Claria Moves Management, Changes Focus

US behavioural marketing specialist Claria has shuffled its senior management in line with plans to focus on web personalisation research. Scott VanDeVelde becomes President and CEO, replacing co-founder Jeff McFadden who has served as CEO since 1999. Scott Eagle, formerly Chief Marketing Officer, is now Executive VP.

The company is due to launch the beta version of its PersonalWeb software next quarter. The application dynamically creates a personalized start page for each user, offering easy access to favourite web sites, automatically organising and recommending content of interest. The aim is to display relevant banner advertising to consumers for products or services based on their anonymous web-wide surfing habits. By using Claria's BehaviorLink advertising technology combined with its RelevancyRank content optimisation engine, PersonalWeb aims to create a 'unique, permission-based, customized web experience for consumers'.

Claria's goal is to 'advance beyond the pop-up centric, first generation version of its behavioral marketing model' to one that allows all online publishers to capitalise on the personalisation platform. McFadden says he believes the new leadership will be a 'catalyst to accelerate this bold change in business direction, and capitalize on Claria's current market momentum in the behavioral marketing arena'.

VanDeVelde has been Claria's Senior VP of Global Sales for the past five years, overseeing partnership relationships with major portals and publishers. He was previously a senior executive at Catalina Marketing. Eagle worked at Procter & Gamble and Concentric Networks before joining Claria.

In other changes, Mitchell Weisman, Senior VP, has left the company, and, Jason Fairchild, VP of Business Development, will now lead Claria's partnership initiatives with online publishers. Fairchild was formerly VP of Business Development at the Overture Division of Yahoo!

Claria's web site is at www.claria.com

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.

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