DatafuelX Expands With Senior Technology, Partnership Hires

DatafuelX, which provides decision science tools for the forecasting, optimization and activation of advertising schedules against demos, audiences and outcomes, has announced new technology and partnership hires in support of its expanding growth.

Effective immediately, Steve Popper has been named VP of technology and Guanghui Lui VP of data science. Additionally, Caitlin Barter has been named director of partnership success. All three are new positions.

As VP of technology, Popper will be responsible for evaluating current architectural directions, tools, and development plans tied to datafuelX’s product plan and help provide day-to-day management of the engineering team.

He was formerly CTO at antuit.ai, a Goldman Sachs portfolio company, recruited to drive the transition from professional services-oriented point solutions to a SaaS product company. He has was CTO at Vidillion, where he helped developed the market-leading SSP for CTV and OTT video advertising, enabling the creation of new ad inventory and auction, delivery and tracking of billions of ad impressions.

In his role as VP of data science, Lui will serve as datafuelx’s most senior leader and subject matter expert in optimization modeling, machine learning, artificial intelligence, mathematical algorithms and predictive modeling.  He joins from Catalina USA, where he was principal data scientist and senior direct of data science, responsible for applying ML/AI and advanced analytics to solve business problems in media advertising, retail and CPG marketing in omni-channels.

As director of partnership success, Barter will oversee datafuelX product implementation with clients, encouraging adoption and providing external education materials to allow for scaled usage.  She will also serve as primary point person on promotion of DatafuelX’s new M3 Data Driven Linear (DDL) platform to publisher-clients.

Barter joins datafuelX with extensive experience in DDL SaaS products having managed the customer success team for clypd and Xandr’s TV Platform. She has experience supporting relationships with both Monetize TV sell-side users (publishers) as well as Invest TV buyside users (agencies). Prior to clypd, Barter has led media planning, reporting and execution across a variety of advertising verticals.

M3, recently launched by datafuelX, is a DDL SaaS platform specifically designed to meet the multi-currency, multi-platform and multi-goal challenges in Convergent TV today.

The cloud-based platform is designed to support the entire process, from planning to forecasting, deal optimization, stewardship and posting, with solutions that address multiple currencies, platforms and goal optimizations and that enable greater publisher yield and advertiser results by unifying the reach of television with the precision of digital channels.

The cloud and data-agnostic platform, which is designed to be quickly adaptable to changes in the market and easily integrated, is TV viewership-source agnostic, supporting use of standard or advanced targets, regardless of source; enables holistic campaign construction across multiple platforms and channels for linear, digital and addressable allocation; and makes possible the use of a combination of multiple viewership and outcome metrics.

Founded in 2021, datafuelX is headed by Jay Amato, president, the former general manager of OpenAP; Howard Shimmel, head of strategy, president of Janus Strategy and Insights and former chief research officer at Turner Broadcasting; and Spencer Lambert, director, formerly with Horizon Media, along with a data science and engineering team with years of media industry experience.