Eric Picard

Eric Picard is one of the founding architects of the modern programmatic advertising industry, with nearly three decades of experience building the infrastructure, standards, and companies that define how digital media works today.

Picard co-authored the first industry standard for the ad impression and served on the Executive Committee of the IAB Tech Lab Board of Directors. He invented Programmatic Curation through his startup Rare Crowds—a concept now recognized as one of the most significant strategic shifts in the contemporary advertising ecosystem, which was acquired by MediaMath in 2014.

His career spans the full arc of digital advertising’s evolution. He founded Bluestreak in 1997, one of the earliest ad technology companies, and later authored Microsoft’s ad technology strategy while serving on the deal teams for seven adtech acquisitions and as one of three principals in the landmark Microsoft-Yahoo search and advertising partnership. He has since led ad products at Pandora, product strategy at MediaMath, and was Chief Product Officer at both the ad exchange Yieldmo, and at Bark (the publicly traded company behind BarkBox). Eric has been part of fourteen acquisitions across his career, on both the buy and sell side.

A prolific voice in the industry, Picard has published more than 200 articles in trade press and advised more than thirty companies. He has mentored more than 100 professionals throughout his career. He is also the author of two novels.