Leadership

Tom Phillips joined Media6Degrees (m6d) as CEO in October 2009. He was founding publisher of Spy magazine in 1986, the original media chief for Starwave Corporation in 1993 (creators of ESPN.com, NFL.com, ABCnews.com and NBA.com), and CEO of Deja.com in 1998. After a stint as a venture partner at Insight Ventures, he joined Google in 2006 and managed media platforms and the DoubleClick integration before establishing the Search & Analytics team to pioneer new uses of Google data on behalf of major advertising clients. He holds a BA in Applied Math from Harvard and a MBA from Stanford.

Penry Price joined m6d as President in June 2011. He spent the prior seven years at Google, where he oversaw the day-to-day operations of Google’s North American Sales and Account management teams, and then was responsible for Google’s business strategy and global partnerships with advertising agencies. Under his leadership, North American revenues grew from $250M to over $3.3B. Prior to joining Google, he was the Advertising Director at Us Weekly, and held various advertising sales management positions at Wenner Media and Hachette Filipacchi. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Church & Dwight (NYSE:CHD), the Board of Advisors of Outward Bound USA, and sits on the Board of Governors of dmgMedia. In 2008, he was named to the AAF Advertising Hall of Achievement. He holds a BA from Hobart College.

Rod Hook co-founded m6d in January 2008. He has over a dozen years of experience designing and scaling several of the largest digital marketing platforms ever built. An early open source advocate for corporate environments, Rod has a record of architecting technical solutions for extremely high volume, complex, mission-critical functions using open source technology and commodity hardware. Rod was CTO of AdModus (sold to Connexus), an advertising platform engineered to maximize publisher yields through semantic analysis and contextual and behavioral targeting data. He holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Kentucky.

Andrew joined m6d as COO in September 2008. He was Vice President of Digital Development at the New York Times, and COO and CFO of About.com, where revenues exceeded $100M and profits tripled during his tenure. He has a BS in Business Administration from Washington University and an MBA from NYU.

Claudia Perlich serves as Chief Scientist at m6d and in this role designs, develops, analyzes and optimizes the machine learning that drives digital advertising to prospective customers of brands. An active industry speaker and frequent contributor to industry publications, Claudia enjoys serving as a guide in world of data, and was recently named winner of the Advertising Research Foundation’s (ARF) Grand Innovation Award and was selected as member of the Crain’s NY annual 40 Under 40 list. Additionally, she has been published in over 30 scientific journals, and holds multiple patents in machine learning. She has won many data mining competitions, including the prestigious KDD Cup three times for her work on movie ratings in 2007, breast cancer detection in 2008, and churn and propensity predictions for telecom customers in 2009, as well as the KDD best paper award for data leakage in 2011 and bid optimization in 2012. Prior to joining m6d, she worked in Data Analytics Research at IBM’s Watson Research Center, concentrating on data analytics and machine learning for complex real-world domains and applications. Claudia has a PhD in Information Systems from NYU and an MA in Computer Science from the University of Colorado. Claudia takes active interest in the making of the next generation of data scientists and is teaching “Data Mining for Business Intelligence” in the NYU Stern MBA program.

Elizabeth joined m6d as Chief Marketing Officer in January 2012. She spent the prior ten years as VP of Corporate Marketing for Alloy Media + Marketing, a pioneer in non-traditional marketing services for the millennial market. Prior to joining Alloy, she held marketing positions with Scholastic and Radio City Entertainment. She takes an active role in the NYC public education community through her efforts with PENCIL and as a board member for the Bronx Academy of Letters. She holds a BA in Art History from Dartmouth College.

Rob joined m6d as VP of Business Development in January 2012 and brings over 12 years of digital media experience. Previously, Rob held senior roles at Google, where he helped launch the hugely successful AdSense platform and eventually head up their strategic partnerships division. Most recently, Rob served as the SVP of Business Development at Scribd where he led corporate strategy and brand relationships. Rob is also very active in the New York start up community as an advisor for the First Growth Venture Network. He holds a MBA from the Case Western Reserve University and a BA in Political Science from Ohio Wesleyan.

Brian joined m6d as head of the data science team in September 2008. He has led the development of m6d’s patent pending machine learning technology, as the company has gone from pre-revenue to supporting 100s of concurrent client campaigns. His current research interests include building autonomous machine learning systems over big data architectures, causal inference and influence attribution. He recently served as co-chair of the 2012 KDD Cup competition. Prior to joining m6d, he was a Senior Research Analyst at Meetup.com, and a credit risk modeler for American Express. He holds an MBA with a concentration in Statistics from NYU and a BS in Mathematics and French Literature from Rutgers.

Kevin joined m6d as head of the product team in February of 2010. He has nearly 15 years experience in product management and business development roles with both early stage and more mature companies, most recently at IPC Information Systems and MessageLabs, a cloud-based provider of email security services. He has an BA in Economics from Lafayette College and an MBA from Babson College.

Alec Greenberg joined m6d in July 2008. With over a decade of experience in the digital advertising industry, he has held positions at various companies including Monster, Bluestreak, The FeedRoom, and aCerno. Prior to joining m6d, he was instrumental in building the national operations team at Monster’s relocation site, MonsterMoving as well as aCerno, which was a key milestone in helping aCerno get acquired. Alec is a member of the IAB Ad Ops Council and the IAB Networks and Exchanges Committee, both of which are dedicated to improving the operational efficiency of interactive advertising. Alec holds a BA in Liberal Arts fom Purchase College.

Brett Moskowitz joined m6d in 2009 as the Director of Sales for the eastern region, and currently serves as the Vice President of Sales. His 14 year tenure in the digital ad industry has spanned across Fortune 500 companies including Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. Prior to m6d, he managed strategic accounts at AOL and doubled revenue year-over-year via integrated partnerships with Citibank, IKEA, and Pizza Hut. Brett has a BA in Psychology from the University of Arizona.

Yuva Mahendran serves as Vice President of Software Development at m6d, where he conceives, designs and builds pioneering ad serving technologies. In 2008, Yuva joined m6d as a Senior Java Developer. Over the past five years, Yuva has been a core contributor to the architecting, building and testing of our high performing ad serving platforms. Prior to m6d, Yuva spent five years developing software for the online advertising industry. He has a Masters Degree in Information Technology from the University of North Texas.

Amit joined m6d as Director of Systems Engineering in April 2008. He has over 15 years of systems engineering experience, with 10 years designing, scaling and maintaining infrastructure for complex high volume digital marketing platforms using open source technologies. Amit has built the IT Infrastructure to support m6d’s growth, from startup to the current 15 billion web transactions a day. Besides his responsibility for data centers and warehousing, business intelligence, custom applications, big data technologies and database management, Amit’s team manages vendor relationships and a multimillion dollar technical infrastructure budget. Prior to m6d, Amit served as Lead Systems Engineer at MeMedia. He holds a Masters Degree in Computer Applications and several certifications for technologies such as Hadoop.

Gabriel Celis joined m6d’s Account Management team in July 2009.  He has over 10 years of experience building and leading client services and account management teams.  He also has extensive expertise working with product and engineering teams to guide product offerings across a wide range of industries.  He plays an integral role in sales support and strategy at m6d.  Gabriel has a BS in Business with a concentration in marketing from the University of Phoenix.

Aisha joined m6d as Director of Finance in February 2011. Prior to m6d, Aisha spent seven years as the Controller of The About Group, which included websites About.com, ConsumerSearch.com, UCompareHealthCare.com and Caloriecount.com, as well as their related businesses. During her tenure, About.com was acquired by The New York Times Company, and Aisha played a pivotal role in facilitating the transition of financial accounting and reporting to The New York Times’ systems. Previously, Aisha held positions in accounting at Interactive Corp and Tullett Prebon. She holds a BA in accounting from Pace University.