Yahoo has promoted Flurry executive Prashant Fuloria to head up all advertising products, the company confirmed on Friday.
Fuloria’s title is SVP of Advertising Products, a job with oversight of Yahoo’s display, native, video and mobile ad products. He will report directly to Marissa Mayer and will oversee Scott Burke (who runs Yahoo Ad Manager Plus and Yahoo Gemini, and who moves down a rung with this reorg) and Tod Sacerdoti (CEO of recently-acquired BrightRoll).
Yahoo said in its statement, “Prashant brings more than a decade of experience building advertising platforms at Google, Facebook and, most recently, Flurry, to Yahoo. With Prashant leading the team, we will continue to streamline and integrate our growing advertising technology capabilities in a way that brings the greatest value to advertisers.”
Fuloria’s appointment was previously reported by the Wall Street Journal and Re/code.
Fuloria’s previous job was chief product officer at Flurry, reporting to Flurry CEO Simon Khalaf. Khalaf’s status is not clear, but the company is reportedly working on an integration of Flurry with its Gemini self-serve marketplace. After that process is complete, Khalaf will presumably either continue to focus on the Flurry product family or seek other roles within the company – or outside of it.
At this stage, Fuloria’s credentials are a bit of a mystery, but a source says he is well regarded at Yahoo. In any case, he and Mayer have a kinship – at least on paper. They both came up through Google, and they have similar educational pedigrees, with Fuloria going to Stanford University – even serving as a guest lecturer – while Mayer went to Harvard Business School. Fuloria also did a stint at Facebook, and given Facebook’s momentum in the mobile and ad-tech arenas, that may hold a certain draw as well.
Mayer has stated that one reason she makes acquisitions is for talent. Buying Flurry helped her get talent like Fuloria that she probably couldn’t hire away from a Google or a Facebook. And after six months in the Yahoo fold, Fuloria has apparently proven himself enough to be elevated into this role.
The question is, what will Fuloria do in the new position?
Whatever he does, it better be good. Over the course of 2014, Yahoo suffered from declining CPMs in display. In Q2, Mayer blamed a “mix shift” away from premium, likely to programmatic, as well as a delayed transition to the new ad platform, Yahoo Ad Manager Plus. “We’re aligning our product teams to better execute our revenue goals,” Mayer wrote in a memo to staff, obtained by the Wall Street Journal. “2015 is the year that we return our display revenue to growth.”
