NextMark today announced it has hired Mark Winberry as its Director of Product Management. In this role, Mark will lead the group that establishes the roadmap for all products, designs the user experience, and ensures the quality of product upgrades and enhancements. His initial focus will be on NextMark’s newest products that automate digital advertising workflow for “programmatic direct” advertising: Planner for media planners at advertising agencies and Compass for ad salespeople at publishers.

“Mark is a great addition to the team,” said Joe Pych, NextMark’s founder and president. “Skillful product management is critical to the success of our new offerings. Frankly, we’re overwhelmed with the fantastic ideas we’re getting from early clients. It’s a huge challenge to combine that feedback with our own vision to quickly deliver elegant solutions. It requires a unique combination of imagination, work ethic, design sense, technical knowledge, and interpersonal skills to be successful.  Mark’s the right guy for this job.”

Mark brings more than 20 years experience in software development to NextMark. Most recently, Mark served as the Senior Director of Engineering for Acquia – a software and hosting company that enables enterprises to efficiently build, deploy and manage hundreds of Drupal websites. Prior to that, Mark was the president of Trebuchet Development – a Software Development & Scrum/Agile consulting business. Prior to that, Mark served in various engineering and management roles at TomTom/TeleAtlas, Microsoft, Vicinity, Tally Systems, and Terra-Map East. Mark holds a BA in Mathematics from Harding University.

“I am thrilled to be joining the world-class team at NextMark,” said Mark Winberry. “The deep marketing automation experience of this team is unparalleled. That experience, combined with the best Market Intelligence database is enabling us to create the foremost media planning experience in the industry. I’m looking forward to leveraging my product development experience to help NextMark customers grow their businesses by delivering them the highest quality marketing automation solutions!”

Mark is already on the job working to deliver version 2.4 of Planner, which is scheduled to be released next week.

January 29, 2013 New York, NY – NextMark, Inc. today announced it has hired Chris O’Hara as Chief Revenue Officer. In this newly created role, Mr. O’Hara will lead NextMark’s marketing and sales departments, and manage NextMark’s new regional office in New York City.

“Chris is the ideal person for this role,” said Joseph Pych, NextMark’s President. “We were overwhelmed with 102 applications for the job. Chris stood out from the rest of the pack because he’s not only got the right sales management skills, but also has extensive industry experience and the right ideas to lead our new growth in digital advertising.”

Mr. O’Hara was most recently Chief Revenue Officer for Looksmart, a search advertising technology company. Previously, Chris has held senior roles at TRAFFIQ, Reviewed.com, MediaBistro, and Nielsen. Chris is a member of American Business Media’s speaker’s bureau, the IAB’s Networks and Exchanges and Sales Executive Committees, and a contributor to industry publications including Business Insider, eMarketing & Commerce, Econsultancy, AdMonsters, MediaPost, The Agency Post, Adotas, ClickZ, iMediaConnection, DigiDay, and AdWeek.

In addition, Chris has published extensive research on the ad technology space, focusing on platforms and technology solutions that drive digital advertising. His recent publications include “Best Practices in Digital Display Media” (Econsultancy, March 2012) and “Best Practices in Data Management” (Econsultancy, December 2012).

“When I saw the NextMark offering, I knew I wanted to join the team,” said O’Hara. “The industry is finally ready to apply real technology to the problem of buying premium guaranteed media, where more than 85% of digital display media spending still resides. NextMark’s tools are the best I have seen, and I am looking forward to getting into the market and giving agencies a way to immediately see improvements in the way they plan and buy media.”

Mr. O’Hara’s hire is effective immediately.

We’re happy to announce that Weiping Liu has joined the NextMark team as our Director of Software Engineering. In this role, Weiping will be leading the software team in building software for buying and selling media for advertising. He’s joining us at a very exciting time – just as we’re putting the finishing touches on a brand new product – a digital media planning system (we’ve yet to come up with a fancy name for it).

Weiping has more than 20 years experience building software. As a hands-on manager with a keen focus on shipping, he’ll fit right in with our lean, maker culture. Prior to NextMark, Weiping has worked with some of the great software companies here in the Upper Valley such as TomTom, isee Systems, Tally Systems (Novell), High Performance Systems, and Concepts NREC. Weiping holds a Master’s Degree from Dartmouth College and a Bachelor’s Degree from Beijing Normal University.