• by Ben Frederick  @mp_benfred, January 25, 2016

Former Millennial Media President Jason Kelly is joining LiveIntent, a programmatic email platform. He will serve as the head of sales and marketing for LiveIntent and will support CEO Matt Keiser.

Kelly has been a part of several successful ad tech companies before they were purchased. He previously oversaw the sale of Millennial Media to AOL, a deal worth $240 million that closed in September, as well as shepherding the sale of Sociomantic to Dunhuby.

Kelly says he accepted the job because of the people involved and LiveIntent’s unique offering, which rests on the strength of its email platform. Email is also a channel in which many of the issues that plague other channels, specifically mobile, have been addressed and solved.

“There are no viewability, fraud, or ad-blocking issues. Users are in charge of their inboxes,” says Kelly.

“One of the things we say here is that email is no longer about sending email, it’s about identity,” says Keiser, “your email address is how you log into things -- all services are based on it.” Leveraging that deterministic dataset to help target ads across devices is how LiveIntent operates.

LiveIntent raised $32.5 million last June; it has been utilizing that capital to expand at a brisk clip since. Keiser says that hiring Kelly is a part of that expansion, which included the purchase of the AVARI Recommendation Engine and Danish data on-boarding company Mojn, and establishing offices in London and Berlin.

Other recent hires at LiveIntent include Eric Raab, former CIO of Yodle, as EVP Engineering; Shiven Ramji, formerly VP products at NBC Universal and head of global shopper and marketing insights products at Amazon, as chief product officer; and Carsten Hyldahl, founder of Mojn, as CTO.