Keynotes

Speaking To Machines In The Age of Data

Increasingly, to communicate with other humans and to be found by them, we need to make our case to the machines that interpret us. This is the basis of search-engine optimization, of course, but will also spread into the rest of our lives and business. How much do we have to simplify, or even distort, our message to get picked up by the machines?

Presenter: Stephen Baker, Journalist and Author of The Numerati

Stephen Baker, author of The Numerati, is a journalist based in the the New York area. For more than 20 years, he was a writer at BusinessWeek magazine, in Mexico, Pittsburgh, Paris before returning to cover technology from New York. Before BusinessWeek, Baker was a reporter for the El Paso Herald-Post. Prior to that, he was chief economic reporter for The Daily Journal in Caracas, Venezuela. Baker holds a bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin and a master's from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He blogs at TheNumerati.net and is on Twitter @stevebaker. His story Math Will Rock Your World led to The Numerati, which is about the mathematical modeling of humanity.

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Bill Wise, Vice President & GM, Display Platforms, Yahoo!

Bill Wise heads up the Advertising Platforms business for Yahoo!– Products under his watch include the Right Media Exchange and APT by Yahoo!, Yahoo’s next generation ad platform. Bill Wise is responsible for business strategy, overall go-to-market, total marketplace liquidity, and business development to: top marketers, ad agencies, publishers, data and technology providers, and differentiated ad networks. Prior to Yahoo’s $850 million acquisition of Right Media, Bill Wise was President of Right Media, running their media and services business.

Prior to that, Bill Wise was CEO of Did-it, the largest independent search marketing firm, from 2005 to 2007. Under his guidance as chief executive, the company had a 3 year growth rate of 1,368.5%, which ranked them #137 in the Inc 500 of fastest growing private companies. Did-it was ranked as a top paid search marketing firm by Jupiter Research. Bill Wise joined Did-it following several executive positions at leading online marketing companies, such as DoubleClick, MaxOnline, and Ask.com, now IAC Advertising Solutions.

As SVP, Products & Strategy at Ask.com, Bill Wise was responsible for the integration and strategy of the consolidated product suite within the Ask portfolio: MaxOnline, The Excite Network, and Ask.com Search. Prior to that, Bill Wise had been Chief Executive Officer for MaxOnline, which Ask.com acquired through its parent company, Interactive Search Holdings, in 2004. Bill Wise also spent five years at DoubleClick in numerous roles—from Director of Financial Planning & Investor Relations responsible for guiding Wall Street and the company’s shareholders to Vice President/ GM of Sonar, a direct marketing media business, to Vice President of DoubleClick Media. Bill Wise is also a certified public accountant (CPA) licensed in the state of New York.

Bill Wise sat on the Board of Directors of contextual-based marketing firm ContextWeb (from 2004-2007), and is currently on the board of directors for Wealth Media Group, a company who reaches the affluent market through their passions (from 2007). A past weekly contributor to MediaPost’s SearchInsider, Bill’s opinions are also frequently quoted in various marketing and business publications such as Business Week, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, AdAge, AdWeek, New York Times, and DM News. Bill Wise is also on the client advisory board for Microsoft Digital Advertising Solutions, the search engine marketing council board for Google, and is a board member for the DMA IMAB (Interactive Marketing Advisory Board).