Online Media Remix  

This week we will be speaking with Tom Hespos and Eric Porres, partners at Underscore marketing and two of the most knowledgeable guys about marketing and how they employ Social Media for their clients. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Underscore, they are one of New York's premier digital advertising shops and Eric and Tom are fixtures in the industry. Tom has been involved in interactive communications since the commercial explosion of the World Wide Web in 1994. Referred to by some as “a spiritual leader for online advertising,” Tom is well known as a weekly columnist for such publications as ClickZ and Mediapost’s The Online Spin. Not to be outdone by Tom, Eric held management positions at AOL Time Warner and Agency.com, and worked with The Walt Disney Company and LiveTechnology. In 2000, he won both a W@MMY (awarded by the National Academy of Recording Artists & Sciences) and a Yahoo! Internet Life award for one of the largest Internet webcasts in history, Paul McCartney´s “Run Devil Run” concert live from Liverpool. Eric was also a contributing writer for Crossing the River: The Coming of Age of the Internet in Politics And Advocacy.

Michal Bortnik came to AdNectar from Microsoft where he spent 6 years as a Product Manager in the consumer-products group. At Microsoft he was responsible for designing the features for XBox live —winner of the Emmy award for outstanding technological achievement—an online video game community with an industry-leading customer satisfaction rate and five million subscribers. Michal co-invented eighteen patent pending technologies enabling social interactions between Xbox players. Michal has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Computer Science from Harvard. Vlada comes to AdNectar having spent 2 years working with a handful of social networking start ups. Prior, Vlada spent 5 years as a program manager on high profile projects at Microsoft. She was responsible for providing leadership to the cross-discipline teams involved in the design, build, and launch of Windows Live. Vlada designed features of the content publishing platform for Office Online, reducing content delivery time hundredfold and helping drive site traffic from 100 thousand to 65 million unique customers per month. Prior to this, she served as a software engineer at Sprint. Vlada has a BS in Engineering from Northwestern with a double major in Computer Engineering and Art Theory and Practice.

Prior to David Shen Ventures, LLC, David was the Vice President of the User Experience and Design Team at Yahoo! for almost 8 years and has been involved in almost every product and service Yahoo! has built in the U.S. and internationally. As an early employee of Yahoo!, he lived the startup life of working long, committed, and satisfying hours and embodied the "do what it takes" attitude required for success in entrepreneurism.