GumGum Leadership

Phil Schraeder is an executive and recognized thought leader in digital advertising and contextual technologies…who loves fashion and EDM music. As Chief Executive Officer of GumGum, the leading contextual intelligence company, Phil Schraeder believes that we don’t need to know who people are in order to deliver relevant, engaging and effective digital advertising. As the CEO, he is responsible for GumGum’s success in leading the industry in privacy-first, contextual intelligence technologies based on a consumer’s mindset, and not their personal data. Phil is passionate about making advertising experiences better for consumers by ushering the industry into mindset-first, privacy-forward solutions in an exciting and fast-moving digital ecosystem.

Schraeder, who joined GumGum in 2011, served previously as the company’s President, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. In those roles, he developed the management, revenue, planning, accounting, controls and human resources infrastructures that supported the company’s rapid expansion and growth. Prior to joining GumGum, Schraeder wore a variety of finance and accounting based hats at companies like Verifi, RealD, New Regency Entertainment, and KPMG.

Phil regularly contributes to outlets like Advertising Week, Entrepreneur, and AdExchanger, and frequently speaks at engagements and industry events such as Cannes, AdExchanger Industry Preview, the IAB and the 4A’s. In 2022, Phil was a finalist for the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Greater LA program.

Schraeder is a fierce advocate for LGBTQIA+ equality and lives by the mantra, "Don't spend time with anyone or anywhere you can't be your authentic self."

Ken Weiner leads the engineering and product teams behind the industry’s top contextual platform for marketers and rights holders. An active member of the ad tech community, he holds an IAB Tech Lab board seat, is a member of the OpenRTB Working Group, and leads the LA AdTech Meetup for regional tech engineers and product managers. Weiner is also a frequent conference speaker and guest columnist for VentureBeat and Forbes. In 2015, he was named LA Business Journal’s CTO of the Year, and, in 2003, he was included in the InfoWorld 100 for his work on uPortal, an open-source web portal framework for the higher education community.

Before coming to GumGum, Weiner was the Director of Engineering at the lead-generation platform LowerMyBills.com, acquired by Experian in 2005. He has also worked as an open-source software consultant, a project manager and an instructor at Interactive Business Solutions, acquired by Unicon Inc. in 2003. Weiner received a B.S. from UCLA and currently lives in Los Angeles. Away from the office, he enjoys mountain biking, hiking, California native plants, jazz music and playing the saxophone.

Kerel is the Chief Marketing Officer at GumGum, a contextual-first, global digital advertising platform that captures people’s attention without personal data. Kerel leads all marketing activities that help evolve the brand, increasing revenue, awareness, and relevance amongst target audiences. Kerel is also an adjunct professor at Kean University, teaching digital and sports marketing. Cooper is an award-winning executive with 20+ years of digital media experience building Advertising Operations, Account Management, and Marketing teams. Previously, Kerel served as President of Advertising at Group Black and Chief Marketing Officer at LiveIntent. He is the co-founder and co-host of the Minority Report Podcast, highlighting people of color, women & LGBTQ+ leaders within business, media, and technology. 

He has been widely recognized for his leadership and innovation. In 2021, Kerel was included in Crain's New York Business Notable Black Leaders and Executives list and was selected as the Adweek Readers’ Choice: Best of Tech Diversity Advocate of the Year award. He also won the Diversity Advocate of the Year Award at the Campaign Tech Awards and the Award of Excellence by the Academy of Interactive & Visual Arts in 2021.

Patrick Gildea is the Chief Financial Officer for GumGum, leading the finance, accounting and legal departments. Patrick’s hands-on leadership style has allowed him to build high-performing teams to support scalable operations aligned with the vision of the business. Over the past decade, Patrick has led finance, HR, legal, strategy, corporate and business development departments that span from the start-up phase to high-growth global public companies with multiple successful strategic exits.

Prior to GumGum, Patrick help lead Joybird.com to a successful exit with La-Z-boy, served as the CFO of Gracenote, where he was instrumental in both its growth to a $250 million business that operated 5 divisions with more than 2,000 employees in 20 offices around the globe and in its sale to Nielsen Media in 2017. Patrick also served as the first CFO of M-GO, scaling the business and ultimately selling it to NBCUniversal to become FandangoNow.com.

Earlier in his career, Patrick was the Group Vice President of Corporate Strategy and Development at Blackhawk Network (NASDAQ:HAWK), ran corporate development at IC Media, where he helped raise three rounds of venture capital and sold the business to Citibank Private Equity. Patrick began his career as a CPA at Arthur Andersen, after graduating with a degree in Japanese from Sophia University and a B.S. in Accounting from the University of Southern California.

As Head of People Operations, Kelly Battelle is responsible for hiring, developing and engaging the industry’s best talent and for creating a positive, collaborative work environment where GumGum’s thinkers and doers can thrive. With more than 20 years of human resources experience, Battelle is a highly skilled communicator who takes pride in her ability to develop cross-departmental strategies that push our business forward and keep our team members engaged and thriving.

Battelle comes to GumGum from media giant The Walt Disney Company, where she served in the capacity of HR Business Partner. Throughout her career, she has served in a variety of other HR management and leadership capacities at a variety of small- and mid-sized technology and digital companies, including Razorfish and RealNetworks. She is an advisor on the People Tech Partners LA Chapter and holds a BA in Sociology from Washington State University and a Certificate in Coaching from The Coach Institute. When she’s not making GumGum a great place to work, she enjoys spending time at her family cabin in Big Bear with her husband, Tony, her daughters, Emily and Elise, and her kitty, Riley.

Rob Hall is GumGum’s Chief Data Officer and is the former CEO of Playground xyz. GumGum acquired Playground xyz in December of 2021 and fully integrated the business into GumGum in August 2024. 

Having spent many years in the advertising industry, Rob saw an opportunity to bring the art and science of effective brand building together and founded Playground xyz in Sydney in 2015. 6 years later the business has 80+ employees, offices all around the world and is the leader in attention based advertising solutions.

Rob is passionate about consumer behaviour and psychology, advertising technology and, of course, the quest to earn precious attention for brands. Rob graduated from the University of New England (AU) with a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce.

Lisa Berry is General Counsel for GumGum and is responsible for all legal matters, including commercial contracts, corporate governance, securities regulation and compliance, insurance and risk management initiatives, intellectual property, data privacy, and employment law matters.

She comes to us from Docker and brings over 30 years of experience in high technology companies across multiple industries ranging from start-up companies to publicly traded global companies and has held leadership positions in such companies as Tellme Networks, Juniper Networks, KLA-Tencor and Ticketfly.

She has a B.B.A in Accounting and a J.D. from the University of Miami and an LLM in Taxation from the University of Florida.

Adam Schenkel is the EVP, Global Platform Strategy and Operations for GumGum. He is responsible for DSP Partnerships and Operations for Media and Data, Publisher Development and Supply, Business Intelligence, global strategic initiatives, leading GumGum’s position in Open Market trading, Supply Path Optimization Strategy, and marketplace quality. The EVP, in coordination and direction from the CEO, is responsible for strategic initiatives within the organization ranging from M&A activities and platform and operations integration of new companies to overall business operations and helping to implement company strategy.

Prior to being EVP of Global Platform Strategy and Operations, Adam was GumGum’s Senior Vice President of Global Commercial Development and was responsible for programmatic advertising, international markets, and business development at GumGum. He has been with GumGum since 2013, where he founded its Programmatic Department and developed the first custom in-image programmatic offering to be transacted at scale through real-time bidding. He has been a member of IAB’s Programmatic Council since 2014.

Prior to GumGum, Adam worked on reality television and celebrity licensing and endorsement deals at United Talent Agency. He holds a degree from Arizona State University’s W. P. Carey School of Business undergraduate program and currently lives in Calabasas, California. An avid sports fan, Adam enjoys playing golf and traveling with his wife, Kim, when he is not working.

Vaibhav Puranik leads GumGum’s world-class engineering team, a position that has empowered him to play a key role in shaping our big data and natural language processing platforms. Puranik is also responsible for maintaining GumGum’s entire server infrastructure, which includes thousands of servers located in AWS data centers all over the world.

Prior to joining GumGum in 2008, Puranik served as Principal Engineer at LowerMyBills.com. A frequent speaker at Los Angeles technology meetups, Puranik began his career with NASA’s Johnson Space Center and holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the University of Houston Clear-Lake. He currently resides in Los Angeles, where he spends his free time reading on a range of different subjects.

Grace Chang is the SVP, Finance for the global GumGum organization.  She leads enterprise Financial Planning and helps the company manage profitability and investment.  She also supports the CFO and Executive Leadership team by providing strategic financial guidance in all commercial areas.

Grace is a seasoned finance professional with extensive experience in the technology and entertainment industries.  Prior to GumGum, she held roles with Activision Blizzard, NBC Universal (Fandango), and The Walt Disney Company.

Grace received her undergraduate & masters degrees from The University of Texas at Austin.  She currently lives in Los Angeles, with her husband and 2 children.  When she isn't working, she loves staying active with her family and attending concerts and music festivals around the world.

Rasmus van der Colff is the Principal Accounting Officer for GumGum and is responsible for the leadership, development and execution of the company’s global accounting function, including controllership, income tax, financial reporting and treasury operations.

Rasmus has extensive experience in the technology and entertainment industries at companies ranging from start-ups to global, publicly traded entities. Throughout his career, he has served in multiple accounting and finance leadership positions at PSI Services, Canoo, Guidance Software, THQ and Activision. His experience includes mergers and acquisitions, divestitures, capital raising and an initial public offering.

Rasmus is an inactive CPA and began his career in public accounting at KPMG in South Africa after graduating with a degree in Accounting from the University of Pretoria and an Honors degree in Accounting from the University of South Africa.

Peter has been at the forefront of shifting trends in the digital media industry for over 15 years: he led a team of digital specialists at behavioural planning agency Total Media and quadrupled revenue at audience data platform Eyeota before entering the brave new world of contextual advertising at GumGum five years ago. During that time, he has seen the business grow exponentially through both organic growth and acquisitions to now being the global leader in the space.

Niall Hogan has a track record of launching and scaling new companies in global markets and is currently the General Manager, JAPAC, for GumGum, a global advertising technology company. In this role, Niall leads the Sales, Customer Success, and Operational Delivery teams and is focused on delivering revenue growth across the JAPAC market.

Before GumGum, Niall was the first APAC-based employee at Ogury, a global technology company driven by user choice. He was also the first European employee at Integral Ad Science in 2013, where he served as the UK Managing Director. In that role, Niall built the UK team from 1 person to over 65 people in 4 years before moving to Singapore to lead their new Southeast Asia (SEA) team.

Niall works as a non-executive director, board member, and advisor for tech start-ups both in the UK and in Asia.

Allison Gietl is Senior Vice President of Sales for US East Coast and Canada. She is responsible for driving revenue through developing sales strategy, establishing and managing senior level client relationships and enhancing cross functional collaboration and partnerships. She guides her teams in identifying and securing new clients, encouraging their professional development while creating procedures and guidelines to ensure continual regional and national growth.

Joining GumGum 10 years ago as an individual contributor, she brought her unique background and experience in the social space working with BlogHer, one of the largest blogging communities for women during a crucial period of evolution.

Gina Smart currently serves Senior Vice President of Sales at GumGum, responsible for the strategic vision and omni-channel revenue growth for the US West Coast region.

Gina joined GumGum in 2013, utilizing her background in digital and track record of successfully monetizing contextual alignments to solidify GumGum's West Coast presence, and set the trajectory for the exponential growth that’s been attained in the years since. With her extensive experience at the company, Gina brings a unique perspective to her leadership role, allowing her to effectively understand how big picture strategies will impact day-to-day operations, foster cross-functional collaboration, and drive positive outcomes and experiences for partner brands and agencies.

Britt Wallace is Senior Vice President of Agency Development leading GumGum’s Open Exchange for North America. She leads Holding Companies, Agencies, and Brand partnerships. As SVP of a new division, she is devising and implementing strategies to enhance and expand the development of GumGum’s Open Exchange on its Supply Side Platform.

Prior to Britt’s SVP role, she was GumGum’s Vice President of East Coast Sales for over 3 years scaling the team and growing the business year over year. She joined GumGum in 2012 as an individual seller and was GumGum’s 18th employee.

Britt went to Brown University where she received her bachelor’s degree in Public and Private Sectors of Organization.