Los Angeles – GumGum, the world’s largest in-image ad platform, announced today that Robert Elder has joined the company as Senior Vice President of Sales, a newly created position. Elder will oversee GumGum’s brand sales strategy and national sales team. He will be based in New York.
“Rob is an accomplished and well-respected expert in digital media. He brings over 11 years of digital advertising sales and management to GumGum,” says Ophir Tanz, CEO and founder of GumGum. “Under Rob’s leadership, we expect our already strong sales growth to accelerate.”
Since 2008, Mr. Elder has held the position of Vice President Digital Sales at Independent Television Networks (ITN) where he built and managed the digital sales organization for its local online video and display network, consisting of over 5,000 local newspaper, television and radio websites. Before that, Mr. Elder was with Internet Broadcasting where oversaw Strategic and East Coast sales initiatives across IB’s 80+ TV station partner sites. Earlier in his career, Mr. Elder held sales positions at NBCOlympics.com, Maxim Online and Sony Digital Entertainment. He volunteers with The Tom Deierlein Foundation, an organization that works to improve the lives of Iraqi and Afghani children.
“Look no farther than Pinterest or Instagram and you will see that images have become a central part of the digital, social and mobile experience. GumGum is the global leader in helping publishers monetize those images,” says Mr. Elder. “The opportunity to be part of the premiere in-image display platform is one I couldn’t pass up.”
GumGum (www.gumgum.com) is the world’s largest in-image ad platform and a Quantcast Top 10 Property, reaching 150 million unique visitors and serving billions of in-image ads per month.
GumGum’s proprietary image recognition and targeting technology helps garner user engagement through highly targeted campaigns that yield 20 times the click-through rate of traditional advertising units. In addition to helping brands reach audiences predisposed to the marketer’s message, the GumGum model gives publishers a completely new monetization stream and provides brands the opportunity to reach highly targeted mass audiences.
Hundreds of the Internet’s premier websites, including Time Warner Inc., Tribune, Scripps, Gannett, Hearst Corporation, Internet Brands Inc. and Glam Network rely on GumGum to turn photographs into lucrative interactive experiences by overlaying text, banner or Flash ad units on top of the images.
Founded in 2007, GumGum is headquartered in Santa Monica, CA. Investors include: GRP Partners, First Round Capital, New Enterprise Associates and Crosscut Ventures.
[cb type=”company”]gumgum[/cb]
