Usama Fayyad has
joined Martini Media's board of directors. A data analytics scientist and architect of the Yahoo data systems, Fayyad will help the company develop the next generation in ad targeting technology. The
platform aims to connect advertisers with consumers generating annual income of $100,000+. This group makes up 25% of the Internet population, but holds about 70% of the spending.
Branding that leads online consumers to make purchases offline has become an art -- rather than direct purchases -- especially for big-ticket items, such as cars and gems. mInstinct, the new targeting
platform from Martini Media, allows marketers to insert ads that brand companies, products and services.
Fayyad will work to move the platform from "applied research" to "theoretical research"
to "Martini 2.0," making sure it supports brands that want to quickly scale up campaigns. The work will close gaps between audience targeting methods -- contextual, demographic, behavioral,
psychographic, and social-graph targeting -- developing a closed-loop system that creates a direct pipeline from publishers to the most affluent audience online.
This audience -- which is
extremely difficult to reach -- is coveted by many companies, so it's important to know their passions. Those who like yachting and cruises are different from racecar enthusiasts. "Reaching this
group was one of my big goals at Yahoo, but I couldn't get enough data to get there, which Martini Media can do today," Fayyad says. "It's not about gathering data for the hell of it, but rather
enabling the advertiser to engage with this audience in the most relevant way."
Collected data provides hints about human behavior to assist 300 advertisers targeting ads across 1,000 publisher
sites. A deep analysis of the context and an understanding of the frequency in users over time at those sites form the basis for exact targeting.
Skip Brand, CEO of Martini Media, says the
company will begin building platforms that mix first-party, behavioral-targeting, survey or qualitative and third-party data to identify trends that help companies launch new routes for airlines or
lines of cars. "These customers spend money to save time," he says.
It shouldn't be difficult for Fayyad to help build the system. He built several data-mining and predictive analytics systems
for NASA JPL, which changed the way NASA's data sets were used for scientific analysis. He also led the development of data-mining products for Microsoft's Server Division, cofounded and led Audience
Science, and then DMX Group, which re-engineered predictive applications for the automotive, financial services, telecommunications, and technology industries. At Yahoo, Fayyad built the data
processing and the ad-targeting systems.
Other advisors include Greg Coleman, who built the sales organizations for The Huffington Post and Yahoo; Kevin Brown, a Reed Elsevier Ventures principal
who led both iPhrase and AllBusiness acquisitions; Chris McKay, a managing director at Granite Ventures who led multiple software investments; and Brian Asher, a VenRock partner, who has led
investments in ad technology such as Adify's acquisition by Cox Communications.