Senior Engineer Leaves Google To Become AdMob's 'Quality Guru'

by Tameka Kee, Oct 18, 2007, 6:00 AM

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San Mateo-based AdMob continues to shake up the mobile ad space--serving nearly 1.6 billion global impressions in September and snagging Kevin Scott, former Google Senior Engineering Manager.

As the growing company's new vice president of engineering, Scott will spearhead AdMob's efforts to build out the ad-serving platform, among other projects.

While at Google, Scott led engineering efforts focused on improving ad relevance and overall quality, as well as platform and team integration efforts for two successful acquisitions. He also won a Google Founders Award in 2005--the company's highest employee recognition award--for technical contributions to the ad quality program.

Scott is the second high-ranking engineer to quit working for the search giant this month--as Benjamin Ling, former product management director for Google's e-commerce efforts (like Google Checkout and Google SMS) left to head up Facebook's platform development on Oct. 12. Insiders say both technologists left on good terms.

Although he had spent some time researching AdMob's model, Scott was "very happy and very well taken care of" at Google, according to Jason Spero, AdMob's vice president of marketing. But after meeting with the team (including CEO and founder Omar Hamoui), both parties recognized the advantages that could be gained by having Scott take on a leadership role at AdMob.

"Kevin has already been through some of the challenges that we're learning about, albeit in a different context," said Spero. "That lends a sort of calming influence to a startup." Much like his stint at Google, Scott will serve as what Spero coined AdMob's "guru of quality"--ensuring that the company's tech and process development plans are built to handle continuously serving global impressions, while maintaining overall ad targeting and quality.

Scott's experience with growing an operation to scale is extremely important, as AdMob's forward progress stems partly from the company's ability to deliver relevant ads by the billions.

AdMob's recently published metrics showed that the company served almost 1.6 billion impressions in September, with 42% of those hitting handsets in the U.S.

AdMob has roughly 60 employees based primarily on the West Coast, but live sales teams in New York and Europe. About half of the staff is engineering-focused, and the company boasts executives like vice president of ad sales Tony Nethercutt (formerly vice president of ad sales for Google's YouTube) and CFO Cheryl Dalrymple (former CFO of Digital Chocolate).

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