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.”

Knoll boasts quite the impressive digital advertising resume: he spent six years at DoubleClick in a variety of roles including managing director of DoubleClick Asia Pacific and vice president and general manager of Global Marketer Solutions. He is credited with launching and developing DoubleClick’s ad network in Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, China, Taiwan, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia and Korea.

Prior to founding Aperture, Knoll served as CEO of digital advertising company BlackFoot. The Aperture audience targeting and measurement network was launched by Datran Media in April 2008.

In an interview with John Ebbert at AdExchanger, Knoll seems to suggest that AdSafe would be expanding its verification services into the media buying and selling realm, possibly with RTB-enabled advertising services.

“The current practice of leveraging cookies to target specific audience segments does not scale for most advertisers and has created all kinds of inefficiencies as buying trends towards real-time algorithm based trading,” Knoll said. “AdSafe’s core competency is in data sciences and its ability to make very complex decisions based on a number of different data points about the content of the page, the type of audience it attracts and readers’ behaviors.  This puts us in a very strong position to build advertising solutions for buyers and sellers that create better efficiency and results in the marketplace at great scale.”

A hundred or so participants of Linkshare’s Symposium East 2010 enjoyed the way cool atmosphere of the Antarctica bar on the corner of Spring and Hudson Streets in Tribeca. Missy Ward and Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit generously sponsored a reception serving Lombardi’s Pizza and an open bar.

I discussed the challenges of international affiliate marketing with Anna Lawler of DirectAgents. Several slices later, Danny Giardullo of Datran Media shared some insight with me about NetMargin, Datran Media’s performance network.

I enjoyed a Jack and Coke and learned about trade show marketing with Mark Jacoby of Astoria, NY based Overflow Marketing Communication. I tipped my bartender and left, happy to have made some new friends in the world of affiliate marketing.

Datran Media, a digital marketing technology company, today announced that Dennis Syracuse has been appointed senior vice president of marketing analytics. In this role, Mr. Syracuse will establish a marketing analytics consulting practice, which will provide professional consulting services to agencies. Prior to joining Datran, Mr. Syracuse served as senior vice president for Sony Electronics where he successfully and profitably led retail operations and merchandising across 65 SonyStyle store properties. Previous leadership experience includes marketing consulting roles across top brand and luxury retailers.

Mixpo, an online video advertising technology company delivering locally-targeted display ad solutions, and National Cable Communications (NCC), a provider of cable television advertising sales and marketing, have partnered to give advertisers the ability to extend their existing TV commercials to the Web with highly measurable and locally targeted interactive video ad campaigns. Different than pre-roll video ads, Mixpo’s video advertising platform leverages online display inventory, and adds interactivity and geo-targeting logic to any video creative to drive local response.

Web.com, a provider of online marketing for small businesses, and MerchantCircle.com, a social network of local business owners with 20 million unique visitors per month, has expanded their existing partnership to help improve the online visibility of local businesses. In addition to MerchantCircle’s suite of easy-to-use online publishing services, MerchantCircle’s local business members will have access to Web.com-powered marketing products and services designed to help them successfully market their businesses online.

United Sample and eSPIN, a subsidiary of Hearst Magazines Digital Media and aN entertainment/community network for teens and young adults, have launched the new www.Surveys4Teens.com, a community where teens can have a voice and earn rewards for sharing their thoughts, bringing some of the most valued – and most elusive – opinions within reach of companies and market researchers. eSPIN.com currently has 1.7 million users and 860,000 of them have signed up to take surveys in exchange for rewards; now, teens can also sign up for the panel. The online community will serve as a place to take surveys and share opinions.

Visible World, a provider of targeted television advertising, has partnered with Acxiom, Experian, and Nielsen to enable automated data-driven targeting for television ads through Visible World’s open data exchange standard. Preloaded marketing data from Acxiom, Experian, and Nielsen enables advertisers to apply the data they may be already utilizing in their direct marketing and online campaigns to television.

interCLICK, an ad network, has joined the BlueKai Premier Partner Program. BlueKai is an online intent-focused data exchange. interCLICK’s technology platform was specifically designed to leverage 3rd party data to consistently deliver top results for advertisers. As a participant in the program, interCLICK will be a preferred partner for integrating and leveraging BlueKai data for top notch campaign optimization. Marketers working with program members will be able to tap experts who have long and extensive experience working with BlueKai data and who have deeper product integration with the company.

Facebook:

Netanel “Net” Jacobsson, director of business development, is leaving Facebook. (via Gawker)

MTV Networks:

Mika Salmi is leaving MTV Networks, where he has been president of Global Digital Media. Salmi joined MTVN in 2006 after Viacom acquired his start-up Atom Entertainment for $200 million. (Via paidcontent)

Afar Media:

John Sheehy was named as President and Publisher. Sheehy, 54, former Chief Operating Officer of Weider Publishing and Publishing Director at Time Inc. Ventures, has run a consulting firm for the past five years specializing in new magazine and online development for Reader’s Digest Association, AARP, Dwell Media and Mansueto Ventures. Sheehy formerly served as President of Utne Reader and President of American Hospital Publishing. He began his career as the founding General Manager of Hippocrates (now Health) magazine.

Claude Girard was named as Executive Director of Travel. Most recently Girard, 44, served as Vice President, Integrated Sales for Hachette Filipacchi Media US. Prior to that, he was Vice President, Corporate Sales, LTB Media, Inc., for Culture + Travel and Executive Director of Strategic Development and Director of International Travel at Architectural Digest magazine, selling integrated marketing programs and working closely with the Conde Nast Corporate Group. Girard began his sales and marketing career at American Express’s Travel & Leisure.

Media Storm:

Jenine Kelly was promoted to Managing Director, based in agency’s South Norwalk office. Prior to joining Media Storm she served as SVP, group media director at Universal McCann in New York.

Chad Urice was promoted to Managing Director, based in agency’s South Norwalk office. Prior to joining Media Storm in 2006, he was senior VP/media director at Media Partnership (a subsidiary of Initiative) in New York.

Jamie Melecio was promoted to Managing Director, based in agency’s South Norwalk office. She joined Media Storm in 2007 after serving as Director of strategy at OMD in New York.

Marc Klatzko was named Managing Director, Creative and Marketing, based in agency’s New York office. He joined Media Storm in 2005 after serving as director program marketing for Showtime Networks Inc. in
New York.

Gregg Rothberg was named Managing Director, Marketing and Integration, based in agency’s New York office. He joined Media Storm in 2008 after serving as president of 3g Marketing, Inc. in New York.

Bridge Global Strategies:

The boutique public relations agency in New York specializing in cross-border PR has opened a Toronto office to help meet Canadian companies’ American PR needs. The office is headed by Jill Lewis, Bridge’s Communications Director, a Canadian who worked in PR for 15 years in New York.

Datran Media:

Co-founder, Matt Keiser has left and three senior executive appointments made.
Keiser remains active on the company’s board.

Andrew Graf was named executive vice president In his role as executive vice president. Previously, he was executive vice president of corporate development and secretary and general counsel for Enliven Marketing Technologies. Prior to Enliven, he represented public and private companies in mergers and acquisitions, IPOs, private placements and corporate and securities law matters as a Global Corporate and M&A Associate at Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy in New York. Earlier in his career, he held finance and accounting positions at HarperCollins and Arthur Andersen.

Tony D’Anna was named general manager of the company’s StormPost email business line. Prior to joining Datran Media, D’Anna also served at Enliven Marketing Technologies as vice president of its Unicast division. Earlier in his career, Mr. D’Anna held senior management roles at Dell and Sony.

Todd Boullion was named president of its UnsubCentral compliance technology business. Previously, he has served in executive roles at Dell and Bank of America.

MARS Advertising:

Robert Rivenburgh was promoted to executive vice president and general manager. Rivenburgh, who had been senior vice president and general manager, launched the agency’s Bentonville office in 2004. His experience includes three years with Diageo PLC as director of on-premise marketing and marketing director, and 14 years with Nestlé as director of marketing for Ortega Food Products, director of frozen food customer marketing and divisional customer marketing manager.

Matthew Lawrence was promoted to vice president of finance. Lawrence joined MARS Advertising in 2005 as finance director for the agency’s Bentonville office.

Amy Mastin has joined the company as senior creative director. Mastin comes to MARS from the Fayetteville office of Saatchi & Saatchi X where, since 2003, she was group creative director.

Microsoft:

Jo Wickremasinghe has been selected as Head of Product Management, consumer local and mapping, International for Microsoft. She was formerly Business Manager for Microsoft’s Online Services and Windows Business Group.

Datran Media has also developed an email inventory management for Microsoft that will let the technology giant’s ad sales team keep tabs on email media inventory both available and sold. If the inventory becomes remnant, it can go on the market exchange.

Microsoft will also be able to sell email inventory to various fragmented audiences based on fragmented lists it can create through the Datran Media services.

Datran Media president and co-founder Matt Keiser was quoted in DM News saying, “It is specifically designed so that their sales force can sell segments within that message, which optimizes what they sell and how unsold inventory is released.”

EO.com was launched this year and was to serve as an email ad network for publishers of newsletters and email lists. These clients can incorporate ads from marketers, but what the firm realized was that there is a demand for site-based display ads. Hence, the acquisition of Chintano.

Chief revenue officer for Datran Media, Sean O’Neal said, “We had been working with Chintano for quite some time to help us explore the display advertising opportunity and the ad network opportunity [and] we had a string synergy with them.”

The company believes that what will ultimately set it apart from its competitors will be the offering of email and display advertising simultaneously. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.