The Trade Desk Hires Dataxu Founder Bill Simmons

Ad tech firm The Trade Desk has appointed Dataxu co-founder Willard (Bill) Simmons as Vice President of Product, responsible for driving innovations and data science applications across its media buying platform.

The Trade Desk offers access to a self-service platform through which ad buyers can create, manage and optimize digital campaigns across ad formats and devices. Earlier this year, the firm partnered with Nielsen to provide consumer identity demographic data to expand the latter's identity system, Nielsen ID - initially in France, Italy and the UK.

In 2008, Simmons (pictured) co-founded consumer analytics firm Dataxu, which developed new approaches in the application of data science and machine learning for digital advertising decision-making at scale. During his time with the business, he managed a team of more than 100 engineers, data scientists, operations staff and contractors, and he founded the OpenRTB consortium between six companies, to standardize the protocols for 'real-time bidding'. In 2019, Dataxu was acquired by streaming platform Roku, where Simmons went on to serve as VP Product Management, Ad Platform.

Jeff Green, co-founder and CEO of The Trade Desk, comments: 'Bill is one of the founders of our industry, and he's a visionary in the application of advanced data science to help advertisers drive as much value as possible from every campaign dollar. As more advertisers embrace data-driven advertising, especially in the fast-growing world of connected TV, Bill will bring vital expertise and experience to help The Trade Desk continue to drive value for our clients'.

Web site: www.thetradedesk.com .