Synacor announced today that Ron Bernstein was hired as its vice president of advertising sales.
Prior to joining Synacor last month, Bernstein served as the vice president of product ad sales at AOL, where he was responsible for several key sales initiatives, including AOL homepages and AOL video sales.
Synacor said Bernstein was hired to help build out a national sales organization that will monetize advertising opportunities across their premium portal client platforms.
“Synacor-powered premium portals serve high-quality content and useful tools to consumers and offer a variety of compelling online advertising opportunities,” said Bernstein. “Based on the expansive network Synacor has built, we consider among the most valuable benefits to advertisers: strong reach with access to approximately 30 million customers across the U.S., loyal subscription-based relationships between viewers/users and their provider partners, brand-safe and engaging content, and world-class ad products and targeting tools. When combined with a value pricing strategy, Synacor’s premium portal audience promises to be a huge hit with advertisers.”
Bernstein also led ad sales across various AOL owned and operated sites during his initial stint at AOL from 1999-2005 (including Mapquest, Netscape, AIM, ICQ, Moviefone and CompuServe). As senior vice president and general manager at U.S. News & World Report, he helped to monetize USNews.com and its related digital assets.
Synacor personalizes Web portals for companies, including Bresnan Communications, and was also the entitlement company behind 14 cable operators’ Winter Olympics coverage earlier this year.
Charter Communications is using Synacor’s authentication technology for its TV Everywhere trial.