The Future of Media: Contagious Marketing and the Success of Buzzfeed
Buzzfeed is a pioneer in contagious marketing and one of today’s most successful digital media outlets. Buzzfeed’s President Greg Coleman shares the role testing and learning have played in its success, and how the media company thinks about the future of paid advertising.
Greg Coleman is a digital business veteran with more than three decades of experience in digital sales, advertising technology, and media, and he was one of the industry’s foremost pioneers as an early business executive at Yahoo!, Huffington Post, AOL, and Criteo. He is currently the President of Buzzfeed, the social news and entertainment online platform that attracts over 175 million monthly unique visitors with its breaking news, social video, long-form stories, and short listicles. As President and on the Board of Directors, he is responsible for the management and growth of all facets of the business including sales, creative services, marketing, ad products and business development. Prior to this role, he was the President of Criteo (2011-2014), a global advertising and software company that specializes in personal retargeting to serve ads to consumers based on sites that they have visited. He was President and EVP Global Sales at The Huffington Post (2009 to 2011) where he built a $30 million ad business in one year. He also served as President of Platform-A at AOL in 2009 where he ran their monetization platforms worldwide. Greg was the CEO and President of Netseer, an online media solutions company that fuels targeting advertising by concepts (2008-2009) Earlier he spent seven years as the EVP of Sales at Yahoo (2001-2008), where he helped grow their ad sales from $600 million to $6 billion per year. He was then the President of U.S. Magazine Publishing for Reader’s Digest Association (1991-2001), where he turned advertising from an afterthought to more than 25% of corporate profit. He was a Publisher at Memories Magazine of Hachette Filipacchi Media (1988-1991). At CBS, Inc, he spent ten years (1978-1988) leading advertising efforts for Woman’s Day as their Vice President and National Sales Manager. Greg is an adjunct professor at NYU Stern School of Business and is Chairman Emeritus at The Advertising Council Inc. In addition, he serves as an Advisor to LearnVest, Criteo, Pubmatic and AnchorFree. He previously served as Director at Martini Media Network, Inc., and Board of Directors at Opera Software ASA.