Datran Chairman and CEO Patrick Vogt will serve as executive chairman for the new entity while CONTEXTWEB CEO Timothy Murray has been appointed PulsePoint CEO.

“This is a merger born out of a very successful partnership and fueled by demands to better address today’s fragmented digital marketplace,” said Vogt. “We’ve architected technology to leverage data and make it actionable to inform business strategies and drive results. PulsePoint will be the first media tech company with an integrated approach to meet the changing needs of advertisers, brands and publishers with precision technology across all digital media.”

Guests enjoyed passed hors d’oeuvres, an open bar until midnight and a live DJ spinning all the best top 40 and classics you could imagine. I raised my TRAFFIQ Jam, a special cocktail for the party with a neon green light, to the Aperture, ContextWeb and Openx crews, including about a dozen new hires.

Almost the entire Traffiq team was there, including CEO Nick Pahade, CFO Jay Hirschon, and SVP of Sales Chris O’Hara (a frequent Adotas contributor). A special thanks to the Traffiq marketing team for putting on one of the best holiday bashes this side of the Hudson River.

“Dropping the ADSDAQ sub-brand helps to minimize confusion in a very complicated market and enables CONTEXTWEB to speak in a unified voice,” explained CONTEXTWEB CEO Tim Murray. “Our superior contextual analysis platform is at the heart of everything we do for both publishers and advertisers…. When advertisers and publishers are looking for the ad exchange that delivers results, they should come straight to CONTEXTWEB, without being confused by multiple brands.”

CONTEXTWEB recently partnered with Mpire to offer ad verification across its exchange and introduced a real-time classification system for organizing websites across 450 content categories in accordance with the IAB’s Networks and Exchanges Quality Assurance Guidelines.

ContextWeb, which runs the independent ad exchange Adsdaq, has partnered with Mpire to offer its ad verification and optimization service AdXpose to clients. Networks within the exchange will be protected from make-goods and charge-backs while brands will perceive Adsdaq as a safer place to play.

“Advertisers are increasingly requesting campaign verification by third parties to minimize fraud and wasted ad spend, and to ensure that ad exchanges and networks are fulfilling their contractual obligations,” said Jay Sears, general manager of Adsdaq exchange. “By offering AdXpose’s services as option to our customers and prospects, we’re sending them a clear message that we’re a trusted partner, we’re looking out for their best interests, and that their success is as important to us as it is to them.”
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Mpire is integrating ContextWeb’s Real-Time Classifier into AdXpose to boost its ability to analyze and classify page content. Recently the company earned the TRUSTe seal of approval for its treatment of user data.

Natural search technology shop Conductor, Inc., has hired four senior managers to help guide the upcoming launch and continued development of the company’s natural search solutions. John Pavley has been named CTO; most recently, he was CTO of ContextWeb. Jason Bigler has been named VP, product management; previously, he was VP of product management at DoubleClick. Parashuram Kulkarni has been named director, research and development; prior to this post, he was senior research engineer at Yahoo Research. Kiril Savino has been named director, development; most recently, he was CTO of ShopWiki.

AdMedia Partners appointed Michael Klingensmith as managing director specializing in media and publishing. Klingensmith was previously a senior executive at Time Inc.

In a filing today with securities regulators, Yahoo officially said it will expand its board from 9 to 11, making room (with Kotick’s leave-taking) for Icahn and two of his hand-picked candidates. To remain on the board, Ichan must own at least 30 million shares of Yahoo.

In other industry news, Collective Media announced the expansion of its national sales force in Chicago and Detroit. The online advertising network brought Jeffrey Dillman on board as a regional sales director in Chicago; he hails from Tribal Fusion / Exponential Interactive. David Terski joins as an account executive responsible for Detroit; previously, he was an account executive for Tribune Interactive.

ContextWeb, a contextual ad company, has announced that Chip Meakem has joined its advisory board. Meakem is a general partner at Kodiak Venture Partners.

ContextWeb was founded in 2000 and has raised more than $53 million so far. It launched the ADSDAQ in 2005. The cash infusion will reportedly be used to hire new staffers and expand the ADSDAQ.

The ADSDAQ Exchange Trading Desk will enable buyers to buy more inventory in the better-performing contextual advertising areas and offer to sell underperforming display ads. The new desk can track campaigns outside of its system to, so interactive ad agencies can benchmark their campaign’s performance against 386 other contextual categories of inventory.

A handful of agencies, including Omnicom’s OMD and WPP’s GroupM, are participating in the invitation-only beta program. The desk can be utilized across media buys on portals, ad networks and site-specific buys to break down purchases into content categories and analyze campaign performance within those categories.

“ContextWeb may have found a formula to deliver the best type of insights-ones that are both actionable and because they are standardized to context-repeatable at scale,” said Rob Norman, CEO, GroupM Interaction Worldwide, a division of WPP and one of the program’s beta partners. “The goal of ContextWeb’s ADSDAQ Exchange is to eliminate barriers in this fragmented marketplace so advertisers can buy and sell inventory based on continuous learning and publishers can unlock the true value of their inventory,” said Anand Subramanian, CEO of ContextWeb, Inc. “The ADSDAQ Exchange Agency Trading Desk is a crucial part of making this a reality.”

Clickable and Google are also reportedly developing similar platforms for advertisers.

The Ad Exchange matches buyers and sellers of online advertising, ensuring that advertisers can increase their reach with their desired audience efficiently and cost-effectively, while offering sellers appropriate ads at the best price for their inventory.

Jay Sears, SVP of Strategic Products & Business Development for ADSDAQ stated “Although ADSDAQ is still relatively new; it has quickly become evident that giving advertisers control over how they reach consumers on both big and, as importantly, smaller and more targeted websites has given it unparalleled traction in the marketplace. As advertisers and their agencies continue to address the issues raised by media fragmentation, our ADSDAQ exchange provides a single source of audience, targeting and quality to enable them to efficiently grow their businesses.”