Under New Ownership, San Diego’s Ad-Juster Names Dennis Clerke CEO

San Diego Map 1480x (Depositphotos © lucianmilasan)

Ad-Juster, a San Diego adtech startup acquired earlier this year by the investment arm of China’s Innotech International Group, Wednesday named local software entrepreneur Dennis Clerke as CEO. He succeeds Ad-Juster founder and president Mike Lewis, who has left the company.

Clerke (a San Diego Xconomist) was previously the CEO of Sunnyvale, CA-based NetSeer, an adtech acquired in February by Inuvo (NYSE: [[ticker:INUV]], an advertising technology and digital publishing company based in Little Rock, AR.

Before that, he was an executive vice president at the Software Equity Group, a mergers-and-acquisitions advisory firm near San Diego, and CEO of Alignent Software before it was acquired by Sopheon in 2007. Clerke was also the co-founder and CEO of Cardiff Software, a business process software developer near San Diego that was acquired by Verity (NASDAQ: [[ticker:VRTY]]) in 2004.

Ad-Juster, founded in 2007, is a Web-based provider of unified data reporting and analytics for digital advertising. The company’s software-as-a-service automates the aggregation of third-party reports on digital advertising campaigns, and Clerke said Ad-Juster’s platform uses machine learning to help analyze the data.

In a note to Xconomy, he wrote, “Analytics and data measurement [are] in the cross hairs of digital advertising, and we have a blue-chip client base of the most prominent publishers and partners in the space. Those clients include Disney, Hearst, eBay, Fox, NBC and more.”

Innotech Capitals, a private equity group focusing on the global adtech market, acquired Ad-Juster in January. Financial terms were not disclosed, and a spokesman for Ad-Juster said the acquisition of U.S. adtech companies by Chinese investors is unusual.

According to a statement Wednesday, Clerke plans to focus on accelerating growth and product diversification into different segments of the adtech ecosystem. Ad-Juster currently has about 40 employees.

Dennis Clerke (photo used with permission)
Dennis Clerke

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.