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Venatus Boosts Global Reach with Key Executive Appointments

Venatus, a global gaming and entertainment advertising solutions provider, announced an accelerated global expansion driven by three senior hires: Sacha Bunatyan as the company's first chief marketing officer (CMO); Sterling Wharton as President, North America; and Dominique McAree as Senior Account Director for West Coast Operations. The new executives bring decades of international advertising and gaming experience from Electronic Arts, The Financial Times, Dentsu, Coty, Buy.com and WildTangent. The hires aim to strengthen brand awareness, client partnerships, and growth across North America, Europe, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. Bunatyan will lead marketing and strategic initiatives; Wharton will oversee commercial brand partnerships and NA retail; McAree has scaled multi-channel global brand partnerships with Fortune 500s. Rob Gay, CEO and co-founder, and Matt Cannon, COO, commented on the additions, signaling Venatus’s continued leadership in gaming advertising solutions.

Rakuten Marketing CEO: ‘Our Breadth Of Data Goes Well Beyond Shopper Data’

Rakuten Marketing aims to become a full-funnel advertising platform by stitching together a growing slate of acquisitions and data assets. CEO Tony Zito notes that integration across multiple assets—acquisitions in search, affiliate, display, mobile, and attribution—is complex but central to delivering a better advertising experience for customers. The company acquired Deep Forest Media to obtain a mobile demand-side platform and cross-device tracking, which it is enhancing with deterministic data from the Ebates acquisition. Rakuten Marketing also leverages Slice for receipt-level benchmarking and owns Viki (video) and Viber (messaging), broadening data beyond traditional shopper signals. The strategy emphasizes cross-channel reach and attribution, not just individual channels, with ongoing governance concerns around publisher and advertiser agreements. The interview underscores a broader Rakuten plan to acquire and integrate more assets to accelerate product development and improve cross-channel advertising outcomes.

PHG Targets $10B Affiliate Management Market

Performance Horizon Group (PHG) is an affiliate marketing campaign management provider whose clients include Sony and T-Mobile. Founded in 2010 with seven employees, the company now employs nearly 60 across offices in London and Newcastle (UK), New York, and Sydney. Led by CEO Malcolm Cowley and CTO Pete Cheyne—both co-founders of Buy.at—the firm has grown from its Buy.at heritage, which AOL acquired for $125 million in 2008. PHG has expanded its product line to include optimization tools for Apple’s iBeacon, integrating this capability into its ExactView tracking API to help brands measure in-store activity and bridge online-to-offline conversions. Management says the addressable market sits at about $10 billion, and the business has grown more than 100% year over year since inception, with Q1 2014 growth of 300% versus Q1 2013. The company foresees rapid growth through 2017, planning to scale from roughly 30 customers today to 400 by end of 2017, and staff from 60 to 270.