Kanoodle Hires Sprinks Team, Beefs Up Advertising

Kanoodle.com, Inc. announced on Wednesday that it has closed a round of venture capital funding and has added three executives, formerly with sponsored link innovator Sprinks, to its senior management team. The executives will be based in Kanoodle.com’s newly-opened New York office.

These recent moves help to legitimize Kanoodle as a soon to be key player in pay per click search and contextual advertising, perhaps even joining the ranks of FindWhat, LookSmart, and eSpotting- as second tier alternatives to Google AdWords and Yahoo owned Overture.

The financing and executive hires mark the expansion of Kanoodle.com’s keyword-search based advertising business into content and local targeted sponsored links. Kanoodle.com’s content-targeted ads, unlike traditional keyword search sponsored links, allow advertisers to select specific topics relevant to publishers’ content, ensuring their ads appear on pages that directly match a user’s topic of interest. Analysts project content-targeted advertising, the fastest-growing segment of online advertising, will grow to $1.4 billion over the next four years.

Joining Kanoodle.com are three key executives, each with deep experience in the online publishing and advertising paid search industries. The three will start Kanoodle.com’s Content Division. They include: Lance Podell as President; Doug Perlson as Senior Vice President, Partner Development and Operations; and Mark Josephson, Senior Vice President, Marketing and Business Development. Prior to joining Kanoodle.com, Podell and Perlson were General Manager and Senior Vice President Partner Development and Operations respectively for Sprinks, an About, Inc. company and a division of PRIMEDIA . Josephson was Executive Vice President of Marketing and Business Development for About, Inc.

“We are thrilled to have the team that created content-targeted sponsored links join Kanoodle.com,” said Kent Keating, Founder and CEO of Kanoodle.com, Inc. “They will allow us to take our core search business to the next level, while they launch new business lines for Kanoodle.com. Opening a New York office immediately gives us access to the advertiser and publisher communities critical to our next stage of growth.”

 back to top