Pandora VP Eric Picard Elected to Executive Committee, as 17 Companies Join

Tech Lab Board to Collaborate on Global Technical Standards

The IAB Technology Laboratory (Tech Lab) announced that SpotX Chief Scientist Neal Richter was elected by its board of directors as the new chair. In this position, Richter will play a key role in guiding the Tech Lab’s work to evolve privacy-compliant standards for programmatic advertising, simplify video ad delivery, increase supply chain transparency, and reduce fraud, among other initiatives.

Richter takes on the board post with 20 years of experience leading software teams and developing effective, data-driven products that build the bottom line. As co-chair of Tech Lab’s OpenRTB Working Group, Richter has helped lead the development of the OpenRTB protocol, which has standardized the process of programmatic real-time bidding, and has brought transparency to digital inventory through the ads.txt and sellers.json standards.

“The industry relies on the Tech Lab to develop solutions to support a trustworthy and efficient marketplace, across platforms and devices. And now, consumers and governments around the world are rightfully demanding greater data privacy and transparency, therefore, our work on tools such as the Transparency and Consent Framework and Data Label have only become more important,” said Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab. “As a brilliant engineering leader and a committed contributor to several of our most widely adopted standards, Neal Richter is the perfect person to lead our board of directors during this pivotal time of change in the global digital media ecosystem.”

“It is an absolute honor to be elected chair of Tech Lab’s board of directors,” Richter said. “Having spent the past eight years collaborating with other members on standards like OpenRTB, I know how important our work is in building a better digital supply chain. I can’t wait to take an even larger role in driving the agenda and creating guidance and technology that supports the growth of video, audio, and other content and services worldwide.”

The IAB Tech Lab board also elected Eric Picard, Pandora’s Vice President of Advertising Product Management, to join its six-member executive committee, which also includes:

Dennis Buchheim, Executive Vice President and General Manager, IAB Tech Lab

Patrick Dolan, President, IAB

Randall Rothenberg, CEO, IAB

Scott Spencer, Director of Product Management, Google

IAB Tech Lab’s global membership of over 750 companies includes a broad range of digital publishers, advertising technology providers, agencies, and others – and membership grew over 18 percent from mid-2018 to mid-2019. Growth of the Tech Lab board of directors has been even more significant, with 30 companies now represented, up from 17 in mid-2018.

In addition to the executive committee cited above, current members of the Tech Lab board of directors are:

Yoav Arnstein, Director of Product Marketing, Facebook

Paige Bilins, Chief Product Officer, Telaria

Daniel Brackett, CTO, Extreme Reach

Andrew Casale, President and CEO, Index Exchange

Joe Cepollina, Partner, Group Program Manager, Microsoft Advertising

Alanna Gombert, Head of Advertising Technology, ConsenSys

Chris Guenther, Senior Vice President, Global Head of Programmatic and GM of News IQ, News Corp

Anneka Gupta, President and Head of Products and Platforms, LiveRamp

Vincent Karachira, Chief Product Officer, Rakuten Marketing

James Kelm, Senior Director of Product Management, Twitter

Mark Kopera, Head of Product, Oracle Data Cloud

Guy Levit, Vice President, Product Management, Verizon Media Group

Ai Matsubara, Video Ads Specialist, Yahoo Japan

Dale Older, Chief Product Officer, Integral Ad Science

Michael Palmer, Global Vice President, Emerging Technologies, GroupM

Todd Parsons, Chief Product Officer, OpenX

Gruia Pitigoi-Aron, Vice President, Product, The Trade Desk

Mike Romoff, Head of Global Agency and Channel Sales, LinkedIn

John Sabella, Chief Technology Officer, PubMatic

Wilfried Schobeiri, CTO, MediaMath

Steve Silvers, General Manager and Vice President of Product, Customer Experience, Neustar Inc.

Kate Sloan, Programmatic Sales Director, Hearst Magazines Digital Media

Ajit Thupil, Senior Vice President, Identity, Tapad

Steve Truxal, Vice President, Product Management, Xandr

Dorothy Tse, Vice President, Product Management, Quantcast

Ken Weiner, Chief Technology Officer, GumGum

Jason White, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Global Programmatic Revenue and Partnerships, CBS Interactive