• by Gavin O'Malley , February 4, 2008

In an effort to strengthen its ad technology structure, fashion and shopping e-publisher Glam Media has hired Yahoo veteran Kiumarse Zamanian as vice president of the Glam Evolution advertising platform.

In this newly created position at Glam, Zamanian will be expected to oversee the next stages of development of Glam's premium display ad platform, Glam Evolution, which offers prime-time placement of premium ad inventory, targeted by audience, brand proximity, content, categories, behavior, context, and engagement mode on the Glam-distributed media network of over 450 Glam owned-and-operated sites, publishers, media partner Web sites and blogs.

A co-holder of three U.S. Yahoo patents, Zamanian joins after leading Yahoo's product management team of media advertising infrastructure platforms.

"Dr. Zamanian's significant contributions at Yahoo, driving key innovations in advertising media platforms and smart display ads, make him the ideal hire," said Fernando Ruarte, co-founder and chief technology officer, Glam Media.

While at Yahoo, Zamanian built and directed a new product team responsible for serving, targeting, logging/tracking and predicting inventory for graphical ads served on Yahoo and its partner Web sites.

Glam Media has aggressively pursued a number of growth initiatives since securing $18.5 million in venture capital late last year. (The site has attracted $30 million total, and is seeking an additional $200 million.) Glam has branched out beyond fashion and shopping, and has its sights on growth through mergers and acquisitions, along with expanding internationally.

Glam Media created Glam Evolution after four years of experience of running campaigns for over 300 of the world's top brands ranging from Neiman Marcus, Reebok, MaxFactor to Diet Coke. As advertising spend on the Internet, as a percentage of all U.S. media, has risen to 7-8% in 2007--with some categories as high as 20%--brand marketers and agencies have been increasingly seeking ways to significantly grow display and video advertising in addition to the Web's first wave of search-based direct-marketing.

Clearly a company to be reckoned with, Glam Media is now number two in Top 10 Women's Web properties, according to comScore Media Metrix.

Yet Glam has also been largely criticized by industry insiders for driving revenue by selling ads for partner Web sites, rather than for its own page views. The critics also take issue with Glam calling itself a content site, rather than an ad network.

Glam owns and operates a dozen women's fashion sites, and provides a showcase and ad platform for 380 small affiliate publishers, 300 of them one-person blogs. The model attracts a range of brands from Gucci and Donna Karan to Estée Lauder, Target, and Procter & Gamble.

Along with Zamanian, a number of other credentialed media and technology executives have joined Glam recently. Late last year, for example, Glam hired Ralf Hirt, formerly DoubleClick's vice president of operations & strategic partnerships, as vice president, international, with the task of driving the media company's global expansion.

And in April, Glam hired iVillage executive Jennifer Salant to lead its expansion and business development strategy. Most recently vice president of operations and strategic partnerships at iVillage, Salant spent over seven years at NBC's female-focused Web publisher--charting its partnership efforts early on, along with overseeing secondary ad revenue, licensing agreements, and digital commerce.

Prior to joining Yahoo in 2004, Zamanian directed the Informatica Developer Network as a global Web-based ecosystem for collaborative development of interoperable data integration solutions.