Tech and Product Innovation Series 2021
Zoom Video Events

home office with mac laptop in foreground and second monitor in background

Thursdays
May 13 -June 10, 2021
12-12:45 EDT

A DCN members-only series of events designed to dig deeply into how DCN’s premium publisher members are managing various aspects of the technology and product areas of their businesses. DCN members will have time during the event to share their insights and expertise and to help each other with practical, in-depth information for their businesses.

This is a free event for DCN members.  The unique, members-only attendee list allows for open conversation, information sharing and networking .

Sponsored by:
Algolia Logo
Bonsai logo
Danads logo
GeoEdge logo
The MediaGrid logo
Sessions
Session 1: Thursday, May 13
Three approaches to post-cookie identity
Sheri Bachstein Headshot

Sheri Bachstein serves as CEO, The Weather Company & GM IBM Watson Advertising, overseeing a portfolio of cognitive businesses within IBM. Her role also includes overseeing innovative AI-driven products and services for media clients.

Sheri has played a role on many different aspects of The Weather Company digital properties since joining in 2007. Previously she was global head of the consumer business, which included all aspects of The Weather Channel and Weather Underground consumer properties, including product management and design, content development and global expansion across the organization on Weather’s owned and operated properties.Prior to that, she led global audience growth and has also led international consumer product for weather.com and The Weather Channel apps.


An Atlanta native, Sheri received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from Georgia State University. She enjoys playing golf, traveling and cooking

Pranay Prabhat Headshot

Pranay Prabhat is the senior director of engineering at The New York Times Company. In this role, he leads multiple engineering teams across web, mobile, backend and data to handle the digital ads business at the New York Times. Previously, he was the director of engineering for ad technology and a development manager of engineering.

Before joining the New York Times in 2015, Prabhat was a technical program manager in Tavant Technologies, US. Prior to that, he held software engineer positions at Patni Computer Systems, India, IBM, India and Fidelity, India.
Prabhat holds a bachelor of technology degree in Material Science and Metallurgy from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, India.

John Price Headshot

John Price, SVP, Revenue Operations and GM of Catalyst, Complex Networks

Leading all aspects of the revenue operations team and launching and overseeing Complex Networks' B2B digital advertising consultancy Catalyst, Price brings strategic planning and trend forecasting to his role. Boasting over 15 years of industry experience, Price has held positions as an effective leader at Gawker Media, Mashable, NBCUniversal, and Turner Broadcasting before joining Complex Networks in 2018.

 Session 2: Thursday, May 20     sponsored by: Algolia logo
How Politico Europe modernized readers' experience with an API-first approach
Karl Bjelland Headshot

Karl Bjelland is Product Lead at POLITICO, working alongside the tech team, facilitating development of the Pro platform. Previously, Bjelland founded Statehill, a legislative data platform. In 2018 Statehill technology was acquired by POLITICO and he joined the company in Brussels.

Gaëtan Gachet Headshot

Gaëtan Gachet is Algolia’s Chief Strategy Officer and actively works on defining, developing and executing Algolia’s business strategy. Gaetan has an international background and prior to Algolia, worked in sales and business development at Polestar in Paris and the French Trade Office in San Francisco. He is also passionate about building a team with a culture that empowers its members and is an active advocate of this philosophy at Algolia. He holds an MS degree in telecommunications from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications and BS in Fundamental physics from Université Paris Sud. (Paris XI)

Karl Roos Headshot

Karl Laurentius Roos is Director Technology Development at POLITICO, leading the tech team and overseeing all Pro platform development. From Stockholm, Sweden, Roos has been hammering the keyboard for the past 15 years writing code and building intricate online tools. Stints as CTO at an ecommerce startup, and lead developer at a big data marketing

Session 3: Thursday, May 27
Categorization and context: Reuters' AI powered computer vision application
Viktoriia Samatova Headshot

Viktoriia Samatova is a Director of Applied Innovation team of Data Scientists within Reuters Technology division focused on discovering and applying new technologies to enhance Reuters products and improving efficiency of news content production and discoverability. Prior to joining Reuters, Viktoriia spent over 5 years at State Street Bank’s Global Exchange division where she was managing product development of academic and financial industry content ingestion platform, which was the first company-wide product application utilizing emerging technologies of AI and machine learning.

Yulia Pavlova Headshot

Yulia Pavlova is a Senior Data Scientist in Computer Vision at Reuters Applied Innovation team. Her Yulia's role is focused on developing AI/ML tools to enhance automation into Reuters editorial workflow and increase discoverability of Reuters content by creating additional metadata. In particular, recent examples of her work include facial recognition, image captioning and video analysis. Prior to working at Reuters, Yulia worked on data management automation and computer vision applications for natural resources management.

Session 4: Thursday, June 3      sponsored by: Danads logo
Zeus Prime: Breaking new ground within self-serve advertising
Jeff Turner Headshot

Jeff Turner is the Head of Zeus Product and Commercial Technology at The Washington Post.  In this role, Turner oversees SaaS ad tech for The Post’s Zeus Technology brand, as well as advertising product innovation under The Post’s Research, Experimentation and Development (RED) brand. His teams are laser focused on building the most innovative brand and publisher advertising capabilities in digital publishing.

Prior to joining The Post, Turner served in several leadership positions at Aol/Verizon, including The Head of Ad Product and Monetization for HuffPost, and Senior Director of Product at Verizon Media Group.  Turner lives in Arlington, VA with his wife Lauren and their Goldendoodle Henson.  In his spare time Turner rock climbs, snowboards, sails, and occasionally crashes his electric skateboard.

Johan Liljelund Headshot

Johan Liljelund is CTO and Executive Vice President for DanAds International AB.  He was previously CEO and partner of Backbone4Media.  Liljelund holds extensive experience from software development (CRM, OMS, Billing, AdTech) since 1997 and large system implementations towards the media industry since 2002.  He is a board member of Swedish Software, a non-profitable organization gathering all software development companies in Sweden.

Johan is an entrepreneur with +20 years of experience in developing technology towards the media industry. He has been a pioneer in the digital advertising industry enabling publishers to streamline and efficient their internal processes on a global market. Now on a journey to digitize the media industry through self-service and automation.

Session 5: Thursday, June 10
User behavior modeling to maximize revenue at Bloomberg Media

Bloomberg Media launched a digital subscriptions business with a paywall in May 2018. To drive subscriptions and maximize revenue, the Data Science and Engineering team applied machine learning techniques to model user behavior and build a subscription propensity model and a real-time paywall. This talk will present details about the challenges faced and approaches considered in implementing the subscription propensity model. Bloomberg’s model combines user engagement, lifetime value (LTV), and user’s content interests to build a real-time paywall. The speakers will also share results that demonstrate the success of these approaches in increasing Bloomberg Media’s revenue.

Rohit Parimi Headshot

Rohit Parimi joined Bloomberg Media in 2015 and is currently an Engineering Manager for the Data Science and Engineering team. Rohit’s team builds and maintains big data systems to collect and store user data such as data lake. His team is also responsible for applying Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence techniques to solve key business problems such as subscriber acquisition and churn, news recommendations to users on Bloomberg's web and mobile applications, and named-entity recognition for news content. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Rohit was working on his Ph.D. at Kansas State University with focus on cross-domain recommender systems.

Zachary Weed Headshot

Zachary Weed has been a Software Engineer at Bloomberg since 2017. He is a member of the Data Science and Engineering team within Bloomberg Media with a focus on developing user-focused classification and forecasting models as well as dynamic paywall systems. He has a B.S. in Engineering concentrating in Computer Science from Princeton University.

This is a free event for DCN members.  The unique, members-only attendee list allows for open conversation, information sharing and networking .