Darren Herman
Marketing, Media, and Technology Conversations
Category: Advertising & Marketing

I don’t know if the word “premium” is right for the header, but couldn’t come up with another term. I use @gmail for my personal emails.  I also send the inquiries from this blog to that @gmail account.  The problem I have is that I don’t pay Google.  It’s less about paying Google for my [...]

First, let me start off by saying that any opportunity for a startup to showcase it’s “wares” is a good thing.  An idea in a vacuum is never a good thing and getting on stage in front of a group of people to tell your story could put your startup on the map, depending on who is [...]

3+ month assignment.  Could go much longer, depending on the fit.  Could go much shorter, depending on the fit. I’m looking for a hybrid 30% visionary, 70% executor who has demonstrated entrepreneurial ability within the advertising technology or financial technology markets.  You should have a passion for media trading and at least a working knowledge [...]

Today’s opening keynote was given by Paul Graham, at the YCombinator Ad Innovation Conference in Mountain View.  I attended along with @tdavidson and @barryl530 to see the early stage innovation that’s happening in the ad tech space.  We were certainly impressed not just with the innovation but with the amount of great agencies in attendance [...]

I’ve been noodling the opportunity around an ad tech dream I had.  Yes, I really do dream about these things. We all know the positions that Yahoo! and AOL are in.  I won’t go into that here, other than they will need to make some short term decisions rather quickly. As a proactive entrepreneur, what [...]

One of kbs+p Ventures portfolio companies, Crowdtwist, is looking to attract and hire sales folks to join their team.  For those who aren’t familiar with Crowdtwist, it’s a social loyalty platform that bridges the paid-owned-earned media ecosystem.  I’m extremely bullish on them because they bridge the evolving media ecosystem and bring social data into our [...]

(originally posted on Google Plus and then picked up on PaidContent) I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about data recently and it’s become the central investment thesis for kbs+p Ventures, our go to market approaches for The Media Kitchen, and how kbs+p communicates vision. My friend and entrepreneur extraordinaire +Jon Steinberg says it extremely [...]

I receive @jason‘s letters which he sends out fairly frequently.  If you are into digital media and want @jason’s opinion on the latest topics, then I recommend subscribing. This week’s topic is: Why Google+ Will Take Half of the Social Networking Market from Facebook (or “There Calacanis Goes Again”) As you might know from my [...]

The title of the post is a bit of an exaggeration, but after reading below, you’ll see why.  Note, this mostly pertains to technology/digital opportunities. I had a conversation with an industry colleague the other day and we both came from the sell side (publisher/content distributor) before we ended up on the buy side (agency/client).  We [...]

A couple of weeks back, I went out to Santa Monica to film a segment for This Week in Marketing.  I’m not sure if any of you watch the This Week In Series, but it’s a great collection of 15-60 minute shows on different topics ranging from startups (with @jason) to venture capital to video [...]