Creative content company Alkemy X has added Katharine Starsinic as director of client services & operations, and Jay Halbert as SVP of finance to its management team. Starsinic is tasked with increasing the company’s visibility and working with brand and advertiser clients while Halbert will lead all aspects of its financial functions.
Starsinic was most recently with Comcast, where she served as director of marketing & communications, dedicating five years to building the B2B brand and developing the marketing programs for Comcast Business. She was involved in planning and executing a full range of marketing efforts, including new product launches, sponsorships and demand generation campaigns.
Prior to Comcast, Starsinic spent 10 years as an account director at Wunderman Advertising in New York City. There, she led integrated and direct teams for the agency’s marquee clients, such as Citi, AT&T, Microsoft, HP and Pfizer.
Halbert was most recently SVP of a manufacturing company, and prior to that was president/owner of a laser rental and sales company, both based in the Philadelphia region. Before that, he spent nearly a decade as chief financial officer for a series of companies in the sports, media and entertainment business, including Comcast Spectacor, which owned the Philadelphia Flyers, the Philadelphia 76ers, the Wells Fargo Center, and six other complementary businesses.
After earning his accounting degree from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from New York University School of Law, Halbert practiced in the corporate law department at the New York-based international law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell before leaving for the business world. He then went to work with PricewaterhouseCoopers Securities as an associate investment banker, before taking a position as CFO and principal of New Spring Capital, a venture capital fund based in the Mid-Atlantic Region.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More