The New York Interconnect said it named Andrew Kandel as CEO, effective March 20.

Kandel most recently was chief revenue officer of Waze@Google America. He succeeds Ed Renicker, who retired at the end of 2022.

“We are thrilled to announce the appointment of Andrew Kandel as CEO after a thorough and comprehensive search,” the Interconnect’s board said in a statement. ”Andrew has an impressive track record of growth and innovation in ad sales across a multitude of successful organizations. He has demonstrated himself to be a passionate leader with a deep understanding of business development, media and technology. We welcome him to the organization and look forward to working with him.“

The New York Interconnect is a joint venture of Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast and covers a market with 7.6 million households. ■

Success in TV advertising has always been built on quality and premium experiences. The complexity of the rapidly digitizing marketplace might have drowned out certain quality-centric conversations in recent years, but it never changed that fundamental ground truth. Now those conversations are more important than ever. 

After years of divergence and fragmentation in the TV space — across streaming, over-the-top, connected TV, you name it — we’ve reached an important inflection point as it relates to the kinds of conversations happening on the media-buying front. While TV buys remain multifaceted and nuanced, many of the familiar dichotomies within the space — between linear and digital, between branding and addressability — are falling away. In their place, we’re seeing conversations converge around one factor: quality.

It's a welcome shift within the industry, one that’s long in coming and essential to the continued advancement of the TV space. Let’s take a deeper look at how we got here and why quality and premium experiences will lead us where we need to go now. 

 A Shift in Tone and Focus

When it comes to buying eyeballs, there are a lot of ways for advertisers to get tonnage these days, and on the cheap. But what’s become particularly apparent in the TV space is that not all impressions are created equal. As the TV and video landscape has fragmented, so has the value associated with reaching viewers across the many varied platforms, channels and devices on which they consume content. 

Simply put: People participating in a premium TV experience tend to be more engaged and vested in their programming than those who are giving fleeting attention to the latest cat video. Advertisers understand this, and they are increasingly looking to ensure their media spends prioritize the former over the latter. 

More specifically, what we’re seeing more these days is a number of savvy advertisers looking for extensions of their standard TV buys into streaming and OTT inventory — but not just any streaming or OTT inventory. They want to ensure their linear extensions are geared toward network inventory where the value and experience are just as premium as they’ve come to expect from their linear placements. They want exclusive, quality inventory, and they want white-glove service. But at the same time, they want to create a cross-platform experience and to wrap sophisticated conversion data and analytics around it. 

The conversations surrounding these cross-platform buys are a far cry from the volume-based transactions happening in the programmatic TV space today. And that’s because control of fragmented TV budgets is yet again shifting. 

Talking to Empowered TV Buyers 

When streaming and OTT advertising opportunities came into being, the media-buying landscape split. For years, linear and streaming advertising were handled by separate teams, the latter of which tended to fall in the camp of the digital buying teams. Now, a lot of that is changing. Traditional TV buyers are now increasingly bringing linear extensions under their purview, and they’re being empowered to extend their relentless insistence on quality inventory and premium experiences into new areas. 

This shift makes sense. After all, if content is appearing on that big screen in the living room, does it really matter which kind of pipes it is flowing through? Also, by bringing these buys together under the same buyer’s purview, we’re seeing a much more unified approach to measurement when it comes to campaign impact. 

Part of the reason TV inventory fragmented across buying teams in the first place was because of the vastly different measurement mechanisms that emerged in the early days of streaming and OTT. The new inventory was digital, with a digital language surrounding it, and so it made sense that responsibility for these buys slid toward the teams most familiar with the language. But here again, we’re seeing a shift.

As the TV industry pivots toward a more unifying language inclusive of impressions — versus less extensible concepts like gross ratings points (GRPs) — TV buyers are becoming sophisticated in their understanding of audience addressability and how best to target both their linear and streaming spending for maximum effect. They’re asking more nuanced questions than ever, and it’s paying off when it comes to a renewed emphasis on quality and premium experiences.

Today’s empowered TV buyers are leveraging their deep expertise from decades of linear buys and up-leveling their results through the transparency, measurability and added reach of streaming and OTT — and it’s really just the beginning. As the systems and partnerships that support the vast TV landscape continue to unify and connect more dots on the back end, advertisers will continue to extend the power of their creative and messaging across new audiences and platforms alike.

In this reimagined TV landscape, quality and premium experiences will reign supreme. Just as they always have. ▪️

Nielsen said that it signed a long-term renewal of its deal to provide local TV measurement to the New York Interconnect.

The Interconnect is a joint venture of Altice USA, Charter Communications and Comcast created in 2017 to sell local advertising across the New York market, the biggest in the U.S..

The New York Interconnect also licenses Nielsen Ad Intel, which provides competitive spending information.

Nielsen’s measurement data will be used to evaluate the performance of cable networks in the New York market and calculate the reach and frequency of local ad campaigns.

“Nielsen’s data aids NYI in prospecting as it details ad dollars spent in the New York market on a category and advertiser basis,” Betsy Rella, VP of research and data for NYI, said. “We use Nielsen data in our sales collateral to help position our products in the marketplace. Additionally, with the use of Nielsen data, NYI is able to create posting reports for each client which serve as a ‘report card’ to ensure our local cable advertisers achieve the deliveries they expect.”

Rella said NYI was also enthusiastic about Nielsen’s commitment to shift from local ratings to measuring impressions.

“New York Interconnect is a valued client and industry leader, and we look forward to continuing to support the successful campaigns they create for their brands and advertisers,” said Catherine Herkovic, executive VP, managing director, Nielsen Local TV. “The support for impressions-based buying as evidenced by NYI’s enthusiasm and solidarity is a testament to the imperative across the industry, and Nielsen’s progress lays the groundwork for implementing Nielsen One across local, national and digital measurement.” ■

The most dramatic evolution we’ve seen throughout TV advertising’s 80 years of existence is widely argued to have occurred in the last 10 years. From the proliferation of live streaming and OTT, it seems like nothing is what it used to be. Content can be viewed everywhere, at any time, on any platform, using incredibly advanced technology. The addition of these new content viewing opportunities brings powerful new opportunities to the advertising industry.

As we focus on how to deliver seamless customer experiences with the integration of new platforms, we must also integrate consistency in the language we use to describe them—something I don’t believe we discuss nearly enough. Admittedly, it’s not a small or simple topic to tackle.

I recently sat down in a meeting to discuss revised terminology for how we talk about the ever-broadening opportunity within the TV space. Linear, cable, digital, OTT, VOD, streaming, addressable, connected—where do each of these terms (and others) fit in today’s industry lexicon? And are they all entirely necessary? I couldn’t help but be overwhelmed by a sense of déjà vu. How many times had I participated in similar conversations over the past few years? And as an industry, are we any closer to achieving a common language than when these conversations first started?

The simple fact is that if you ask 10 people in the ad industry to talk about current platforms and opportunities in the TV space, you’ll hear people pulling from 10 different glossaries. Let’s take a look at why that is—and what it ultimately means for the industry.

Refining Language Amid Rapid Change

The proliferation of digital hardware and software has dramatically altered people’s TV viewing patterns over the past decade, thereby upending what was once a fairly well-established and predictable advertising model for brands. As with any technological leap, the language we’ve used to describe new opportunities and viewing behaviors in TV has evolved in an uncontrolled environment, and the consequent confusion and inconsistency can prove frustrating. In a given conversation, two industry players might use “streaming,” “OTT” and “VOD” interchangeably to describe reaching audiences in their new time-shifted viewing behaviors, but there are often nuances among these terms that will ultimately influence a given media buy. Likewise, where does “digital” fit in today’s TV industry? Isn’t everything—even linear—inherently “digital” these days?

When the ad industry dives down this linguistic rabbit hole, conversations usually arrive at one logical conclusion: It’s the audience that matters, not the technology itself. So why are we troubling ourselves about semantics at all? Isn’t it all just “TV” in the end? Can’t we just buy audiences and stop worrying about the technological specifics of how they’re being reached?

A return to simplicity such as this is undoubtedly appealing, but we mustn’t go overboard all at once. Given the newness and continued evolution of TV advertising opportunities, we’re still in a very much needed education phase in which advertisers must come to understand—and to trust—how new viewing behaviors and their related advertising modalities fit into their broader media mixes. Understanding the nuances across the various manifestations of TV advertising today can help brands and their agencies better understand how existing targeting and attribution models need to evolve to take full advantage of the new opportunities within the TV space. By obscuring how various platforms and technologies fit within the greater whole, we obscure the innovation that has taken us so far in so short a time.

Overcoming Confusion to Continue Innovating

Within the TV space exists many players, with many products—and those products are evolving constantly. As an industry, we all agree that the nuance of how advertisers are reaching audiences on TV is important, but achieving consensus in terminology, particularly as it continues to move beneath us, has thus far proven impossible. But it’s an initiative we must continue in earnest.

In many cases, it’s likely that progress will start within the walls of TV’s biggest organizations and radiate outward.

At New York Interconnect, a joint venture between the three largest TV providers in the NY market (Altice USA, Charter and Comcast), we offer all of our capabilities under one holistic platform, called Audience One. We designed this concept in early 2018 with a mission to communicate to clients that targeting audiences wherever (and whenever) they were watching was more important than focusing on how we were reaching them. It was a fairly new position then, but it has become more and more standard within our industry. 

I recently asked Lisa Ahern, VP, Product Marketing at Comcast’s Effectv, about the challenge of language within the TV space, and she noted that it’s one her organization is actively tackling. “We need to start speaking about TV understanding how the medium has evolved to meet viewers’ needs,” she told me. “People now watch TV on their own terms, and viewing is not limited to the largest screen in the house at a fixed hour. To that end, Effectv will retire the word ‘linear’ in our marketing materials, using ‘TV’ instead. Other MVPDs have also voiced similar interest in simplifying this language across the ecosystem.”

Lisa also noted that there’s a lot of confusion over various acronyms and descriptions of digital TV in the market today. “Many people don’t understand the difference between over-the-top (OTT), TV Everywhere (TVE), connected TV (CTV) or set-top box video on demand (STB VOD),” she told me. “At Effectv, we bundle these distribution platforms together as Effectv Streaming, to enable advertisers to reach audiences wherever, whenever, and however they choose to watch TV and premium video content, across screens and devices. We want them to focus less on the acronyms and more on the incremental reach that digital adds to a TV campaign.”

Lisa noted that it would be helpful for organizations like IAB and VAB to help drive toward a standard language for the TV industry by surveying members about their current naming conventions and their ideas on unifying our terminology, and then developing recommendations based on the survey results.

Danielle DeLauro, executive VP at VAB, recognizes the role organizations like hers can play in generating awareness and support for a universal glossary through their deep and trusted connections with buyers, sellers and measurement providers. As she puts it, “As the walls between linear and OTT and digital fall and the industry pushes further towards data-driven solutions, a common language will become a necessity to conduct business efficiently. We recognize the need for clarity on common terms and concepts, and so this year we’ve begun developing glossary content to help marketers successfully navigate this change.”

The current fractured vernacular of our industry is a symptom of the vast innovation that has taken place—and continues to take place—within TV advertising. Everyone in the TV advertising industry recognizes the challenges associated with our inconsistent, constantly changing array of terminology, and we want to get to the other side of this challenge as soon as possible. It’s going to take time, but it seems a decade of conversations is finally starting to translate into action. 

New York Interconnect is a joint venture among Altice USA, Charter Communications, and Comcast that connects brands to over 20 million consumers in the nation’s No. 1 market.

When the pandemic hit, people started staying home and turning on their TVs, even more than usual. What followed was a flurry of headlines heralding the accelerated surge in streaming behaviors, particularly among streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Apple TV and others. But those stories only told part of the story—and perhaps not even the most interesting part. As media plans pivot, here are a few less-discussed insights into new viewing patterns that should be considered as budgets are allocated. 

The State of Live TV 

When advertisers hear about surges in streaming viewership, it’s typically viewed as being at the expense of live TV viewership. But in fact, the rise in streaming is happening on top of live TV, rather than in place of it. In fact, in the pandemic, live TV viewership surged along with the rest of viewing habits, driven primarily by a rise in news content consumption. 

Indeed, live TV is still alive and well, according to recent total U.S. data from the MRI-Simmons Cord Evolution study. In fact, 44.2 percent of time spent watching ad-supported TV shows in an average week is still being spent watching content live on a TV set, while 39.1 percent of time is spent with streaming content, 8.7 percent is spent with DVR content on TV, and another 8 percent is spent with video on demand (VOD).

It’s no surprise, of course, that consumers are also engaging with content on a variety of other platforms and devices. Although the highest percentage of time spent in an average week (44.7 percent) is still being spent viewing on TV sets via TV services (cable, satellite, fiber-optic and over-the-air antenna), internet-connected TVs (12.6 percent) and streaming set-top boxes and sticks (12.2 percent) continue to gain traction. Smaller devices, including laptops, smartphones, video game consoles, tablets and others, account for the rest of today's viewing time. Taken together, these shifts indicate how important it is for today’s advertisers to be thinking multi-screen, while still retaining a foundational presence in the live TV space as it continues to account for such a significant portion of time spent. 

Most Viewing Is Ad-Supported

Due to the high-profile nature and notable growth of subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services like Netflix and Disney+, another common media narrative—and thus, concern among advertisers—has been the potential loss of inventory opportunities thanks to ad-averse, subscription-obsessed TV viewers. However, recent data would suggest that such concerns are unfounded. 

Currently, the amount of time that consumers are spending with cable TV networks and apps exceeds that spent with SVOD, broadcast and free streaming services. While consumers report spending, on average, 27.6 percent of their time with subscription streaming services and apps such as Hulu, Netflix, Peacock and others, they’re spending even more time each week (33.1 percent) with traditional cable TV networks, live or time-shifted, such as A&E, Bravo, E! and cable network apps. 

Traditional broadcast TV networks, live or time-shifted, such as ABC and CBS, and their streaming apps account for 27.6 percent of consumer viewing time. By comparison, about 11.7 percent of viewing time is going to free streaming services like Pluto TV, YouTube and Tubi. 

In short, advertisers aren’t lacking for opportunities to connect with their audiences on ad-supported TV and video platforms. The main challenge, rather, is finding efficient ways to buy audiences across these platforms and channels. 

Cord Stacking, Not Cord Cutting

Finally, despite regular discussion of the rise in cord-cutting behavior among consumers, the data shows us that the reality is a bit more complicated than that. Most consumers right now are not cord-cutting, but rather cord-stacking by layering streaming services and apps on top of their paid, corded TV subscriptions. A big part of this has to do with retaining access to sports and live news services that aren’t as readily available in streaming environments. 

Of course, there are notable distinctions according to age and lifestyle. While the majority (53 percent) of consumers aged 35-54 have both pay TV and streaming services, the 18-34 crowd leads the way in streaming content and is most likely to have severed their ties with paid TV subscriptions. Interestingly, adults aged 18-34 with children are more likely than their childless peers to have cut the cord entirely (23 percent vs. 16 percent respectively), which may be the result of younger adults without children never having paid for TV service to begin with. 

Without a doubt, the pandemic has reshaped the reality of TV viewing for the future. As a result, today’s brands and agencies must reassess what they know about the modern video advertising landscape as it relates to efficiently reaching their audiences at scale. In doing so, they need to look beyond the latest headlines and maintain a higher-level perspective on viewing behaviors as they continue to evolve, in pandemic and non-pandemic times alike. 

New York Interconnect (NYI) is a joint venture among Altice USA, Charter Communications, and Comcast that connects brands to over 20 million consumers in the nation’s No. 1 market.

Lamenting siloes within the marketing world is like lamenting fleas on a dog. They’re irritating, we take great pains to rid ourselves of them—but ultimately, it seems like they come with the territory. But that mustn’t weaken our resolve to continue attacking the problem. Siloes have long been an issue within the TV media buying landscape, with the challenge becoming more pronounced in recent years with the rise of OTT, VOD and digital. 

As an industry, we’ve been making steady progress when it comes to integrating the power of linear with emerging opportunities in OTT, VOD and digital. And now, the pandemic has reminded us why we need to accelerate our efforts in tearing down walls within TV buying. Let’s look at the new pressures the siloed TV buying process faces in the pandemic, and the areas where the greatest effort needs to be made in uniting efforts. 

Shifting Behaviors, Budgets and Buying Vehicles

What was a gradual current propelling us toward a more-integrated TV advertising landscape has become a tidal wave in the pandemic. We’re seeing multiple forces converge in this regard—behavior, economics and logistics alike. 

Consumer shifts. It’s no secret that the pandemic and its associated lockdowns have driven a tremendous spike in consumer OTT viewing behavior. Sean Adams, senior director of the global ad platform at Roku, recently noted that the increase in OTT is proving to be much more than just a pandemic-related blip. We are seeing a greater surge in streaming viewership, which means buying around events is going to be a more-nuanced, cross-channel endeavor going forward.  

Budgetary pressures. Of course, despite the surge in audience attention across new TV modalities, today’s marketers are operating in a new financial reality. For many brands, that means doing more with less, including in the TV realm. This has led a lot of marketers to dig deeper when it comes to understanding addressable TV opportunities and how they can leverage their budgets to target more precisely and in a measurable capacity. 

Buying processes. The desire to minimize fragmentation across media buys and unify measurement across channels has also prompted calls in the industry for media organizations to make it simple to buy linear in partnership with OTT, VOD, digital and other video opportunities. Some networks and media sales organizations now offer advertisers the opportunity to target audiences across every platform (think linear, OTT and addressable) in one media buy. The industry is slowly moving forward, but it’s up to the organizations themselves to create holistic opportunities that work.

The Pursuit of Alignment 

The pressures on the fragmented TV landscape have accelerated over the past six months. It’s time, in turn, for the breakdown in siloed processes and systems to accelerate concurrently. In this regard, there are two key places where our industry needs to focus: 

Team structures. These days, responsibility for buying among the ever-expanding array of TV inventory has become an area fraught with division, uncertainty and inconsistency among brands and agencies. Some linear teams have been tasked with purchasing digital modalities, while some digital teams have been tasked with absorbing emerging TV channels into their purviews. Neither approach is perfect. Only in breaking down the walls between teams to understand the impact of cross-channel TV buys in full context of other initiatives can marketers hope to properly optimize their efforts.

Measurement. Much of today’s fragmentation and uncertainty among TV buying teams is mirrored within the question of measurement. While traditional linear buys generally still communicate in the language of GRPs (though some have made the transition to CRM), emerging opportunities in OTT, connected TV, VOD and others tend to speak the language of digital as it relates to attribution. Now, more than ever, we need to be uniting our understanding of cross-channel effectiveness around audiences and identity, which is an area where players like LiveRamp are taking great strides. 

As those planning content and advertising seek to bridge the gaps among linear, OTT, VOD and digital, the fractured TV landscape faces pressures anew, with the pandemic introducing new dynamics to the conversation. These dynamics aren’t fleeting. They’re here to stay, and they demand action. As an industry, it’s time for all players to come together to break down the walls—walls between teams, measurement modalities and legacy mindsets—to enable the full growth potential of TV and all its manifestations going into 2021 and beyond. 

New York Interconnect (NYI) is a joint venture between Altice USA, Charter Communications, and Comcast that connects brands to over 20 million consumers in the nation’s #1 market.

As TV campaigns become increasingly data-driven, addressable and cross-platform, the evolving science that is multiscreen attribution is taking center stage in marketers’ minds. After all, particularly in these tight economic times, attribution can’t be an afterthought or an add-on; it must be an essential part of campaign planning.

Multiscreen attribution is a complex and ever-evolving discipline, but setting campaigns up for success does revolve around some tried-and-true principles. Let’s look at today’s key requirements for meaningful multiscreen attribution, as well as the challenges in this space that the industry is currently working to address.

6 Keys to Success

In planning a multiscreen campaign, marketers must ensure certain fundamental elements are discussed and confirmed up front, lest questions about the effectiveness of the campaign arise later. To ensure smooth sailing in complicated waters, your planning checklist should include the following. 

Define Your Objective: Your objective will drive the rest of the steps, and you need to go beyond talking solely about selling products. Are you looking to measure conquests? Encourage repeat business? Improve brand perception? Given today’s precise targetability and measurement capabilities, you can have thoughtful and specific objectives that can be measured.

Identify the Right Target and Scale: There is so much rich, sophisticated data available to test against various audiences. The right target will support your objectives, and it will be different each time. But there is a balance to be achieved between being targeted and being too specific. Sample size is important to reach statistical significance.

Craft the Right Copy: Is your copy appropriate for your targets and objectives? Does your messaging capture the right tone and have a call to action?

Outline Your Media Mix and Plan: The power of TV’s scale can now be enhanced by the targeting ability of a digital ecosystem, driving results further down the purchase funnel. Your media plan should be an appropriate length and scale to assess a proper read and garner results.

Confirm Your Type of Study: There are multiple ways to measure attribution, from straight sales conversion to brand health studies. Your objective, budget and target size will drive the right type of study or mix of studies, and your product will determine the study design and appropriate conversion window.

Establish Access to Quality Data: Attribution is only as good as your data on the back end. Rich census-level exposure data is great. But will you have access to clean data in a timely manner? 

Attribution Challenges and Opportunities

The above elements, when defined up front in a campaign, lay the groundwork for attribution success. But even with these parameters set, multiscreen attribution isn’t easy. In fact, from an industry perspective, it can be quite complicated and confusing. There are many analytic partners out there, not to mention countless data sets and various approaches to measurement. An advertiser could see different results for the same campaign depending on the data sets and methodology used. In the coming years, the industry must come together to further define an accepted approach to multiscreen attribution. The sooner we can all agree on the right elements, the sooner we can enact standards that help advertisers more easily evaluate results.

As we move to establish industry best practices for attribution, we must keep in mind that consumers are everywhere, viewing content on multiple devices. That means advertisers need to be everywhere too, and we need to report on campaigns from a holistic perspective when calculating reach and frequency. An advertiser needs to know how many people saw its ad, not just on TV, but across all platforms, including digital. Furthermore, we must lock down a way to de-dupe these numbers to fully evaluate a campaign’s performance. This is no small task.

But there is good news. With data at the heart of everything today, the TV industry is moving toward impression-based buying and selling. This provides a common currency that allows for a more holistic approach for aggregating audiences across screens. Likewise, industry organizations such as the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM) are taking on a lot of large-scale initiatives that will help to move the industry forward, including combining set-top box and smart TV data and creating a data environment linked by IDs to enable de-duplication of reach.

Ultimately, working together to share learnings, versus advancing individual agendas, will benefit everyone and advance the media industry in the coming years. The power of multiscreen campaigns is not in question. But it’s high time that we help brands and agencies quantify their results in a way that lets them optimize and improve their efforts over time. 

New York Interconnect (NYI) is a joint venture between Altice USA, Charter Communications, and Comcast that connects brands to over 20 million consumers in the nation’s #1 market.

The New York Interconnect has hired four top media veterans to focus on the rollout of its new multi-screen audience targeting platform, Audience One – Charlie Holmes, senior vice president of sales; Bill Little, chief financial officer; Karen Au Claro, chief legal counsel; and Betsy Rella, vice president of research and data.

Audience One allows brands and marketers to discover and target audiences across TV, digital, VOD, and OTT.

Previously a division of Altice USA’s Altice Media Solutions, the new NYI re-launched in April as a strategic joint venture between Altice USA, Charter and Comcast and other affiliated MVPD’s including Fios, DirecTV, and Dish Network. NYI is now the largest interconnected market in the U.S., with more than 6.2 million households in the New York DMA.

Related: Altice USA, Charter, Comcast Form New NY Interconnect 

"The NYI management team is complete," said New York Interconnect CEO Ed Renicker, in a statement. "We took the time to find the right people for these positions. Charlie, Bill, Karen, and Betsy have unparalleled track records of success, and they will be integral as we pioneer multi-screen addressable, audience targeting, and measurement into the market."

Holmes has more than 30 years of sales experience, most recently serving as vice president and general manager of NCC Media. In his new position, Holmes will set and execute the company's sales strategy, leading a team of more than 30 people.

Little is a former SVP of finance and business development at DirecTV and as CFO will manage NYI’s financial operations, including all pricing strategy, planning, forecasting, budgeting, and capital allocation.

Au Claro was most recently SVP of law – local media and ad sales for Cablevision, and had previously served as VP of legal affairs – sports and entertainment at AMC Networks. In her new role, Au Claro will oversee all of the company's legal strategies, external transactions and corporate matters.

Rella joins NYI from TiVo, where she was most recently senior director of data monetization and analytics and VP of research. In her new role Rella will develop and drive the company's data products and strategies, leverage research to grow sales, and create and maintain relationships with third-party data providers.

The four new hires join a previously announced executive team consisting of: chief operating officer Tom Donohue; SVP of national sales, business development and strategy John Verre; VP of marketing and client services Dana Barakat; and VP of human resources Judy Courtney.