Eric Picard is CEO of Rare Crowds, an ad technology company focused on programmatic media buying and selling across online display, mobile, video, and social media advertising. He was previously Chief Product Officer at TRAFFIQ where he led Product Management and Engineering. Prior to this position, he held several advertising technology roles at Microsoft, including managing the long term ad platform and product strategy - determining what the end-state of Microsoft’s ad platforms and other advertising offerings should look like. He also managed the emerging media strategy, planning for incubation & research teams, and designed next generation advertising products. Additionally Eric managed the advertising technology acquisition planning from 2005 through 2007 – including work on some pivotal acquisitions, such as Massive, Screen Tonic, aQuantive and others.
Formerly, Eric was founder and director of product management at Bluestreak, where he oversaw advertising products, such as third-party ad serving, ad analytics, rich media products and led development of many company technologies. He helped pioneer rich media advertising in the late '90s and has been active in most of the critical industry conversations related to technology, including the IAB's Measurement Committee and Rich Media Task Force. A frequent speaker across the industry, Eric has written about advertising technology since 1999: an archive of which is available at springload.com
