The revolving door between advertising technology companies, which has been spinning with particular vigor in recent months, has deposited another executive in a new chair.
Ian Colley, who served as chief marketing officer at the Trade Desk, is joining DeepIntent as its new head of marketing and communications. He will report to Chris Paquette, the company's founder and chief executive, in a role that has been vacant since Adam Kapel departed last year.
DeepIntent, for those keeping score at home, operates in the programmatic advertising space focused on pharmaceutical and health care marketers — a sector that has proven somewhat more resilient than others as the broader digital advertising industry continues its periodic spasms of consolidation and cost-cutting.
Mr. Colley arrives from the Trade Desk, the demand-side platform that has positioned itself as something of a white knight in the ongoing drama over the future of the open internet. His tenure there coincided with a period of considerable growth for the company, which has made a habit of positioning itself against what it characterizes as the walled gardens of the largest technology platforms.
(Whether moving from a company valued in the tens of billions to a smaller programmatic player represents a step sideways, backward, or in some other geometric direction is, as always, in the eye of the beholder.)
The appointment continues a pattern of executive migration that has become familiar in advertising technology, where the number of senior positions has not kept pace with the number of executives who have held them. Mr. Colley will presumably bring to DeepIntent the same marketing sensibilities he deployed at the Trade Desk, adjusted for a company whose name contains the word "Intent" rather than the word "Desk."
Original story published in adweek.com: "Former Trade Desk CMO Ian Colley to Lead Marketing at DeepIntent"