John Cobb Takes the Reigns at Digital Media Pioneer as Native Advertising Quickly Becomes a Fundamental Strategy for Agencies and Brands

Giant Media, the complete native advertising company, today announced the hiring of advertising industry veteran John Cobb as its chief executive officer. He will partner with the existing Giant Media executive team to grow the company’s revenue and relationships with leading marketers and agencies.

“As the digital media world matures beyond increasingly ineffective traditional advertising methods, I’m excited to lead Giant Media through the next huge online growth opportunity of native advertising,” Cobb said.

Founded in 2009, Giant Media was one of the earliest companies dedicated to native advertising and has successfully run more than a thousand video advertising campaigns forFortune 1000 brands. According to comScore, Giant Media has one of the top native distribution networks in the United States, boasting 214 million unique visitors per month.

Giant’s best-in-class technology platform combines massive distribution with advanced targeting capabilities, including over 40,000 custom audience segments. This proprietary platform allows Giant to not only maximize brand engagement by targeting extremely relevant consumer segments, but to do so in premium environments, at scale.

Since 2010, Mr. Cobb had been the chief executive officer of Publishing Group of America (PGOA), a Bain Capital Ventures and Shamrock Capital backed multi-media publisher of newspaper inserted magazines and branded digital properties reaching nearly 35 million households in nearly 1,700 local markets in the U.S. In December 2014 Mr. Cobb led the sale of PGOA to Fexy Media, a private equity backed new media company, where he stayed on as President, COO of Fexy Brands Los Angeles.

“John’s vast sales experience and deep relationships at the publisher and agency level were really the perfect complement to our native ad technology platform,” said Marco Ilardi, president of Giant’s parent company, Adknowledge. “He shared our vision of what Giant Media can become within the advertising world and has the knowledge and leadership to accelerate the realization of that vision.”