AOL appoints Tim Mahlman top ad tech role
AOL has today (15 June) announced the appointment of Tim Mahlman as president of its ad tech unit AOL Platforms, effectively succeeding Bob Lord who left to join IBM earlier this year.
In this new role, Mahlman head up a team of 1,400, and will be responsible for developing and executing AOL’s offering to advertisers and publishers, as well as differentiating its data products. He will report directly to AOL CEO, Tim Armstrong.
In addition, the AOL Platforms team has made new executive additions including Matt Gillis as named SVP publisher platforms and Jay Seideman named as SVP, advertising platforms. Both will report directly to Mahlman.
Mahlman, said: “We continue to rationalise our technology and build deeper relationships with both advertisers and publishers, so they can better engage with their customers. By adding seasoned veterans like Gillis and Seideman to my leadership team, we now have the right nucleus to accelerate development and unite the management of our market-leading platforms.”
Mahlman brings 20 years of technology and advertising experience to this new role. Most recently, he was Global Head of AOL’s publisher technology platform. Additionally, he was the founder of Vidible, a video content exchange platform, which was acquired by AOL in 2014 and is now part of ONE by AOL: Publishers.
Over the past six years, AOL has invested over $1bn in its technology stack through organic building and acquisitions, so it can build and deliver solutions to reach consumers across desktop, mobile and increasingly on connected TVs.
The past 12 months have been some of the most significant in AOL’s history with the online behemoth being purchased by US telco Verizon Wireless for $4.4bn, plus its own subsequent purchase of mobile ad network Millennial Media.
This followed the 2015 purchase of ONE by AOL, a cross-screen programmatic platform that was specifically targeted towards brand-side marketers, with AOL talking up the ‘ad tech tax’, in a bid to win over brands’ confidence.
Latterly, Bob Lord’s tenure at the top of AOL’s ad tech team also saw it announce the launch of self-serve programmatic TV buying to give marketers a clearer view of valuable audience buying opportunities, and to better plan, purchase, and measure their TV ad investments.