New Day at WhenU

Contextual ad firm WhenU today named Bill Day, co-founder and former head of About.com, CEO. Avi Naider, who founded the company in 2000, stepped down from the top seat to become president of the company.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity to be capitalized on,” Naider said of the decision to bring Day onboard, citing Day’s consumer-side experience as particularly valuable to the company.

“It’s a super-rich space,” added Day, “We’ve basically doubled our bench strength.” Day describes the contextual advertising space as “highly, highly targeted content, and highly, highly targeted advertising.”

It’s a space Day knows. Until December of last year, he was CEO and president of About, Inc., seeing the company through About.com’s launch, IPO and sale to PRIMEDIA. Under Day’s leadership, About launched contextual pay-per-click Sprinks ad network.

Neither Day nor Naider can say at present how they’ll divide leadership duties. Lately, Naider has been active in spy ad adware public policy issues, particularly in quashing Utah’s anti-spyware bill this year. The company was accused of cloaking and subsequently banned by both Yahoo and Google last May.

Back in June, the company hired investment bank Perseus Group, saying it was looking to “explore various possibilities to take its business to the next level.”