SOURCE: Pandora Media

 
 
Feb 05, 2009 17:38 ET

Pandora Hires Former AOL Business Development Director for New VP Slot

Leverages Experience in Performance Ad Programs, Direct Response Advertising

OAKLAND, CA--(Marketwire - February 5, 2009) - Pandora Media, Inc. (www.pandora.com), the premier provider of personalized radio service online, announced today the hire of Brian Mikalis for the newly created position of vice president, performance sales. Prior to joining Pandora, Mikalis was the director of business development at AdReady, a Seattle based advertising technology company focused on making online display advertising accessible and effective for advertisers of all sizes. Before AdReady, Mikalis led sales teams for AOL in both San Francisco and Los Angeles. While serving as director of sales and business development, he created AOL's first performance program for direct response advertisers, managing partnerships with some of the largest online advertisers.

"Brian brings a wealth of experience and knowledge of performance advertising programs to his new position as well as a number of valuable relationships among the biggest online advertisers," said Cheryl Lucanegro, senior vice president of advertising for Pandora. "He's ideally qualified to help us launch our new Performance Program and to facilitate structuring it to optimize advertiser ROI while mitigating the impact on our user experience."

"I'm delighted to join the Pandora ad sales team and to have the chance to leverage my background in performance advertising to ensure that this new program embraces current best practices for maximum return on investment for Pandora and its clients," said Mikalis.

Prior to AOL, Brian held positions in sales and trading at Robertson Stephens and Montgomery Asset Management. He holds a BA degree in business economics with an accounting emphasis from the University of California at Santa Barbara and an MBA from Saint Mary's College of California.

About Pandora

Pandora (www.pandora.com) is a personalized Internet radio and music discovery service available anytime and anywhere on the PC, in the home, and on mobile devices via partnerships with AT&T, Apple and Sprint. Pandora is based on the Music Genome Project begun in 2000 and is the most thorough analysis of popular music ever undertaken. Each song in this massive collection is analyzed by more than 30 trained musicians, and assessed against nearly 400 distinct musical attributes such as melody, harmony, and rhythm to capture its unique musical identity. Using this information to build playlists based on musical similarity, listeners can simply enter a favorite song or artist, and instantly launch a personalized listening experience which includes discovery of new bands, artists and songs. Pandora is the largest online music site based on monthly unique visitors, has a growing user base of more than twenty-two million registered listeners, a database of over 575,000 songs, and national advertisers such as HP, Microsoft, Honda, Procter & Gamble, and Nike.

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