “We’re excited to have an online media veteran like Marc join our team during this time of high growth.”
The appointment, Nanigans says, comes as the company is in expansion mode, building up its sales, marketing, business development and operations teams. The company also recently upgraded to Facebook’s new ad-targeting and conversions API. Its 2 billion daily impressions works out to 12,000 per second, for clients like Fab and American Express.
And just because Grabowski’s most recent position at Yahoo was VP of media sales, where he oversaw $1 billion of annualized revenue, that doesn’t mean that he was outside of looking at how to leverage technology to improve ad performance.
In his time with the company, Grabowski had been one of the execs “driving the Interclick acquisition,” as well as leading on its recently-launched big-data platform called Genome. He also played a part in mid-market sales (a potentially big area for advertising on Facebook) and in Yahoo’s reseller relationships. Most recently at Yahoo! he was responsible for a team of over two-hundred online advertising sales and account management professionals.
Nanigans is transforming how marketers acquire and remarket to customers. By harnessing the power of lifetime value to inform more intelligent and efficient media buying, the company is moving the industry away from buying on a cost-per-click and cost-per-action basis to a lifetime ROI basis. Nanigans’ Ad Engine™ is the only advertising platform that measures, predicts and optimizes ad spend for lifetime ROI on both desktop and mobile. Chosen by the world’s leading performance marketers in sectors such as...
Yahoo was founded in 1994 by Stanford Ph.D. students David Filo and Jerry Yang. It has since evolved into a major internet brand with search, content verticals, and other web services. Yahoo! Inc. (Yahoo!), incorporated in 1995, is a global Internet brand. To users, the Company provides owned and operated online properties and services (Yahoo! Properties, Offerings, or Owned and Operated sites). Yahoo! also extends its marketing platform and access to Internet users beyond Yahoo! Properties through its distribution network...
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 1 billion monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...
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