• by Joe Mandese , February 11, 2008

It seemed hard to believe that MediaPost could host a conference about behavioral targeting and not have one of its founding fathers, Tacoda's Dave Morgan, come along for the ride. And now we know why Morgan demured a role at this event. Seems he's leaving Tacoda, and its new parent AOL, five months after AOL acquired Tacoda for $275 million, and after Morgan was named executive vice president-global advertising strategy at AOL.

Truth is, we'd been hearing for weeks that Morgan -- a serial entrepreneur -- might be itching to move on after a few months in the technocracy of AOL/Time Warner. And kudos for Paidcontent for getting the scoop this morning, in the form of a memo from AOL COO Ron Grant, which simply stated: "Dave... is an entrepreneur at heart, and so it didn’t really surprise me that he wanted to get back in the start-up game again and we’ll look forward to working with him in the future.”