Industry Pioneer Neal Richter Joins Rakuten Marketing as Chief Technology Officer; Richter Will Lead Rakuten Marketing Technology and Data Innovation to Drive New Revenue Opportunities for Advertisers and Publishers

SAN MATEO, Calif., June 29, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Rakuten Marketing, a leading technology company that enables brands and publishers to increase sales through data-driven marketing, today announced its appointment of industry pioneer Neal Richter, to Chief Technology Officer (CTO). Neal's expertise across 20 years of software experience, particularly his eight years pioneering programmatic real-time-bidding (RTB) infrastructure and data-intensive algorithms for publishers and advertisers, make him uniquely positioned to lead Rakuten Marketing technology innovation to drive new revenue opportunities for automated marketing. 

"Neal is a valuable and strategic addition to our Rakuten Marketing executive team, and we are thrilled to benefit from the experience, expertise and acclaim he brings to this role," said Tony Zito, Rakuten Marketing CEO. "Among the leading reasons we chose Neal as CTO is his ability to connect technology innovation with the larger Rakuten Marketing mission to improve performance for all our publishers and advertisers. We are confident that Neal is the right person to do this job, and can't wait to see his vision for driving our technology forward."

Neal serves as co-Chair of the IAB TechLab's OpenRTB protocol that standardized the process of RTB, the Deal-ID, the Native Ads format, and the recently announced ads.txt standard. Most recently Neal was CTO of the Rubicon Project, an early pioneer of programmatic supply-side platforms (SSPs).  He also held engineering leadership roles at OthersOnline and RightNow Technologies building scaled machine learning, sentiment analysis and natural language processing algorithms before "data science" was a coined discipline. In bringing this expertise to Rakuten Marketing, Neal is strongly positioned to uncover new ways to use programmatic advertising and Rakuten consumer data insights to maximize advertising returns for Rakuten Marketing advertisers and publishers.

"Rakuten Marketing has a strong foundation in technological innovation, and embraces data as a leading driver of software solutions to the opportunities advertisers and publishers face in a world dominated by data," said Neal Richter, CTO, Rakuten Marketing. "I am excited to take on the task of leading the vision at Rakuten Marketing to provide technology and data solutions to empower marketers to excel in their roles."

Neal grew up in a log cabin in Montana and holds a PhD in Computer Science from Montana State University, specializing in artificial intelligence algorithms. He authored and published 16 academic papers and more than 10 patents. When not sifting through data or designing high scale systems, Neal enjoys fly fishing and living in the Rockies in Salt Lake City, Utah.

About Rakuten Marketing
Rakuten Marketing is the global leader in integrated marketing solutions, spanning affiliate, display and search. Rakuten Marketing empowers marketers to achieve the full potential of digital marketing by delivering data-driven personalized ad experiences that engage consumers – across screens, platforms and traditional publishers – and influence them to purchase. Rakuten Marketing is committed to transparency, providing consumer journey insights that are used to continually optimize for performance.

Rakuten Marketing is a division of Rakuten Inc. (4755: TOKYO), one of the world's leading Internet service companies. The company is headquartered in San Mateo, California, with offices in Australia, Brazil, Japan, the United Kingdom, and throughout the United States. Follow us on Twitter or learn more at http://rakutenmarketing.com.

PR Contact
Lisa Tadje, Sr. Director, Communications
Rakuten Marketing
801-718-9980
[email protected]

SOURCE Rakuten Marketing

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