Yahoo! Hires Chief Data Officer

Tuesday Dec 14th 2004 by Pamela Parker

Revenue Science co-founder joins the portal player.

In a move that has implications for ad targeting and reporting, Yahoo! has hired Usama Fayyad, a co-founder of the company now known as Revenue Science, to the newly-created position of Chief Data Officer.

Fayaad will be responsible for the company's overall data policies and strategies, helping gather and analyze the data used to improve customer experiences and help advertisers achieve better results.

"As you can imagine, Yahoo! users on a daily basis generate a large amount of data. The goal is to analyze that data and use it in a way that will enable us to make products and services that will be more engaging for the user, more innovative," said Dan Berger, a Yahoo! spokesperson.

As for advertisers, Berger says the data practice is designed to help them "be smarter about their marketing choices on the Yahoo! network and use the analysis of the data to be able to be more innovative in their advertising."

Prior to joining Yahoo!, Fayyad co-founded and headed the DMX Group, a data mining and data strategy consultancy. In 2000, he co-founded and served as CEO of digiMine, which later changed its name to Revenue Science.

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