I’m very pleased to announce that we’ve made a major email industry hire in Ali Swerdlow. As our VP of Industry Relations, Ali will be helping to lead our efforts in partnering with Email Service Providers (ESPs), Marketing Clouds and Agencies.
As you are aware, ESPs send the email that contains our tags. ESPs have always been core to our business. A key component to our recent success has been how we approach partnerships with Email Service Providers to power our platform and exchange. We’re always looking to better our product to help ESPs deliver more value to our joint clients: the brands that utilize our platform. A key reason reason we have such strong relationships with ESPs is that we don’t send any email for our clients and we’ve been able to work together to drive more engagement in and with email. Ali’s expertise and stature among ESPs and the data/technology companies that own them will increase our exposure to our platform and the benefits it delivers for all members of the email ecosystem, especially the brands that use it to drive critical customer engagement initiatives.
Ali knows her way around the email industry. She comes to us after a stint as the Vice President of Channel Sales and Marketing at LeadSpend, an Experian company. She was LeadSpend’s first employee and helped shepherd them to their acquisition by Experian, the Cross Channel Marketing leader. As we continue our rapid growth, another member of our team with experience in helping to shape companies growing at incredible rates will be extremely valuable. Her work at LeadSpend saw her lead all strategic alliances and build the partnerships that were at the core of LeadSpend’s success. We expect her to do the same here.
Prior to her work with LeadSpend, Ali had a six-year run as director of the Direct Marketing Association’s (DMA) Email Experience Council (eec.) The EEC is a member-driven organization that serves email marketing service providers by evangelizing the channel and ensuring its expert members take responsibility for creating and disseminating best practices to the brands and publishers they serve. It’s considered the voice of authority for ethics and offers expert advisement for email marketers. Its reputation for advocacy for brands and consumers guides our company (and all conscientious email marketing service providers.)
Ali will focus extensively on driving usage of LiveAudience through ESP partnerships. Ali has spent her career developing insights on how email is best leveraged by brands and advertisers looking to connect with their audiences, and LiveIntent is a natural continuation of that work. We’re looking forward to having Ali build and nurture our relationships across the email, ad-tech and CRM communities while helping all parties understand the value of real-time addressable audience marketing in the most effective interactive marketing channel, email.
The prominent hire is another sign of our extraordinary sales and staff growth! In the past year, we’ve moved into beautiful new offices, more than doubled our employees, revenue and ads served, tripled our unique reach to more than 70 million monthly active users, and launched several new products, including our high-impact ad unit in email (Marquee). Our LiveAudience product (similar to Facebook’s Custom Audience and Twitter’s Tailored Audience) has also been getting strong traction among brands looking to use 1st party data to reach engaged audiences within email in 2014.
We don’t know what the future will hold but there are two things we’re very confident of: Email will continue to be a central focal point of our lives and the backbone of how we communicate in the modern era and Ali Swerdlow will help guide us into a new era of growth driven by mutually beneficial industry partnerships.
