Press Releases

Industry Veterans from Microsoft, DoubleClick/Google, comScore
& MediaMath Bring Additional Seasoned Expertise to Leading Automation Company

LOS ANGELES – December 11, 2013 – Rubicon Project (www.rubiconproject.com), which operates the advertising industry’s largest independent real-time trading platform for digital advertising, today announced the appointment of Anthony “Tony” Katsur, Mari Kim Novak, Ryan Polley and Shekhar Yadav to its senior leadership team. Collectively, their wide range of advertising industry expertise spans digital media and content delivery infrastructure, strategic partnership development, predictive analytics and business intelligence with Fortune 100 brands and leading advertising services worldwide.

“The level of knowledge and experience that is brought to Rubicon Project through these strategic hires will provide great depth to our leadership team and allow us to bring more efficiencies to our operational business practices, and greater opportunities to buyers and sellers on Rubicon Project’s Advertising Automation Cloud,” said Greg Raifman, President of
Rubicon Project. “At Rubicon Project, we strive to engineer the best advertising automation technology. In pulling this team together, I am confident we will continue to deliver the best technology to buyers and sellers in the advertising industry.”

As Senior Vice President, Business Operations, Tony Katsur will initially focus on implementing several cross-functional operations across the organization, including automation initiatives (both internal and external), go to market and product delivery processes, and technical capabilities to more quickly deploy Rubicon Project’s technology to buyers and sellers. Reporting to Greg Raifman, President of Rubicon Project, Tony will be introducing organizational best practices and establishing new metrics to improve efficiency throughout the company, in addition to providing support for the Product, Engineering, Sales, Account and Marketing teams.

Tony is a well respected and recognized industry veteran who brings more than 16 years of experience in building digital media and content delivery solutions, and most recently served as CEO of Maxifier. Prior to that, he held many senior roles in the industry including GM at MediaMath, where he led the TerminalOne buying platform, CTO of Travora Media, COO of Panther Express and Vice President, Engineering at DoubleClick.

“I’m thrilled to be working at Rubicon Project,” said Tony Katsur. “Automation has been a focal point of my career, and I’m pleased to be joining a company that shares my passion for engineering great digital platforms for buyers and sellers.”

Mari Kim Novak joins Rubicon Project as Senior Vice President, Global Advertising Solutions, a part of the company’s Buyer Cloud team, and will work on new business initiatives and key strategic relationships with buyers on the Advertising Automation Cloud. For more than 17 years, Mari Kim has worked for many of the pre-eminent participants in the advertiser and buyer community. Including 9 years as Global Head of Marketing for Microsoft Advertising where she was responsible for Microsoft’s multi-million dollar global marketing budget and sales enablement programs supporting key brands including MSN, XBOX, and Bing. Before Microsoft, Mari Kim worked at Millward Brown as its SVP, Strategic Client Development, at Jupiter Media Metrix as its Managing Director, UK, and at Relevant Knowledge and Grey
Interactive.

Additionally, Rubicon Project has brought on Ryan Polley as Senior Vice President, Business Development, who will be responsible for leading the company’s business development efforts, strategic partnerships, and channel marketing and product partnerships. Most recently Ryan served as Senior Vice President for comScore, Inc., where he was responsible for several of the company’s global partnerships. Ryan also served as COO at AdXpose, which was subsequently acquired by comScore. Prior to AdXpose, Ryan served as President of Dragon Media Online, which acquired Don’t Blink Media, where he served as CEO. Ryan also led the business development and partnership efforts at Marchex, Inc., Classmates Online and RealNetworks.

Shekhar Yadav brings over 15 years of experience in platform development and business intelligence to his new position as Senior Vice President, Open Platform, where he will be responsible for bringing the power and scale of its Advertising Automation Cloud to application developers, partners and customers. Most recently, Shekhar was leading the Big Data BI team at Google that was aggregating the largest data set within Google to predict and analyze display ads and search trends. Prior to Google, Shekhar was the founding architect at StrongMail Systems, Inc., where he designed and led the development of its core platform and messaging server, scaling it to process billions of messages on commodity hardware.