• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 17, 2015

Liquid, the tech arm of Publishers Clearing House (PCH), plans to transition into a data-driven advertising company in the coming years by building a network of services backed by seasoned industry executives, along with insight into billions of ad impressions and multiple terabytes of data monthly gathered across PCH digital properties. 

In three newly created positions at Liquid, Heather Menery, former VP of emerging solutions at Pubmatic, joins to head revenue and drive worldwide sales, while Tom Anderson, steps in to lead programmatic to streamline operations for advertising sellers and buyers.

Aaron Olmstead will lead engineering. He comes to Liquid from Fiksu, which grew under his engineering watch to become a large mobile demand-side platform serving thousands of brands and clients such as Dunkin, Starcom MediaVest, Amazon, and Best Buy.

The new hires signal a move beyond being a large-scale publisher platform. The road map will steer Liquid to support other publishers by late 2016, other than its network of sites, Steve Bagdasarian, GM at Liquid, told Media Daily News. "To get there we need the services and data structure this team will build," he says.

Data is Liquid's core asset for its team of 71 employees supporting everything from search to display and video in programmatic media buys across sites owned by PCH, its parent company. The plan is to build a stand-alone product and engineering group outside of PCH. 

Bagdasarian admits that having conversations around participating in "data-consortium initiatives" but today the company's focus remains on building audience-targeting models for any advertiser wanting to target off PCH first-party registration data from about 73% of U.S. households.