• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, May 10, 2012

To some, the online display advertising marketplace looks increasingly like Wall Street’s electronically traded commodities and equities markets, but a major player in the automation of online buying and selling has reached out into another massive electronically traded marketplace altogether -- concert tickets -- to bring in some key players. The Rubicon Project has recruited two top former Ticketmaster executives to lead its technology and legal teams.

Former Ticketmaster CTO Brian Pike has been named CTO of Rubicon, and former Ticketmaster Deputy General Counsel Victoria von Szeliski has been named Rubicon’s new general counsel.

A third key executive, former Yahoo Vice President-Product Management John Slade, has also joined Rubicon as senior vice president-product management, rounding out the new executive team.

Noting that Pike oversaw a global team of 700 “technologists” and the engineering of “very sophisticated pricing and trading algorithms at scale,” as well as “fraud prevention and rules-management technologies to protect buyers and sellers,” Rubicon CEO-Founder Frank Addante said he is the ideal executive to lead Rubicon’s mission of bringing “maturity to real-time ad trading.”

At Rubicon, Pike will be responsible for overseeing the engineering, product management and technical operations teams behind Rubicon’s real-time trading platform, which currently processes 1.3 trillion bids and 150 billion ad trades each month.

“I look forward to extending our trading platform’s capabilities into markets such as mobile and video,” he said in a statement announcing his new role.

And while she has no direct experience in advertising or media law, von Szeliski has had an extensive background with large-scale, publically traded companies, and previously worked on a variety of political campaigns, including Obama for America and the Democratic National Committee. She began her career at international law firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman.

At Yahoo, Slade oversaw a wide range of “publisher technologies,” including ad serving and exchanges.