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."

Michelle Hulst is President at GumGum where she leads their global advertising business and drives the worldwide adoption of GumGum’s platform for the future of digital advertising, The Mindset Platform™. 

Prior to joining GumGum, Michelle was Chief Data Officer and, previously, Chief Operating Officer, at The Trade Desk, where she launched industry-leading initiatives such as retail media and Unified ID 2.0. She oversaw all aspects of The Trade Desk’s data business and global operations, including client services, commercial enablement, technical account management, and rapid geographic expansion. 

Before she joined The Trade Desk, Hulst was Group Vice President of Marketing & Strategic Partnerships at Oracle Data Cloud (now Oracle Advertising Cloud), a global business unit within Oracle. Michelle led the strategic partnerships, business development, culture, and marketing organizations, including the teams responsible for sourcing and managing data and platform partnerships. 

Prior to it being acquired by Oracle, Hulst was at Datalogix, where she was Senior Vice President of Strategic Partnerships and Business Development. Michelle led the global deal team’s execution of pivotal partnerships, which were instrumental in transforming the business from an offline, direct-mail company to a data-driven digital innovator. She was a founding member of the executive team responsible for growing Datalogix to one of the largest data companies in digital advertising, leading to the sale of Datalogix to Oracle. 

Hulst holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Michigan and a Master of Business Administration from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. She serves on the Board of Directors of the Bank of Hawaii and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and three children.

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.

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 GumGum’s global CMO, Erin McCallion is responsible for architecting GumGum’s narrative and bolstering its global brand presence while scaling the corporate communications, product marketing and lead generation teams to support GumGum’s growth. With 20+ years of experience in marketing, Erin thrives in high-performance organizations and leads organizations through a transformation to a customer-centric, goal driven approach across all GTM initiatives that results in positive customer lifetime value and success.

Prior to GumGum, Erin served in leadership roles at Outbrain, a recommendation technology platform; Mediaocean, an adtech company in the Vista Equity portfolio; and INVISION, a cross-media ad technology company. In those roles, she built and scaled teams to support each respective company's next stage of growth. In her most recent role at Outbrain, she oversaw the successful execution of their IPO. Prior to adtech, McCallion spent almost a decade running marketing teams in the publishing industry at The Deal and TheStreet. McCallion is an avid tennis fan, a proud mom of 2 children and a lifelong New Yorker.

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.

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.

Rob Hall currently serves as both Playground xyz’s CEO and Head of Attention Intelligence for GumGum. GumGum acquired Playground xyz in December of 2021 and is in the process of integrating the two companies and technologies.

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.

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.

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.

Sorrel Osbourne is Head of Business Operations at Playground xyz, a GumGum Company. She was previously the Head of Growth with Playground and was brought in to run the deal team for the 2021 acquisition of Playground by GumGum.

Prior to Playground xyz, Sorrel worked as COO of independent publisher Conversant Media for five years before moving to martech start up Audience Republic as their Head of Operations and Commercial where she spent two years launching their UK and US businesses and pivoting the business from a one off to a SaaS revenue model - doubling the value of the company in a 12 month period.

Sorrel is also the chairperson of IAB Australia’s Talent and Careers Working Group, sits on the IAB Tech Executive Council and mentors with the Founder Institute on growth and investor relations.

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.