Mobile demand-side platform (DSP) Tapad has hired Ben Regensburger, the former president of the DoubleClick ad exchange in EMEA and APAC before its acquisition by Google. Regensburger will serve as president of Tapad Europe.
He joins Jim Clark, formerly of Turn, whom Tapad brought on this month to lead media and programmatic ad sales, as well as 10 other staffers Tapad hired over the past five days to fuel its footprint abroad.
“We’ve expanded quite a bit in the market now around multiscreen ad solutions and we work with maybe 200 of the largest global brands in the US, as well as global agencies,” Tapad CEO Are Traasdahl said.
Although he declined to name the number of publishers Tapad now works with, “the partners that we have are global companies, and we’ve been receiving a few emails a week now to launch outside of the US.”
The New York-based company, which has seven US offices, is opening locations in London and Frankfurt, Germany, in the next few months as it builds Tapad Europe operations.
Regensburger’s background both on the brand side, as CMO of Hugo Boss and marketing director of Lycos Europe, and the exchange-based side building publisher and agency relationships will come in handy for Tapad, Traasdahl said.
“Ben has a lot of experience taking successful American companies into European markets,” he said. “He joined DoubleClick when DoubleClick was 30 people in Europe and scaled that from 30 to 300 people” as Google’s media platform business lead in Europe after the acquisition.
As Tapad eyes the future of mobile ad formats, Regensburger’s experience with native ads and content marketing as founder of RollUp Media will be pertinent as platforms like OpenX begin to launch mobile native ad exchanges.
The iteration of the mobile ad format itself, he said, and the ability to augment the unit successfully into the content experience is something Facebook and Twitter are also pursuing.
“For us, it’s really about developing this technology that can unify multiple devices – mobile, tablets and desktops,” Traasdahl said, “as well as addressing needs of publishers and the buying ecosystem, and attribution.” This year, he added, will be when marketers really branch out beyond simple handheld and tablet screens and start to measure the “multiscreen” influence of television and set-top boxes.
Founded in 2010 to tackle cross-device advertising, Tapad claims it served 8.6 billion ads in 2013 and now processes 400 billion cross-screen data points per month. The company closed a $6.5 million Series B financing last March and Re/code’s Peter Kafka has reported its value is estimated at more than $140 million. Former DoubleClick CEO David Rosenblatt and AppNexus’ Brian O’Kelley are both investors.
