Ground Truth Adds Heavy Duty Advisory Board

Gail Chiasson, North American Editor

Ground Truth, Seattle-based mobile measurement firm, has assembled thought leaders representing decades of experience in new media measurement and interactive media technology to serve on its advisory board.

Ground Truth’s new advisors include: Peter Daboll, Usama Fayyad, Clark Kokich, Henry Lawson and Chris Maher have built some of the world’s most innovative and successful interactive media and measurement businesses, such as Hitwise, Razorfish, comScore and Donovan Data Systems.

“The fact that some of the most brilliant and successful executives in the interactive media and measurement industries have aligned themselves with Ground Truth is a tremendous show of confidence for both the opportunity we have identified and the business we are building,” says Sterling Wilson, president and CEO, Ground Truth. “I couldn’t be more pleased to have the collected wisdom and experience of these outstanding executives as we fulfill our charter to make Ground Truth the standard in mobile media measurement.”

Daboll is the former chief of insights at Yahoo!, president and CEO of comScore Media Metrix, president at MarketTools, COO for MediaPlan and executive vice president at Informational Resources Inc.. He is currently CEO of Bunchball, a marketing technology company that leverages rich consumer insights and game mechanics.

Fayyad was chief data officer and executive vice president at Yahoo! after his company (DMX Group) was acquired by Yahoo! in 2004. He was CEO of digiMine Inc. (Audience Science Inc.), the behavioral targeting company he co-founded in 2000. In addition to his work leading the development of the data mining and exploration group at Microsoft, Fayyad was the recipient of several prestigious research awards while working at NASA‘s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He’s now CEO of Open Insights, the market-leading data strategy and technology firm.

Kokich’s name has been synonymous with interactive marketing. In 1999, Kokich was appointed president of Avenue A, which became one of the largest interactive marketing agencies in the world, acquiring Razorfish in 2004, selling to Microsoft in 2007 and last year becoming part of the Publicis network. Kokich is now chairman of Razorfish.

Lawson, a leader of Donovan Data Systems – provider of IT systems and services for the marketing communications industry – was president and European CEO, responsible for running the company’s European operations and building its global business. He is currently executive in residence at Warburg Pincus, London, chairman of Cogniti and member of the advisory boards for Covario and Zumobi.

Before assuming his current role as CEO, eBureau, a predictive analytics company, Maher was president of Hitwise, where he oversaw the company’s global operations and financial performance, culminating in the company’s $250M sale to Experian. He joined Hitwise from Jupiter Media Metrix, where he was vice president, sales.

Ground Truth is a mobile measurement firm that delivers the precise, timely and actionable mobile intelligence required for operators, advertisers and publishers to measure, optimize and grow their businesses. As the sole provider of actual usage data aggregated from millions of subscribers using True View, a patent-pending census-based methodology, Ground Truth sets the benchmark for Mobile Internet measurement. Ground Truth is headquartered in Seattle, Washington and is venture-backed by Steamboat Ventures and Voyager Capital.


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