Like a Rolling Stone, Bill Day Moves to ScanScout

You won’t find any moss growing on Bill Day, a digital media veteran who hasn’t recently stayed in one place long enough for that to happen.

Only 13 months after being named chief media officer of local media and ad firm Marchex, Day has accepted a position as CEO of online video ad network ScanScout. It’s the latest in a long list of career moves.

Day was on the development team at Prodigy during the Internet’s infancy. He later became co-founder and CEO of About.com, a position he left about five years ago to serve as CEO of the somewhat infamous adware firm WhenU (which morphed into behavioral targeting company MeMedia). While at About.com Day formed an ad network, Sprinks, which was later acquired by Google.

Despite his heavy involvement with advertising-related start-ups, the 44-year-old Day considers himself a tech guy, not an ad man. He said it is ScanScout’s technology that attracted him to the New York-based company.

“Because of my background starting technology companies that have added value to industry segments…I see tremendous value in the ScanScout technology,” said Day in an e-mail interview. He said the company isn’t just focused on helping advertisers and publishers today but also has plans to improve ad targeting and video delivery in the future across multiple platforms.

He said ScanScout’s “technology and what it means for the next years is the really sexy selling point” that convinced him to take the job.

Day replaces ScanScout co-founder Waikit Lau, who served as acting CEO after former ScanScout CEO Doug MacFarland left the post in December. Lau has gone back to serving as president.

According to Day, ScanScout currently delivers about 200 million video streams monthly. He said the ScanScout Network has north of 60 million uniques and “represents 43 percent of the total population of streamers.”

The company recently partnered with PointRoll to enable video ad offerings for brands.

ScanScout also recently named former the VP of product development at Specific Media, Steve Carter, as its SVP of operations and platform.