Canoe Ventures Continues to Staff Up

Canoe Ventures--the company that is implementing Project Canoe, the US cable industry's initiative to create a national unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising (it is backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House)--continues to staff up. The company--which earlier this fall named Arthur Orduna CTO (see [itvt] Issue 8.06 Part 1)--has named John Collins SVP of product development; Michael Davis general counsel; Bruce Dennler SVP and chief relationship officer, agency relations; Vicki Lins chief marketing officer; and Mark Mitchell SVP and chief relationship officer, network relations. Collins, who was previously group VP of advanced advertising technologies at Time Warner Cable and who has been involved with Project Canoe since its launch (he also chairs the CTAM On Demand Consortium's advertising subcommittee), will be tasked with developing new advertising products; Davis previously worked at CableLabs, providing legal and business counsel for tru2way, Go2Broadband and other projects; Dennler, who was previously president of Nielsen Entertainment, and, before that, president and COO of Palisades MediaGroup and interim president of Carat USA, will be tasked with building and maintaining relationships with agencies; Lins, who was previously SVP of marketing and communications at Comcast Spotlight, will be tasked with leading Canoe's marketing and communications efforts--something that she has actually been doing concurrently with her Comcast Spotlight position for the past year; and Mitchell, who previously headed sales for Premier Retail Networks and worked in sales management at the ABC broadcast network, will be tasked with building and maintaining relationships with broadcast networks and cable channels. "With our growing team, Canoe Ventures is closer to our goal of turning television into a more robust platform," Canoe Ventures CEO David Verklin, said in a prepared statement. "I look forward to announcing the specifics of our product line-up and working with agencies and networks in deploying these products." (Note: for a recent interview with Verklin, see [itvt] Issue 8.17.)