We are thrilled to announce our CEO Peter Bordes has joined the Board of Directors of Symitri, an incredibly important next generation platform for privacy, security and real-time data for advertising and media. Symitri is the world’s first integrated privacy firewall and real-time data cleanroom for the open web, designed to balance the economic viability of open-web programmatic advertising with the growing global demand for consumer privacy.
Symitri has appointed a seasoned board of directors to advance its mission of balancing digital publishers’ and advertisers’ business needs with every individual’s fundamental right to privacy. Co-founder Bill Wheaton, former chief strategy officer and EVP of Media at Akamai Technologies, has been named chairman. Experienced investors and executives, Keith Bank, Jeff White and Peter Bordes, have also joined the board, bringing extensive tech and media expertise to Symitri’s product and go-to-market strategy.
“More than 30 years of unfettered access to personal data has powered everything from marketing and sales to product development. Data is the foundation that supports much of the free, ad supported internet. Few companies can operate without consumer data,” explained Wheaton. “Today, government regulation and third-party signal loss threaten the interests of businesses and consumers alike. For the open web to survive, we have to find a way to balance the data businesses need with the privacy consumers deserve. We’ve created this balance with Symitri.”
Symitri co-founder and CEO, David Kohl, witnessed this disruption firsthand in his seven years as CEO of TRUSTX, a programmatic marketplace created by more than 30 of the world’s top premium publishers and now a Symitri subsidiary. “Privacy is a fundamental human right that must be protected, while at the same time, we need to sustain the business model that supports professional journalism and the lifestyle, sports and entertainment content we often take for granted,” said Kohl. “Symitri creates a new foundation for the ad-supported open internet that won’t force publishers or advertisers to choose between performance, precision and privacy. Symitri seamlessly integrates into the existing programmatic ecosystem to deliver all three.”
Bordes, the CEO of Collective Audience (NASDAQ: CAUD), an audience-based advertising and media platform for the open web, spoke of the catch-22 for advertisers and of Symitri’s potential to stave off unwanted consequences for all stakeholders in the digital economy. “It’s not hard to see why lots of brands favor the walled gardens, with seemingly unlimited consumer data, over transacting across the open Internet, where advertisers are loath to risk exposing their valuable customer data to an unknown number of third-parties.”
“What we see in Symitri is a simple and seamless way to neutralize that risk,” said Bordes. “I think of Symitri as the ‘dial-tone’ for the digital economy, securing personal data across the open internet in the background so that advertisers can support this vital part of our media economy without risk.”
Jeff White, CEO of Pod TV and a veteran tech executive, has developed a discerning eye for disruption in his leadership roles at companies including Media Analytics, HP, Agilent, and Fingerworks (a multitouch technology startup he co-founded and later sold to Apple as the foundation for the iPhone and iPad).
According to White: “All the companies trying to find a solution have lacked the perspective to map a new approach. Consequently, they’ve repeated the same fundamental mistake of pushing identity, albeit encrypted, through the bidstream, which opens up all kinds of regulatory and data leakage risks. The kind of disruption called for had to come from outside the industry, from an independent, unconflicted innovator like Symitri that could look at the challenge with fresh eyes. With Symitri, no consented consumer data leaves the publisher’s or advertiser’s environment, let alone enters the bidstream, and while that might seem like a simple change, it’s a massive differentiator.”
Banks, who serves as CEO of KB Partners, added: “Consumer data is the most valuable currency in the world—it’s the lifeblood of the global digital economy—but we don’t own it. It’s on loan from the consumer, and they expect us to handle it with the utmost care.”
With his nearly 30 years of experience in tech and investments involving more than 70 startups, including successful exits to companies such as Intel, Oracle and Sony Interactive, Banks expressed the board’s confidence in Symitri’s ability to solve the digital world’s most pressing challenges: “Symitri offers advertisers and publishers an unprecedented opportunity to ensure that the data entrusted to them stays with them. This is something no other company trying to solve this problem—and there are many—has been able to achieve. It’s the catalyst this industry needed to rebuild the foundation of open web publishing and advertising in a truly scalable way.”
ABOUT Symitri
Symitri is the world’s first integrated privacy firewall and real-time data cleanroom for the open web. Designed to balance the economic viability of open-web programmatic advertising with the growing global demand for consumer privacy, Symitri is a seamless EZ-button for buyer-defined deterministic campaign targeting, measurement and attribution, without exposing any personal data – pseudonymous or otherwise – in the bidstream. Discover more at Symitri.com, or follow Symitri on LinkedIn.
Rachel Pasqua
Symitri, Inc.
+1 917-683-1688
[email protected]
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