IAB Spotlights Outstanding Leaders in Interactive Advertising with Its Annual Sales & Service Excellence Awards

IAB Recognizes Individuals and Organizations for Their Contributions to the Growth and Development of the Interactive Advertising Industry

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) today announced the winners of its 2012 Sales & Service Excellence Awards. The IAB Sales Awards honor sales excellence by organizations and individuals as determined by a survey of executives in the interactive advertising buying community, both agencies and advertisers. The IAB Service Excellence Awards recognize outstanding member contributions to IAB industry-related initiatives.

“What makes these awards unique is that they are based solely on customer feedback, assuring that the honorees truly exemplify excellence in selling, thereby helping to grow the interactive advertising space.”

Sales Excellence Awards

The recipients of the IAB Sales Excellence Awards are determined by the IAB Sales Executive Council in partnership with Advertiser Perceptions, Inc., a highly regarded research firm specializing in agency and marketer communities. The IAB Sales Executive Council worked hand-in-hand with Advertiser Perceptions to develop, deploy and field a two-part customer feedback survey to identify the sales organizations and individuals who are viewed by the ad buying community as achieving the highest standard of excellence.

Approximately 400 agency and marketer decision-makers responded across two waves of research. The respondents represented a broad cross-section of verticals, including Automotive, CPG, Financial, Retail and Travel. Each individual respondent spent at least $1 million on online advertising over the last year.

2012 Sales Excellence Award Winners include:

• Overall Sales Excellence for Large Digital Sales Organizations: AOL
• Overall Sales Excellence for Small to Mid-Size Digital Sales Organizations: YuMe
• New Award Leadership Through Mentoring: Dan Simon, Regional Vice President, BrightRoll, Inc.
• Sales Person of the Year:
  • West Coast: Laura Faigle, NBCUniversal
  • Central: Brent Richey, AT&T AdWorks
  • East Coast: Brad Kolodny, The New York Times Company

“This year’s Sales Excellence Awards honorees exemplify the digital media organizations and executives whose distinction and dedication know no bounds,” said Sherrill Mane, Senior Vice President, Research, Analytics and Measurement, IAB. “What makes these awards unique is that they are based solely on customer feedback, assuring that the honorees truly exemplify excellence in selling, thereby helping to grow the interactive advertising space.”

Service Excellence Awards

The IAB Service Excellence Awards honor individual members who have demonstrated strong leadership and provided an exceptional contribution to one or more significant, completed IAB initiatives over the last year. They are selected from participants in 20 IAB councils and committees, and dozens of working groups.

“This year’s Service Excellence Award winners embody the enthusiasm and commitment we need to grow and develop the interactive advertising industry,” said Julie Van Ullen, Vice President, Member Services, IAB. “We are proud to honor the contributions of this highly talented group, whose ideas and actions will shape both the IAB and the digital media and marketing landscape for years to come.”

2012 Service Excellence Award Winners include:

• Sean Snider, Senior Web Software Engineer, Yahoo!, for his leadership as Co-Chair and Chief Architect of the IAB SafeFrame initiative
• Cory Hudson, Creative Director, AOL, for serving as Co-Chair and Lead in the creation of the HTML5 Best Practices
• Edwin Yu, Customer Relationship Manager, ADTECH, who led the campaign setup and overall management of the Industry Education Campaign for AdChoices
• Jason Bier, Chief Privacy Officer, ValueClick Media, for his dedication and leadership of the Do Not Track Working Group
• Robin Zucker, Social Marketing Director, Yahoo!, for her thought leadership and contributions to the Paid, Owned, Earned Media #IABPOEM initiative
• Jonah Goodhart, Co-Founder & CEO, Moat, and Karin Eanes, Technical Director, Pictela, for their hard work and dedication on the Rising Stars Ad Unit Research Study showing big lift across core interactive metrics
• Justin Fibich, (former) Account Executive, Mediaplex, for being the creative mind behind a clear and concise Ecosystem Map
• Todd Chu, Senior Vice President, Partner Development, BrightTag, and Maggie Neuwald, Vice President, Product Marketing & Partnerships, TagMan, for their leadership roles in the development of the Site Tagging Best Practices
• Sable Mi, Senior Director, Strategic Account Planning, BrightRoll, for her outstanding contributions to the Optimizing Ad Effectiveness Studies and Resource Center
• Wook Jin Chung, Product Manager: Admob/DoubleClick, Google; Adam Schuetz, Senior Director, Engineering, Opera MediaWorks; and Aron Schatz, Director, Integrations, Mocean Mobile, for their key roles in the development of MRAID 2.0 standards
• Nick Lanzafame, (former) Global Research Manager, Mojiva, for his significant contribution to and oversight of the Olympics Go Mobile: U.S. & U.K. Research
• Tim Avila, Vice President, Product Marketing, BrightRoll, and Jed Nahum, Senior Director, Global Channels & Exchange, Microsoft Advertising, for their superb leadership and direction of the Quality Assurance Guidelines 2.0 Taskforce

The awards were announced at the sixth IAB Annual Leadership Meeting “Big Data & Big Ideas: Friends, Enemies or Frenemies?,” at the Arizona Biltmore in Phoenix, where top digital advertising executives have come together to address how content, data and creative are being blended to drive highly effective, real-time and hyper-local digital marketing.

About the IAB

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) is comprised of more than 500 leading media and technology companies that are responsible for selling 86% of online advertising in the United States. On behalf of its members, the IAB is dedicated to the growth of the interactive advertising marketplace, of interactive’s share of total marketing spend, and of its members’ share of total marketing spend. The IAB educates marketers, agencies, media companies and the wider business community about the value of interactive advertising. Working with its member companies, the IAB evaluates and recommends standards and practices and fields critical research on interactive advertising. Founded in 1996, the IAB is headquartered in New York City with a Public Policy office in Washington, D.C. For more information, please visit www.iab.net.