• by Joe Mandese , February 17, 2009

Canoe Ventures, the cable industry-backed group charged with developing a national infrastructure for planning, buying and managing addressable and enhanced TV advertising, has quietly added three key executives to its core team, including former Interpublic media executive Lydia Loizides.

The executives are part of a core product development team Canoe is assembling to define and build products that will help advertisers, agencies and cable operators find new ways of harnessing the data and addressability from cable digital set-top devices.

Loizides, who most recently was vice president-interactive at Paradigm Talent & Literary Agency, and prior to that was vice president & director, technology and media engagement in the Consumer Experience Practice at Interpublic, will serve as vice president-product development at Canoe, focusing on data initiatives, including ways of exploiting video-on-demand data streams. Loizides, who is a long-time media and technology industry analyst, is a regular contributor to MediaPost's TV Board.

Reed Barker has joined Canoe as vice president-product development responsible for overseeing the rollout of addressable advertising products. Barker, who has been working as an independent consultant with Canoe, will begin by focusing on "creative versioning," a term used to describe systems enabling advertisers or agencies to efficiently create multiple versions of TV commercials - or other forms of advertising - on-the-fly utilizing digital production technologies. Prior to consulting with Canoe, Barker was group product director of content & advertising at Tandberg Television.

Malia Flynn joins Canoe as vice president-product development responsible for interactive products. She previously held positions with Time Warner Cable, Cisco Systems and TV Guide.