Eric Picard
Vice President of Advertising Product Management of Pandora
Eric Picard is an advertising technology expert with more than 20 years of experience in the ad technology industry. Eric is currently Vice President of Advertising Product Management at Pandora Media. Previously Eric led product strategy for the DSP business at MediaMath, which acquired his startup Rare Crowds in 2014. Rare Crowds built micro-segmentation technology for finding valuable highly targeted audiences, at scale, and was a spin-out from TRAFFIQ, where Eric was the Chief Product Officer.
Previous to this, Eric was at Microsoft for six years, where he had a variety of roles in technology strategy. He helped set the company’s long-term vision for advertising technology, emerging media product planning, planning for incubation & research teams, and designed next generation advertising products. Eric managed advertising technology acquisition planning from 2005 through 2007 – including reviewing hundreds of deals, and participating on deal teams for numerous pivotal acquisitions, such as Massive, Screen Tonic, adECN, aQuantive and others.
Eric started working in ad technology as founder and director of product management at Bluestreak from 1997 to 2004, where he oversaw advertising products, such as third-party ad serving, ad analytics, rich media products and led development of many company technologies. A frequent speaker across the industry, Eric has written about advertising technology since 1999.