• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, February 25, 2020

Madison Avenue digital native Jason Heller is back on the operator side -- this time on the marketing technology supply side -- following a six-year stint as a management consultant at McKinsey.

Heller, who founded seminal digital shop Mass Transit Interactive in the late 1990s before selling it to Horizon Media in 2005, has joined AI-powered ad optimization firm Persado as president. 

Heller has been a partner and global lead of the digital marketing operations and technology practice at McKinsey.

He says his main focus will be spreading the word and the number of marketers using Persado’s sophisticated natural-language-processing technology to optimize advertising, both creative and media. 

In an interview with MediaDailyNews, Heller said Persado likely is best known and most used as a platform for optimizing variants of copy in email marketing, but he said that’s just the surface and his goal is to help marketers and their agencies understand how to leverage the technology to optimize the outcome of any form of marketing communications, including conventional brand advertising. 

In July 2019, Persado announced a five-year deal with financial services marketer JPMorgan Chase to use Persado’s “message machine” to generate copy aimed at millions of current and potential customers. 

At nearly 10 years old, Persado is a leader in marketing technology firms focusing on leveraging AI and natural-language processing to help brand marketers and their human-powered creative and media partners optimize the messages and media buys they make.