Jay has an accomplished career helping to run companies in the high tech and media sectors. He is also the founder of Team Dayā ( दया) (Dayā means kindness in Nepali), a charity group fighting illiteracy and poverty in developing countries around the world by funding the construction of primary schools. Sears owns and operates the community new site MyRye.com.
Sears served as SVP, Ad Intelligence for MasterCard Advisors, part of MasterCard (NYSE: MA). The group works with advertisers in the retail, restaurant, travel and telecommunications sectors to use transaction based insights to drive greater efficacy in advertiser planning, activation and measurement. (See Crossing the Rubicon to Mastercard. Priceless.)
Prior to Joining MasterCard in 2016, Sears served as SVP Marketplace Development for Rubicon Project (NYSE: RUBI), working with management and business unit heads across the company to expand Rubicon Project’s market. He worked across the media owner and advertiser sides of the business globally to advance the company’s work with its top customers.
Sears joined Rubicon Project in 2011 as GM, Buyer Cloud. In this capacity, he was responsible for global relations with the buy side including ad holding companies, ad agencies, advertisers, agency trading desks and demand side platforms headquartered in North America. He took a sell side focused technology company and built buy side capabilities including the vision, the team and the operational infrastructure and execution to service the buy side. In addition to driving the company to a market leadership role in the auction market (real-time bidding or RTB), Sears also worked to add an Orders market (the automation of private deals or trading relationships).
Prior to joining Rubicon Project, Sears was GM of the ad exchange for PulsePoint (FKA ContextWeb). He focused on the company’s real-time bidding initiatives with agency trading desks and demand side platforms.
Sears joined ContextWeb in 2004 and helped build its exchange and media businesses from inception. He created the company’s original publisher development team and launched the self-service product, used by over 11,000 web publishers. He then oversaw the subsequent launch of ContextWeb’s self-service offering for advertisers and its inside sales team. In 2011, ContextWeb merged with Datran Media to form PulsePoint.
Prior to joining ContextWeb in 2004, Sears was SVP Business & Strategy Development for EDGAR Online, where he drove the strategy that took the company from an under $1 million entrepreneurial business to a publicly traded NASDAQ company. He created over 300 partnerships including ones with Yahoo!, The NASDAQ Stock Market and Microsoft.
Prior to EDGAR Online, he served as VP Marketing for Wolff New Media, an early Internet directory service. The company was the subject of the book Burn Rate by Vanity Fair and USA Today media columnist Michael Wolff.
Sears has spoken extensively to advertising industry audiences across the globe (Advertising Week in New York and London, ANA, 4As, Cannes Lions, Festival of Media in Miami, Rome and Singapore, IAB, Monaco Media Forum and private events) and the Wall Street analyst and investment community (many one-on-one, group and conference settings).
He has served on the Leadership Council of the Trustworthy Accountability Group (TAG), a joint effort of the ANA, 4As and IAB, the first-of-its-kind cross-industry accountability program to create transparency in the business relationships and transactions that undergird the digital ad industry. Sears also co-chaired the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Advertising Technology Advisory Board and is the former co-chair of the Ad Networks and Exchanges Committee, helping write its Quality Assurance Guidelines. Sears received the 2009 President Award from The Advertising Club.
Sears holds a BA in political science from Kenyon College. He lives in Rye, NY with his wife Lauren Rosen and their three boys.
Additional Information:
Adweek: How Agencies Are Retooling for the Automated Ad Buy Q&A with Jay Sears, svp of marketplace development for the Rubicon Project (Download PDF)
USA Today: From Cannes: Automated ad selling’s future (Download PDF)
Television is the New Television (book): Chapter 9 Explaining Programmatic Advertising
Jay Sears 