• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, January 6, 2010

Perianne Grignon, one of the most influential "client-side" buyers of media over the past two decades, has joined one of the leading developers of databases and system enabling marketers and agencies to more effectively target online users. Grignon, who most recently was senior vice president-marketing for the Online Publishers Association, has joined [x+1], a company that aggregates online audience data and develops systems for integrating them with offline and proprietary consumer databases to, as Grignon puts it, improve the "audience decisioning" process.

"Whatever we say about the last year, there is still a great deal of optimism about online advertising," Grignon, who for years reigned as one of the most influential television advertisers at companies such as Sears, AT&T and Nabisco, tells Online Media Daily. "Advertising is really moving online. Marketing is so moving online in dramatic ways."

Prior to joining the OPA in July 2009, Grignon was vice president of media strategy and digital innovation for Sears Holdings Corp., where she championed the use of enhanced analytic tools to improve marketing and media buying decisions for the retail giant.

She also was the long-time co-chair of the Association of National Advertisers' Television Committee, and a member of the executive committee of the Family-Friendly Programming Forum. Among her recent credits was championing Sears branded entertainment deal that seamlessly integrated the Sears brand into ABC's popular "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition" prime-time series.

But Grignon now says the action is in the online world, and in integrating data about online audience behavior with offline consumer behavior data, and she cites [x+1]'s development of CPG Connect, a new service that integrates online user data with consumer purchasing data from Information Resources Inc.'s massive purchasing database.

[x+1] is a leader in the field, but increasingly is competing with other third-parties such a s Rubicon Project, PubMatic and AdMeld, as well as with home-grown ad agency systems such a s Interpublic's Cadreon, Havas' Adnetik, and others that are seeking to mine empirical online user behavior and align it with other key metrics to create enhanced audience targeting for marketers and agencies.

"Consumer marketers have a lot of needs, and they have a lot of questions. And they need better platforms for managing and optimizing audience targeting, or what some people call, audience-building," she explains.

Grignon says her six-month sabbatical at the OPA helped accelerate her knowledge about the online marketplace, but she had no comment on what would happen to her former role as head of marketing for the online trade publishing group.