• After announcing a leave of absence on September 15, Gannett Chairman and CEO Craig Dubow has resigned due to health issues. Marjorie Magner, independent director and chair of the audit committee, has been named non-executive chairman of the board while Gracia C. Martore has been named president and chief executive officer and taken a seat on the board of directors.

• e-commerce personalization specialist Baynote has teamed up with crowd-sourcing offer-maker Crowd Factory to enable merchandisers to offer contextual flash deals, referral offers and group deals to consumers based on real-time buying intent across multiple channels.

• Email, mobile and social marketing software developer Emailvision has integrated its Campaign Commander product for email and mobile marketing with the Magento e-commerce platform.

• Now that Apple’s iOS 5 has taken unique device identifiers off the table, DigiDay’s Jack Marshall reports that mobile targeters are looking in the direction of device fingerprinting.

• Havas has opened multicultural-marketing agency Totality in New York City that will partner with other agencies in the Havas network, including Arnold Worldwide, Euro RSCG and MPG. The full-service agency, led by CEO Leo Olper and CCO Mauricio Galvan, will focus on ethnic and niche consumers, including the Hispanic, African-American and LGBT communities.

• U.K.-based mobile marketing agency agency Fetch Media has acquired British peer agency Lucidity Mobile, also picking up clients Carlsberg, Harrods, Vodafone and… the British government (well, the Office of Central Information).

• Location-based advertiser JiWire has tapped Steve Ricketts as its European Managing Director. While at Orange UK (now Everything Everywhere), Ricketts launched mobile advertising services, mobile payment systems and location-based services.

• Energy People Connect, an online community and communications consultancy for energy industry professionals, has launched a B2B advertising network to assist energy advertisers in developing targeted and efficient media planning across energy-related publishers.

Sponsored by 24/7 Real Media, TRAFFIQ, Adometry and Big Fuel — and put together with a great assistance from Max Ramirez of Digital Media Events — Adotas Off-Duty packed the bar at Cipriani Club 55 with representatives from just about every nook and cranny of the digital advertising space.

Before the mass consumption of alcohol and foodstuffs, Adotas hosted an event with some top-notch speakers. First Big Fuel CEO Jon Bond, cofounder of Kirshenbaum Bond Senecal + Partners, expounded about trends and opportunities agencies are missing in the social media arena. Then Paul Pellman, CEO of Adometry, gave a brief talk about attribution models before 24/7 Real Media SVP of Business Development Larry Allen discussed why finding a digital advertising partner was so imperative in the ultra-cluttered space.

But enough work! It was time for drinks and food. I sipped white wine and listened in disbelief as Bradley Lewis, CEO and founder of QR Media Group, explained the impetus for his QR code social network Skanz came from reading an article… on Adotas. Wow, we’re actually inspirational. Indeed, Lewis has really taken the idea of QR codes and run with it, as Skanz’ customizable codes can be used to do anything from managing contacts (and all their social links) to aiding brands in instantly engaging consumers.

We promised to talk more later, as I was distracted by how incredible my proscuitto and mozzarella appetizer was — seriously, I hadn’t eaten so good since I was last in Italy. More wine flowed, and I found myself telling TRAFFIQ CEO Nick Pahade about my time at TheStreet.com, which included the dark period after Chairman Jim Cramer was dissected by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show.” My main course, grilled sea bass, was absolutely luscious, but I couldn’t stick around for desert because the party had started.

Immediately I ran into folks from e-Miles, a company I wrote about a few weeks ago, who discussed future plans for its value exchange service. I also ran into Londa Lavender, the senior director of business development for Datonics, and caught up on what’s going on at the third-party data provider, which was recently spun off from AlmondNet.

I also chatted up a few guys from Evidon, who really needed their drinks considering the complications inherent in getting the behavioral opt-out system perfect. John Mracek, CEO of Netseer, also said hi, and commented on some partnerships the concept-based conceptual targeter is working out.

And right at the end of the evening, I was introduced to a slew of Finnish mobile companies that were in town to promote their wares. Ismo Rantala, CEO of the Finnish Mobile Association, intrigued me with details of an incubator specifically for mobile companies hailing from Finland that his association was currently trying to build in NYC.

All in all, I had a great time, and was thoroughly exhausted from meeting exciting new faces in the industry as well as catching up with old pros. But don’t just take my word for it — we have photographic proof.

It’s going to be a ridiculous week judging by how many meeting requests I have sitting in my inbox right now. So many people want to say hello and give me a spiel about their digital wares, and you know what? I’d love to hear every pitch — those of you who have had the misfortune to have met me know I’m a sucker for cool tech. I wanna write about it all.

Alas, there are only so many hours in a day — and only so many times my ears can hear acronyms like DMP, DSP, SSP, OPP, etc… So you want to hobnob with me during Ad Week? This is where I’ll be on Tuesday night: Adotas Off-Duty at Cipriani Club 55 at 55 Wall St.

Sponsored by 24/7 Real Media, TRAFFIQ, Adometry and Big Fuel, this party celebrates the relaunch of our events section, which we are rebranding “Adotas Off-Duty”. You might have noticed our coverage of a Google Places-sponsored Digital DUMBO and Vice’s Digital Upfront. I’m going to be all over the NYC tech party scene with my camera and my quips.

But to show we know what makes a good party, we gotta throw one of our own first. And yes, we may call it “off-duty,” but who are we kidding? You’re never really off-duty in the digital ad space.

Once you RSVP and get your ass to Cipriani Downtown (don’t get it mixed up with the Cirpriani in Grand Central, though I’m sure you can find plenty of drunks in the train station to party down with) look for me — I’m the thin tall guy with medium-length dirty-blonde hair and a dirty smirk. Let’s talk — I’ll even take your picture.

But more important, you can schmooze with a roomful of important industry types — the kind that could have a serious effect on your business. Compared to that, who cares about some pipsqueak tech reporter?

The event only goes on till 10, so if you guys want to take the party elsewhere, I’m game — especially if we head back to my borough of choice, Brooklyn.

Last week’s news of the merger between Donovan Data Systems (DDS) and MediaBank was certainly exciting. In digital media management terms, it’s kind of akin to rooting for the Yankees; only their fans want to see them grow more powerful, because it sure ain’t good for baseball.

These two behemoths have been fighting over agency budgets for the last four years, and have managed to steal a bit of market share from one another, while advancing the cross-media efficiency agenda slightly. The stated hope for this merger is that the corporate combination will give them enough firepower to finish the golf swing and solve the insanely complicated digital media puzzle, making cross media management possible in a real way.

Is this merger good for the digital media ecosystem? Maybe. Here are the three factors that will determine whether MediaOcean will become the digital media industry’s defacto system:

Standards are good

First off, it helps when everybody is reading from the same sheet of music, and there isn’t an industry that hasn’t benefitted from a common, accepted set of standards. The IAB has done a great job in terms of helping standardize ad sizes and out clauses, and some of the systems and procedures that help oil digital business transactions. An argument could be made that having 80% of agency dollar volume running through the same system brings efficiencies to the entire media buying landscape, but I’m not sure anyone in the industry would say that this was the case when DDS had larger market share.

For digital marketers, a significant hassle has been bill/pay and reconciliation, and that has been an area of focus for DDS and MediaBank across digital and traditional media. There is no doubt they can help standardize the process by which advertisers and publishers reconcile delivery even just by being the largest player – they can bring a de facto standard to bear, but how quickly can they really react to a rapidly evolving space with myriad nuances in ideal workflows for almost every customer? If they can change their DNA, they will be a force to be contended with.

Platforms Are Good

Secondly (and most importantly), the right approach to solving this problem is an open platform approach. But none of the leaders in this space have shown any predisposition for opening things up. This is in large part because the technology landscape has evolved so fast that the legacy companies haven’t been able to adapt their systems to keep up. The market needs an open, extensible platform approach to solve its numerous problems, the question is can any of the existing leaders in the space, including MediaOcean, provide that?

My colleague, TRAFFIQ Chief Product Officer Eric Picard, learned about the power of platform effects while working at Microsoft over the last several years. He recently educated me on the varieties of platform approaches that could be taken in our space, and has offered to let me publish that here:

Systems vs. Platforms: The first thing to discuss is that most companies in our space have built systems – not platforms (despite everyone using the word platform for everything.) A system simply exists on its own, is proprietary and closed – it doesn’t allow third parties to build on top of it. This describes almost all the offerings in our industry today.

Simple Platforms – or Mashups: Most of us have experienced a “mashup” in one shape or another by now. This is where a tool or web site is built that calls to numerous remote services (APIs or web services) to build one cohesive interface. In this case, the platform is really all the multiple different systems used “behind the scenes” to create one simple application that you could use. Many web sites use this technique, using various content management systems, ad servers, etc… A lot of the SEMs and DSPs use this approach, building their own interface that hits each of the paid search providers or ad exchanges via API.

Consumable Back-End Platforms: Lots of companies now offer API access to their systems. This kind of “back-end” access is then used by third parties to “mash-up” the functionality with either their own or other third-party functionality. AppNexus, Right Media Exchange, Atlas, DoubleClick and numerous others provided this kind of back-end access by API. Some of the more sophisticated providers, like AppNexus and RMX even enable third parties to extend their functionality to some degree – but they don’t make that extension generically consumable.

Ecosystem-like Platforms: A great example of this is Salesforce.com – which has built out a platform that really begins to live up to the market opportunity that the industry should be looking for. Salesforce enables numerous services that can be consumed, like the platforms and mashups we discussed above.

But they also let third-party vendors come in and extend the functionality of the core Salesforce platform. They even provide an app marketplace, similar to iTunes, that allows third party vendors to distribute their applications to existing Salesforce customers. This is a powerful approach, but requires a whole new set of skills that most companies in the ad technology space are not quite able to pull off.

Within this overall context of platforms verses systems, you can see the variety of approaches being taken by the various parties in the ad ecosystem:

• Google offers third parties APIs to write against, but keeps the vendors playing in the search ecosystem on their toes by frequently changing the APIs, and it’s fairly clear that their goal is to be both the platform and the applications that run the advertising ecosystem. They support third parties, but only as it furthers their end-game.
• The ad servers understand that their value is in the engine, much more-so than their workflow. And they’ve opened up APIs to let other workflows plug in and become mashups that ultimately are powered by the smarts of the ad servers behind the scenes.
• Donovan Data Systems has brought one mashup workflow to market, their iDesk product. It interfaces with DDS’s other applications fairly well, and can integrate with the dominant ad servers. MediaBank has done somewhat similar things with their application suites, but has taken a more “Google-like” approach when it comes to their business – investing in their own DSP and automated media buying systems. This investment in products that compete directly with the very vendors that would need to integrate into the combined system causes me to pause a bit.

At the end of the day – it’s hard to understand who might have the right DNA among these constituents to actually roll out the right platform to solve the industry’s needs.

Creativity is good

Finally, I think a development like MediaOcean is excellent, if it actually creates an environment that transforms where digital media people spend their time. Right now, digital agencies spend most of their time and effort trying to wrangle an “ecosystem” of nearly 300 technology, data, and media providers. They spend the bulk of their time trying to execute media plans, rather than coming up with creative strategies to engage consumers.

The mess of systems, lack of standards, multiple log-ins, and unmanageable hoards of data that each system throws off has created the ultimate irony: digital media is becoming the least creative, least profitable, and least measurable channel for marketers. If the merger brings us one step closer to making the digital execution piece easier, and gets the conversation back to creative, than I think it’s a step in the right direction.

After being out in the field, and talking to over 400 agencies about their digital media needs, I know that a standardized platform is what everybody wants. Whether or not MediaOcean is going to be nimble and creative enough to deliver a system that meets the needs of our growing ecosystem is very much in question. Technology has always thrived on choice, flexibility, and open standards. I believe that the company that can deliver on all three will end up winning.

TRAFFIQ is one of the sponsors of next week’s Adotas Off-Duty party at Cipriani Downtown– have you RSVP’d?

While listeners will be thrilled that Pandora has shelved the much-hared 40-hour listening cap, us marketing types will be more interested in the music streaming/discovery service’s HTML5 redesign, which opens a slew of new advertising options, including better cross-platform executions, bigger video ads and enhanced social features.

In addition to its Sneak Peak social analytics service and Engagement Bar, Visibli has launched Follower Intelligence, which enables social marketers to both segment and target their followers. Check out what Visibli’s earlier study questioning whether brands can be rock stars.

Media management system TRAFFIQ has partnered with Nielsen to integrate Nielsen @Plan market information to clients planning and optimizing display campaigns. Check out our July interview with TRAFFIQ Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing (and regular Adotas contributor) Chris O’Hara on the platform’s many recent additions.

MediaMind and Havas Digital have agreed to integrate MediaMind’s multichannel ad-serving tech with the attribution and analytics capabilities of Havas’ Artemis platform.

Following the summer  launch of GlamCreate, a content management and publishing platform for Glam Media’s 4,000 odd writers, the female-focused vertical content and ad network has acquired social website builder Ning.

Digital marketer Tribal Fusion announced a deeper integration of BlueKai Exchange audience data to enhance clients’ media planning and buying abilities.

Mobile entertainment firm Myxer, which runs ad-supported Myxer.com, introduced Myxer Social Radio, a music streaming service that is integrated into Facebook and selects which tunes to play based on a user’s social graph.

Digital marketing software-maker Kenshoo has upgraded its local marketing platform on the holistic Kenshoo Universal Platform. New features within Kenshoo Local 2.0 are not limited to onboarding and campaign creation tools; support for Facebook, Baidu, and Yandex; multiple conversion event optimization; dimension and category tagging; customizable online reporting dashboards, and flexible scheduled email reports. But wait, there’s more…

ADOTAS: Terence Kawaja’s infamous display ecosystem landscape places TRAFFIQ in “media management systems” with companies like Centro — closer to the supply side than DSPs. Do you think this is a fair placement and why?

O’HARA: I don’t think we should put too much emphasis on placement in the landscape chart. Many companies belong in one or more buckets—and some of the logos should appear much larger than others, based on overall impact within the landscape itself. TRAFFIQ, for example, could appear in many of the categories (DSP and Ad Serving being two of them), but I believe there is a revenue threshold to be met before LUMA will place you in multiple buckets.

That being said, I think TRAFFIQ is in the right category. Eventually, the notion is that TRAFFIQ would appear as an overlay to multiple sections of the map, providing dashboard level access to an advertiser’s entire vendor toolset.

How does a media management system differ from a DSP? Confused agency people want to know.

Mostly, it’s nomenclature. I think the term “demand-side platform” is a great term for a technology tool that helps advertisers manage their media. The reality is that now “DSP” means “technology tool for real time managing exchange buying.” Agencies have every right to be confused, as companies within the landscape are changing from network to “platform” and from data provider to “DMP.”

The difference is simply that a “management system” should provide tools that cover inventory discovery, vendor negotiation, offer management, contracts, ad serving, analytics, and billing; DSPs handle a sliver of the overall media buy. For example, TRAFFIQ customers will be able to manage several DSPs within our platform at once.

It seems like the new Private Marketplaces tool allows advertisers to customize publisher and exchange lists — fair assessment, or is there more, so much more?

Right now, TRAFFIQ private marketplaces enables advertisers to buy outside of our curated list of 3,000 guaranteed inventory sources, which is especially important in terms of giving agencies the control they need over media. Publishers increasingly want the convenience and efficiency of exchange buying…without exposing their quality inventory to the world.

Demand side customers like the reach and price efficiency they can achieve with exchange-buying—but still struggle with brand safety and transparency. Our next-generation system will offer both sides a lot more control over who they work with, and that is sorely needed in our business right now.

Can this tool also offer hookups into the increasingly popular private exchanges, such as The Weather Channel’s Category 5 and Quadrant One?

Yes, as long as the demand-side partner has a business relationship in place with the inventory supplier, TRAFFIQ will be able to enable the connection.

Why are agencies going gaga over your new finance management tools?

If agency CFOs could actually go “gaga,” they may be doing so over our new tool for the simple reason that most digital platforms don’t take the vagaries of agency pricing into account. At TRAFFIQ, we have to manage several different pricing scenarios at once.

What is the agency’s margin, and how do they want that margin reflected in the pricing (baked into the media cost, or shown transparently)? How about data and technology fees? Those can be added to the gross media cost, or shown separately as well. Also, handling net and gross costs with publishers has always been challenging.

Smart systems should recognize these fundamental business needs, and expose the correct pricing to everyone within the system, eliminating confusion and duplicative work.

Can you explain how the multiple user permissions work? Why is this important for your agency clients and how can they best be deployed?

For the demand side, multiple user permissions means giving access to a subset of clients for an individual account team. On the supply side, it means having the ability to put the right publisher rep with the right demand side customer.

For example, an individual agency account team may buy from Fred at ESPN for one client, and Joe at ESPN for another. It is also necessary for agencies to be able to manage which of their end-clients gets to view certain reports. Multiple user permissions adds the layer of flexibility that enables TRAFFIQ users to expose the right data to the right set of customers.

What kind of agencies are you working with these days and what kind do you hope to add to your client base? Are you working with brands directly as well?

For the past several years, our focus has been getting total product adoption from the small to mid-sized agency market. Some are the types of shops that have a thriving traditional media practice, but not necessarily the right tools to tackle digital media. Still others are strong in digital, but are struggling with multiple tools, and having a hard time putting all of the pieces together efficiently.

We partnered with some of the great agency groups like TAAN, Magnet Global, AMIN and Worldwide Partners to reach these shops, and have been quite successful. We have also done some work with the holding companies, but mostly on a campaign-by-campaign basis, rather than getting the large shops to adopt our solution fully.

The product features we are working on now will actually enable big agencies to adopt TRAFFIQ by enabling API connections to their existing systems (ad serving, billing, etc). You can’t walk into an agency and ask them to drop all of their vendor relationships at once… You have to be able to work seamlessly with what they have.

What sets apart your attribution services from your media management peers as well as other attribution providers? What kind of extra insight do you provide?

Right now, a lot of our customers are working with our embedded Aperture audience measurement reports. Unlike other platforms, we make it fairly easy to take those demographic campaign  learnings and take action against them. So, it’s not just click- or view-based data; it’s using third-party data to understand who is seeing your campaign, clicking on it, and ultimately converting against it.

We are the only platform that can help marketers react to that data through guaranteed buying—and RTB. In the near future, we will be able to show how our efforts in initial media budget allocation and optimization are driving performance. We also see a great opportunity to get some key attribution metrics out of search and display, once out customers are doing both types of media in the platform at scale.

How does TRAFFIQ integrate first-party and third-party data into audience buying efforts?

Right now we have over 15 data segmentation partners. Some of them work directly with our Trading Desk (we apply those segments to exchange buys), and some of our partners provide both targeting and media execution. We see our role as a platform as provisioning our advertising clients with the right best-of-breed partners, no matter what the targeting need.

That means Proximic and Peer39 for semantic; AlmondNet (now Datonics) for search keyword retargeting; Media6Degrees and 33Across for social targeting; Nielsen, Lotame and eXelate for demo targeting, etc. We also have the ability to match any first-party data with available audience within our real-time bidding system, and find that audience as well.

Do you foresee more mobile partnerships in TRAFFIQ’s future or is Phulant your one and only?

TRAFFIQ is an open platform, and that means we must be willing to integrate partners based on our clients’ needs. We see Phluant as a key TRAFFIQ partner for mobile ad serving, and have plans to work closely with them to define and grow our mobile capabilities. We want to see more standardization around mobile workflow, and that means making it easier for marketers to allocate budgets across different media types (social, search, mobile, video, and display) in one system.

Phluant has developed amazing technology to help marketers take rich media for display  and bring it to mobile devices. That’s a great starting point… and something that can be leveraged across multiple mobile inventory vendors.

Regarding your partnership with Bizo, what kind of opportunities lie in the realm of targeted B2B display?

Bizo is doing an amazing job of bringing the power of B2B to display advertising. Until recently, B2B marketers stayed away from display advertising (or struggled to get online reach with smaller, niche business publishers). Now, they can take the success that they are used to having with targeted direct mail in B2B, and apply that in real time display.

We believe that there are some real opportunities to make both B2B and local display digital advertising more manageable, scalable, and accountable.

Besides its “interesting” name, what about Oggifinogi (recently acquired by Collective Media) attracted TRAFFIQ to make it your video and rich media network partner?

Our customers use Pointroll, Mediamind, Spongecell, and all kinds of third-party rich media vendors, but we needed a reliable “go-to” partner that could help our registered demand-side client base tackle rich media and video more easily. We saw that “Oggi” had a strong commitment to both technology and customer service, and we felt that we could work with their team well. I think Collective media validated what a great partner choice we made there!

TRAFFIQ appears to have spread itself out pretty well across digital marketing channels, so what area is next on the agenda? Social?

The first big channel we are going to tackle after display is search. In a few months, TRAFFIQ will feature bid management tools for search engine marketing right in the platform—along with access to the Facebook self-service ad inventory. This means that, for the first time, guaranteed display, real-time display, search, and social can be managed within the same “media management system.”

It’s going to be exciting, but the real challenge will be making it seamless for marketers—and getting some great insights out of all the data that such an integrated platform will produce. That’s what we’ll be working on over the next several months.

Mobile tech company and publisher Myxer has named Camilo Kejner to the new position of executive vice president. Kejner previous served as executive vice president and chief operating officer at EMI Music International.

Debra Goetz has been vice president of marketing for Gannett. Previously Goetz served as vice president of integrated strategic marketing at NBCUniversal; before that, she served as vice president of corporate marketing at Univision Communications.

Location-based marketing company JiWire has appointed Trish Tarson to be its first UK agency sales manager. Tarson was last seen at Hi-Media, where she was responsible for selling across a portfolio of premium mobile and online publishers.

Santa Monica-based interactive agency BLITZ has named Tamer Kattan head of strategy, Wilson Yin senior creative director, Bobbie Boucher technology group director, Peter Brine group account director, and Amanda Lewis and Anne Butcher associate creative directors.

Intellectual property law firm Venable, which specializes in online marketing legal issues among other focuses, has a new IP Partner in Justin Pierce, former head of trademarks and brand protection for Sony Ericsson.

Switching over from R/GA, Tim Allen is joining Arnold Worldwide’s Boston office as vice president and creative director.

Ratha Grimes is joining TRAFFIQ as director of product development to be based in Seattle. In her 10 years in online advertising, Grimes has served stints at Google, Microsoft and Bluestreak.

Social platform Meebo has named Daniel Bernstein vice president and head of business development and emerging revenue. Bernstein previously worked in client services at Bite Communications.

Video advertising management platform VINDICO has named Jes Santoro senior vice president of sales. Previously Santoro served as vice president of sales at NBCUniversal.

Aegis Group’s Carat USA has welcomed Laura Hernandez as head of multicultural. Hernandez was previously vice president and connections director of SMG Multicultural for Starcom MediaVest Group. Carat also announced the promotions of Johann Wachs to head of strategy and Michelle Lynn to head of consumer insight.

Along with its new European headquarters in London, Buddy Media announced that Luca Benini is joining the company as managing director of Europe, effective August 1. Previously, Benini served as vice president and commercial director of comScore Europe.

HookLogic has named George Stella director of media sales. While he spent the last two years first at Mindset Media and then MyBuys Media, Stella spent nine years at 24/7 Real Media, where he launched and expanded the Los Angeles media business.

As much as I may criticize The Wall Street Journal’s “What They Know” series for being hyper-paranoid, the paper’s coverage on mobile app data has actually been very informative. WSJ shares viaForensics findings that several apps aren’t encrypting stored user name and password data on Android devices, which frankly seems bizarre…

Fwix tells TechCrunch it plans to index the web location by location — starting with NBC’s local sites in New York and the Bay Area.

Video audience targeter Grab Networks will provide clients with a slew of new advertising formats thanks to a partnership with AdoTube.

PointRoll claims to be the first ad tech company that will be able to support the six winners of the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s “Rising Stars” contest, including AOL’s Project Devil, renamed IAB Portrait.

Thanks to a partnership with mobile rich media tech firm Phluant, TRAFFIQ clients to will now be able to serve rich media mobile creative across a wide variety of mobile inventory services.

Gamification guru Bunchball has an impressive new chief revenue officer: Steve Patrizi, whom you may remember as heading up U.S. advertising sales at LinkedIn. Bunchball also named Gary Chavez vice president of client services; Mike Earhart as senior vice president of marketing; and Kenneth Jones as senior vice president of strategy and business development.

Matt Miga is joining TRAFFIQ’s Product Development division as director of product support. Miga was last seen serving as a senior product specialist at Google.

Data wheeler and dealer eXelate has appointed Kevin Lyons senior vice president of analytics and David Lundell vice president of product management. Lyons shifts from targeting tech firm X+1, where he was vice president of analytics and business intelligence. Lundell comes from Kantar Media, where he provided planning, analytics and reporting solutions for large media owners and agencies.

Jed Savage has joined Collective Media as executive vice president of media sales and strategy. Savage was last seen as chief revenue officer at online video network ScanScout, which was acquired by Tremor Media last November.

Performance marketer Integrate promoted Eder Holguin from vice president of strategic partnerships to chief revenue officer. Prior to joining the company in 2010, Holguin founded OnDemand Research, which was acquired by XL Marketing.

Online and mobile video presentation specialist Brainshark just promoted Andy Zimmerman chief marketing officer, where he will oversee the company’s marketing organization, strategy, content and demand generation programs. Since joining the company in 2007, Zimmerman has served as vice president of product marketing; vice president of business development and vice president and general manager of myBrainshark, the company’s freemium solution and content marketplace.

Lucky participants chowed down on delicious South Western fare, and digital media-inspired drinks. After a few “social media signature cocktails,” I engaged with the lively crowd.

Ammon Brown of Traffiq had quite a few things to say about the improvements being made in the Bing algorithms. Venk Varadan of Citadel Securities revealed his expectations for the VC side of the business, and his thoughts on the future potential of mobile advertising. I overheard some agency folks discussing the challenges of last-click attribution, with the best approach to finding the right clicks hotly debated.

The weather held steady, the alcohol flowed and the conversations were passionate and informative. Thanks to TRAFFIQ and their partners for yet another great online advertising event.