Canoe Ventures has formed a new advisory board thick with
big marketers. The board appointments, announced Apr. 12 include top executives
from Coca-Cola Co., General Electric and the Association of National
Advertisers. Other board members hail from ad agencies, private equity and
technology spheres.
Canoe also
named Jim Garrity chairman of its new board. Garrity has held senior marketing
posts at IBM, Compaq and Wachovia. Garrity is currently CEO of Bellwether
Digital Bridge. Vicki Lins, chief marketing officer of Canoe Ventures, was
named vice chairman.
Other members
of the board include: Wendy Clark,
senior VP, integrated marketing, communications and capabilities for The
Coca-Cola Company; Beth Comstock, senior VP and chief marketing officer for GE;
David Droga, founder and creative chairman of Droga5; Mark Kvamme, partner and
venture capitalist at Sequoia Capital; Bob Liodice, president and CEO of the
Association of National Advertisers; Wes Nichols, co-founder and CEO of
MarketShare Partners; Mike Pohl, CEO of Jinni Media, Ltd.; Gokul Rajaram , co-founder
and CEO of Chai Labs, Inc.; and George Wiedemann, CEO of UMarketing LLC.
Canoe
Ventures is backed by the major cable operators with the intention of creating
a national platform for delivering advanced advertising capabilities.
"We look
forward to the Board's insights to help drive development of products and
services that will accelerate the evolution of television," said David Verklin,
CEO of Canoe Ventures.
Canoe has
said it plans to double its staff numbers to in excess of 100 people and is
planning to move offices into a bigger space in New York. While Canoe Ventures had to
abandon a plan in mid-2009 to launch a "Community Addressable Messaging,"
product it is still on track to launch a smaller interactive TV service which
can provide customers with the ability to request information in the second
quarter 2010 with one or two programmers, according to Multichannel News.
