PlaceIQ Adds BlueKai Co-Founder and CEO Omar Tawakol to Board of Directors

NEW YORK, Aug. 21, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- PlaceIQ, the company building more accurate audiences with location, time and real-world behavior, today announced that Omar Tawakol, co-founder and CEO of BlueKai, has joined its Board of Directors.

"PlaceIQ is completely without peer in the work they're doing around location and behavior.  Right now they represent a leap beyond how brands can reach and interact with consumers, and the PlaceIQ platform's potential goes far beyond that," said Mr. Tawakol. "This company has a very clear vision of the future of digital marketing and is paving the way for the delivery of relevant messages to those who will be the most receptive. Combining location data with consumer behavior creates the ideal recipe for brand lift and insights, and I'm excited to contribute to such an innovator in our industry."

Mr. Tawakol will work closely with PlaceIQ to build upon the company's accelerated growth through his many years of experience in ad/tech operations, audience targeting and his work with major ad tech brands and brand partnerships. He will provide ongoing, strategic guidance as PlaceIQ innovates its offerings and delivers new consumer behavior insights capabilities based on the unique PIQ Platform.

"Omar is a fantastic addition to PlaceIQ's Board of Directors," said Duncan McCall, co-founder and CEO of PlaceIQ. "His impressive background and experience building BlueKai into the world's most complete enterprise data solution for intelligent marketing will be of tremendous value to us as we begin to expand our platform's reach into new markets. His leadership and vision for the future of marketing is extraordinary and as we move down the path, Omar's will be a major contributing factor to our success."

Before co-founding BlueKai, Mr. Tawakol was the chief advertising officer of Medio Systems which was acquired by Nokia. He was also at Audience Science before that, where he was chief marketing officer and general manager. During his Audience Science tenure he was instrumental in founding and growing the company's behavior targeting business, which provided services for many of the largest online publishers. Mr. Tawakol is also a major contributor to defining industry standards for behavioral targeting.

He holds a Master of Science degree in Computer Science and Industrial Engineering from Stanford University, as well as a B.S. degree in Engineering from MIT.  Mr. Tawakol's graduate research and publications were focused on communications of interests based on interaction data, and his work on integrating context into machine to machine communications was published by the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. 

For more information about PlaceIQ, please visit: www.placeiq.com.

About PlaceIQ:

Leading CPG, retail, automotive, entertainment, consumer electronics, and other national brands and their agencies rely on PlaceIQ's patented technology and suite of consumer discovery, engagement and activation solutions to engage with the right consumers and lead them to desired brand actions and destinations at unbeatable scale. PlaceIQ's Place Visit Rate (PVR™) is already the standard for measuring real-world, in-store ROI, quantifying the value and effectiveness of advertising, targeting and messaging. The company is headquartered in New York City and has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago and Boulder, Colorado. For more information, visit www.placeiq.com.  Follow us on Twitter @PlaceIQ and like us on Facebook: PlaceIQ.

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SOURCE PlaceIQ