Yahoo has been losing a lot of steam to Facebook in the advertising game, and now it’s lost one of its execs to it, too. Nanigans, the Facebook advertising company, is today announcing the appointment of a new COO, Marc Grabowski, a nine-year veteran of Yahoo and one of the first to depart after Marissa Mayer took over the CEO job.
The move is an interesting one, given that Yahoo has put a lot of emphasis on the display element of its advertising business, while Nanigans is more of an ad tech company, working in the still-emerging area of social media performance advertising, analysing and optimizing data about usage and viewers to drive installs, registrations, purchases and other engagement metrics. Nanigans says current traffic its ads are around 2 billion Facebook Ad impressions daily.
This appointment could be a sign of Nanigans going for more traditional formats — or Grabowski finally getting to flex some more tech/product muscle. Nanigans would argue both, perhaps:
“The depth of the company’s technology and intellectual property coupled with social being at the crux of the next frontier of online advertising are just two of the reasons why I’m excited to join this team,” said Grabowski in a statement.
“Marc understands all facets of online advertising, from sophisticated optimization techniques to the strategic opportunity that social advertising presents to businesses,” said Ric Calvillo, co-founder and CEO of Nanigans. “We’re excited to have an online media veteran like Marc join our team during this time of high growth.”
The appointment, Nanigans says, comes as the company is in expansion mode, building up its sales, marketing, business development and operations teams. The company also recently upgraded to Facebook’s new ad-targeting and conversions API. Its 2 billion daily impressions works out to 12,000 per second, for clients like Fab and American Express.
And just because Grabowski’s most recent position at Yahoo was VP of media sales, where he oversaw $1 billion of annualized revenue, that doesn’t mean that he was outside of looking at how to leverage technology to improve ad performance.
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In his time with the company, Grabowski had been one of the execs “driving the Interclick acquisition,” as well as leading on its recently-launched big-data platform called Genome. He also played a part in mid-market sales (a potentially big area for advertising on Facebook) and in Yahoo’s reseller relationships. Most recently at Yahoo! he was responsible for a team of over two-hundred online advertising sales and account management professionals.
