Tacoda Names Replacement for Upward-Bound Chief Viebranz

AOL-owned Tacoda has promoted Daniel Jaye, a relative newcomer, to lead the behavioral targeting firm as president.

Jaye replaces CEO Kurt Viebranz, recently named to the top spot at AOL’s new ad network division, Platform A. That group includes Advertising.com and the ad sales functions for AOL’s owned and operated properties.

A veteran of behavioral targeting pioneer Engage and its pre-IPO parent CMGI, Jaye joined Tacoda in April to head its products division. Reached by phone Monday, he characterized Tacoda in the AOL era as having a “modified mission.”

While the company will remain focused on increasing reach for advertisers and revenue for publishers, he said, its activities will be expanded somewhat under AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner.

AOL’s acquisition of Tacoda, he said, “gives us the latitude to focus on scaling the business without the distractions of being a private company.”

Going forward, Jaye and his team will be tasked with integrating the behavioral targeting’s platform with AOL’s sites and network publishers. In that undertaking, Jaye and Tacoda are likely to benefit from a strong working relationship with Viebranz, who as EVP and president of Platform A, will have oversight of all AOL and network ad sales and operations.

“We have an integration to do with AOL in terms of opportunities to partner,” he said. “By organizing under a single person with extensive experience it’ll help us coordinate our activities much better.

Integration aside, Jaye added, “You’ll see us continue to invest in related and supporting services for publishers and other advertisers that will help us accelerate our market share growth.”

Despite joining only six months ago, when Tacoda was certainly already in talks with AOL and other potential suitors, he said at the time of his hire he never discussed the possibility he’d eventually run the company.

“I felt very privileged to join up with Tacoda when I did,”he said. “The field is familiar to me having been involved [with behavioral targeting] in a pioneering capacity back in the late ’90s. I’d been a fan of Tacoda for at least a year, if not for several years, before I joined.”