• by Laurie Sullivan , Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, January 11, 2011

Former Yahoo executives Tim Mayer and Ben Wright have joined the team at Trada, a paid search marketplace that managed to turn the art of creating successful paid search campaigns into a social game. Late last year, the company also secured capital funding, enabling the changes.

Mayer takes on the role of chief strategy officer, responsible for sales, marketing, product development and operations. Wright will serve as VP of service delivery and marketplace in charge of account management, optimizer management and marketplace support services.

At Yahoo, Mayer ran Yahoo's search business for seven years, supporting the homepage, marketplaces, and more. Wright ran paid search optimization, according to Trada CEO Niel Robertson. Making a pretty big deal of the executive hires, Robertson says the two seem to identify enough with Trada's vision to move to Boulder, Colo., and help build the company. I can think of a lot worse places to live.

I'm sure it wasn't too difficult to secure Mayer and Wright. After all, Yahoo turned support for its search marketing biz over to Microsoft. Trada also secured financial capital from Google Ventures. This YouTube video uploaded in November 2010 explains the investment.

In short, Trada closed a $5.75 million Series C round of financing lead by Google Ventures, of which Foundry Group also participated. A very long post explains the process and how the company came to secure the financing.

As for Mayer, prior to Yahoo he held management positions for several companies including Overture Services, where he was VP of search products; Fast Search & Transfer (FAST), where he was GM and VP of the Web search division; Inktomi, where he was director of product management; and The Thomson Corporation.

Wright is a 10-year search marketing veteran, holding multiple positions in account management and agency and channel sales teams. Most recently, he serves as senior director of search creative development at Yahoo, where he oversaw creative development and performance optimization for advertisers running Yahoo Search Marketing campaigns. Prior to Yahoo, Wright held account management positions at GoTo.com, which later became Overture Services and later acquired by Yahoo in 2003.

Late last year, Robertson says Trada launched what he calls "crowd mechanics," so the company built a sophisticated incentive system based on paid search experts hitting the target cost per acquisitions (CPAs) of the campaign. The company also created a grading scale to register the clout of each paid search expert, similar to the way Klout recognizes social media gurus.

Games aside, it's no surprise that a search marketing firm would scoop up former Yahoo execs. In a comment to yesterday's Search Marketing Daily blog post, about Local.com missing revenue as a result of the Microsoft-Yahoo integration, Rapport Online's Miki Dzugan wrote: "No surprise. Still think the Yahoo search marketing platform was better and should have been used for the merged advertising program." Thanks, Miki, for taking the time to share your thoughts.