DAA Austin 2015 Speaker Biographies

 


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Kelley Anderson, Marketing Manager, Insights & Analytics, Golfsmith

Kelley Anderson is the Senior Manager of Insights and Strategy at Golfsmith International, leading customer analytics using internal systems, primary, and secondary research. Kelley’s 13 year career in retail and consumer marketing has allowed a unique perspective to tell the customers’ story to drive decision making throughout the organization.

Prior to Golfsmith, Kelley worked for Walmart as an Insights Partner, and preceding that was Director of CRM/Database Marketing for Stage Stores. She received both her Bachelors and Masters of Science degrees from University of North Texas in Merchandising, focusing on consumer behavior. Kelley’s masters’ thesis research, studying consumer motivations to connect with retailers via Facebook, was published last year in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Sciences.


Jeremy Ballenger, Sr. Director, Game Analytics, Wargaming

Jeremy Ballenger is the Senior Director of Game Analytics for Wargaming.net, an award-winning online game developer and publisher, and one of the leaders in the free-to-play MMO market. Based out of Wargaming’s Global Services office in Austin, Jeremy oversees the development and foundation of Wargaming’s Global Analytics Network, and can share knowledgeable insights on informing design, development and management with actionable insights and business intelligence; including a look into the kind of player data Wargaming takes into consideration for game updates and enhancements.

Prior to Wargaming, Ballenger held several senior management positions as the Head of Analytics at Jagex Games Studio, Senior Manager of Analytics for BioWare in Austin and Senior Business Analyst for Wizards of the Coast. In these roles, he managed the analytics and reporting teams to inform data-driven design and executive decisions for global AAA computer and console software titles, including Star Wars: The Old Republic, Magic the Gathering, MTG: Online, Duels of the Planeswalkers and Dungeons & Dragons


Arun Bhattacharya, Adobe

Arun owns the global success of Adobe's Mobile App Analytics business and go-to-market strategy, including messaging, sales enablement, awareness building and thought leadership. Before joining Adobe, Arun was leading the global product marketing charter for enterprise mobility solutions, at CA Technologies and Good Technology. Overall, he has over 25 years of product marketing leadership technology companies also including Intel, Citrix and HP. Arun got his engineering degree from India and an MBA from Rice University in Houston, TX.


Todd Dennis, Principal Consultant, Dennis & Company, LLC

Todd Dennis has over 20 year of experience in Database Marketing and CRM for enterprise companies such as Dell, HP, and Symantec. He is a results-oriented, hands-on, decisive leader with a solid record of creating primary demand, driving measurable increases in customer value, and improving marketing ROI.


David Franke, Vast.com

David Franke joined Vast in 2009 as Chief Scientist, where he manages the Data Science team and Vast's IP portfolio. He also serves as Adjunct Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to Vast, David managed a team in the Search Quality Evaluation group at Google. He was an Assistant Professor at St. Edwards University in Austin, where he taught Computer Science at New College and the Graduate School of Management and Business. David previously worked for Trilogy Software as Chief Scientist, Senior Member, Technical Staff at MCC, and a Senior Member, Technical Staff at Texas Instruments, Inc. He received his doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin.


Liana Frey, Marketing Director, Lithium Technologies

Liana works at the cutting edge in the digital and social space. She runs product marketing at Lithium Technologies, where she drives product innovations to deliver better engagement, loyalty, and advocacy solutions for Fortune 100 clients. She works with leading brands like FitBit, Google, and GoPro to understand their customer experience and marketing needs in order to build solutions.

Previously, she was a leader in the digital practice at Fleishman Hillard. One of her major clients was General Motors. She increased Fleishman’s business with Chevrolet by 10x in less than a year and Fleishman was named Chevrolet’s social agency of record.

Prior to Fleishman, she ran all social and community at Dell. Altimeter rated Dell as the #1 most engaged brand under her leadership. Previously, she held several marketing leadership roles at Dell- ranging from running a multi-billion dollar ecommerce P&L to digital demand generation.

Her undergrad and MBA are both from Dartmouth College. Though she misses the fall foliage in New England, she prefers living in Austin, where she can be outdoors throughout the year.


Robin Goad, Vice President Marketing, Lucid

Robin Goad is a Dell veteran with 17 years’ experience creating and managing strategic relationships, building global ecosystems, and delivering advanced solutions. She brings invaluable experience building successful global teams who deliver products with immediate value to priority markets. Robin built a Global Cloud Eco-System uniting infrastructure organizations, cloud providers, as well as channel and sales strategies across India, Singapore and the US. She is especially passionate about disruption, which led her to join Lucid in 2015, a company delivering the world’s most comprehensive AI platform focused on tackling the greatest challenges first.


Jesse Gross, Ernst & Young

Jesse Gross is a Senior Manager within Ernst & Young’s Digital Analytics CoE and formerly served as the Vice President of Analytics at Semphonic. Gross specializes in advanced analytics, report creation, tool implementation, deep-dive analyses AB testing and social media measurement. He is a noted authority on digital data visualization and regularly conducts mentored training in the hands-on use of c tools and report development.

Over the past decade, Gross has led digital analytics initiatives across clients spanning eCommerce, technology, consumer products, financial services, health care, biotech and government that range in scale from Fortune 100 to startups .  He's spoken at numerous events including the X Change Conference, SMX West, eMetrics, the Business Forecasting Predictive Intelligence Summit and on a variety of webinar panels.


John Lydick, Director of Global eCommerce Analytics, Dell

John Lydick is Director of Dell’s Global eCommerce Analytics. He leads analytics intelligence across all of Dell’s B2C and B2B platforms, including business analytics, new framework innovation, and data science.

John’s 20 years global leadership span large marketing and analytics / business intelligence roles in the US and Asia. He is widely regarded as an analytics thought leader for his skill in storytelling and framing analytics findings in ways compelling to business leaders.

Learn more about John at www.linkedin.com/in/johnlydick.


Erica McGillivray, Senior Community Manager, Moz

Erica McGillivray spends a ridiculous amount of time being geeky, both professionally and personally. At Moz, she's the senior community manager, wrangling 500,000+ people and co-running their annual conference MozCon. Erica also is a founder of GeekGirlCon, is a published author, and has a comic book collection that's an earthquake hazard. Follow her at @emcgillivray.


James Niehaus, VP & GM of Data Strategy, Ensighten

James specializes in optimizing the intersection of data, marketing, product, and technology. He ran his first optimization program back in 1999, and has gone on to run programs for startups, E-LOAN, Salesforce.com, and Symantec. At Ensighten James advises top brands on their digital marketing strategy and how to take action on their data.


Corry Prohens, Co-Founder, Managing Director, IQ Workforce

Corry has spent 20+ years in executive recruiting, building a number of successful staffing firms.

Corry founded IQ Workforce in 2005 and built it in to a leading recruiting firm for analytics talent. In recent years IQ Workforce has become a leader in providing Talent On-Demand for the strategy, operations and analytics communities. His team staffs hundreds of interim management, independent consultant, contract-to-hire and full time roles each year… from analysts up to the C-Suite.

Throughout his career, Corry has specialized in developing innovative talent sourcing and delivery models.

Brent Schneeman, Director of Data Science, HomeAway

Brent Schneeman joined HomeAway in 2010 and focuses on strengthening the data science muscle in the Technology Office. As Director of Data Science, he serves as an internal consultant on a diverse set of analytic projects such as multi-variate testing, customer website behavior and applying natural language processing techniques to unstructured data. Very much a storyteller, Brent has presented at South By Southwest and has given many technological talks. Prior to joining HomeAway, Brent worked at PayPal, Visa, and other small- and large-companies. He has one degree in Mathematics and another in Electrical Engineering and lives in Austin Texas with his wife and three kids and spends most of his free time mowing the lawn.

Thomas M. West, CEO/Owner, Springbox

Tom is veteran digital leader having run 2 Internet Retailer Top 100 sites and led the digital strategies for countless organizations. He is CEO and owner of Springbox, the leading web development company in Austin. Springbox is proud to work with a number of leading brands including Nestle, Paypal, Dell, SciLabs and UT amongst others. Tom serves as Chairman of Mobile 1st whose mission is to help marketers improve mobile conversion and customer experience. Tom serves on the board/advisory board for MAG Group, Kele Inc, Signal, Martini Media and recently completed a term as Chairman of YPO Austin.

Tom is a believer in the power of analytics in digital marketing and formed his data-driven strategy skill set at Bain and Company. He has his MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and a BS in business from the Kelley School at Indiana University. Tom is a passionate Hoosiers basketball fan and longtime endurance athlete having completed the Hawaii Ironman, Escape from Alcatraz and Boston marathon. He and his wife Jennifer have 3 boys and reside in Austin Texas.


Matty Wishnow, Founder & CEO, Clearhead

Matty Wishnow is the Founder and CEO of Clearhead, a validation and optimization agency, based in Austin. Clearhead helps clients like Adidas, P&G, Patagonia, Keurig, Vans and nearly 30 others, adopt and scale testing, personalization and optimization across all digital investments.

Prior to starting Clearhead, Matty was the Senior Vice President of Direct to Consumer for Warner Music Group and, prior to that, Matty was the founder of several internet-focused start-ups, including, Insound.com, a first wave music e-commerce business and Drillteam, a social marketing agency.

Matty is a graduate of Brown University and lives in Austin with his wife and three kids. When not with his family, Matty is working. And when he's not with family or working, he's listening to buying LPs and reading about advanced baseball stats.


Joel Wright, Director, Analytics & Experience, Society Consulting

Joel Wright is Director, Analytics & Experience at Society Consulting. He is a digital analytics and optimization professional with more than 15 years of experience managing startup analytics and testing programs for fortune 50 companies Dell and HP, leading teams and initiatives that did not exist before, sharing knowledge freely and mentoring others along the way. After years in the field, Joel still considers himself a constant student of digital analytics and related technology.