Top Fairfax And Skyscanner Execs Join Thriving Adtech Startup Publift

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Australian founded adtech startup Publift has made a trio of senior hires including former Skyscanner, Fairfax and Private Media executives.

Founded by ex-Googlers CEO Colm Dolan and COO Tobin Page, the Sydney-headquartered business, which has clients including Bauer, The New Daily, Australian Business Traveller, RSVP and Reader’s Digest, has grown from 15 staff to 23 in the last 12 months.

Dolan commented: “Having built this business from the ground up through hiring graduates only, we are now in a position to hire experienced leaders in the industry.

“This will fuel our continued growth and new SaaS product offering to service the biggest publishers in the market”.

Joining the business is former long-serving Fairfax exec Sandra Moynihan.

Moynihan takes the role as head of commercial strategy, having more than eight years’ experience within publisher ad operations.

Moynihan said: “Publift balances its adtech intelligence with 100 per cent commitment to the success of its customers and I’m delighted to be part of this next chapter.

“Publift is genuine in its intent to support in an incredibly personal way which is rare to find.”

Former Skyscanner and PHD executive Pat McDonald also joins as commercial manager working with agencies and advertisers.

McDonald started out his career on the agency side at PHD and has also worked with big publishers such as Moshtix and Skyscanner.

McDonald said having a cooperative network of publishers that are willing to try new tech and creative executions, at scale, brings a unique offering to agencies that he’s personally really excited to lead the charge on.

McDonald said: “’Publift has done a wonderful job of assisting niche publishers to access the best programmatic tech and strategies in market, allowing these smaller businesses to focus on generating the content and services that keep their users engaged.

“We are now managing such a competitive scale of quality inventory that we’ve identified a massive opportunity to package that up and take it to agencies and buyers in the market.”

In addition to Sydney hires Publift has launched a Melbourne office, headed up by new hire, regional lead Nick Dunlop.

Dolan said: “Our phenomenal growth over the last year has meant we are now able to hire big hitters in the industry and open a new office in Melbourne where we now have over 15 clients.

“Being able to attract industry leads to our organisation is a sign of the progress we’ve made.”

Dunlop has more than 15 years’ experience working in operations teams for small to large publishers both in Australia and the UK.

Cutting his teeth at realestate.com.au, he relocated to London to work in 2006 and introduced internal ad ops teams to Propertyfinder.co.uk and Last.fm.

Moving back to Melbourne in 2010, he spent five years heading up operations at Private Media (Smartcompany, Crikey, etc.) before starting his own digital advertising consultancy.

Dunlop said: “I jumped at the chance to work with Publift as they have a market-leading product that produces great results for its clients and is a real game-changer in Australia.

“After working publisher side, in which innovation can be slow, it is great to work somewhere that puts innovation first.

“This makes for a very exciting workplace.”

The Publift dev team, under the stewardship of Publift head of technology, Joe Wongchanglor, will now grow to eight people by August and the business is in the midst of launching a pioneering new machine learning technology giving tools to publishers to make smarter decisions, and ultimately increase revenue.

As the only Google Certified Publishing Partner based in Australia, Publift, which has a total of 100 clients, 50 of which joined in the last year, now has managed client revenue growth equating to $25million annually, representing growth of 146 per cent.

With a mission to lift ad revenue for Aussie and Kiwi publishers with cutting-edge adtech and a team of awesome people, 2015-founded Publift boasts a 54 per cent average increase to its clients’ net revenue.

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