Cory Treffiletti was an ad major at Syracuse and one of the “lucky ones” — as he says — who know what they want to be early on. Moving to NYC, he joined an agency and was given digital planning responsibilities for major brands such as BMW and CVS just because he’d “been on the Internet.” It was 1995. He later pioneered media planning and testing techniques at agencies such as i-Traffic, Freestyle Interactive and Carat Fusion, in the days when home-page takeovers and roadblocks on Yahoo were the norm for big campaigns. Moving to the West Coast, he lived through the dot-com boom and bust — “It was really fun!” — and eventually founded a startup advisory/capital firm called Catalyst S+F, where he played short-term CMO roles for startups such as Kenshoo, Turn, MediaMath and RedAril. He joined BlueKai as CMO in 2012 and helped define the DMP space, later becoming CMO of Oracle Data Cloud after Oracle acquired BlueKai in 2014. Cory is currently SVP of Marketing at fintech platform FIS. A longtime columnist for MediaPost, he’s also author of the 2012 book Internet Ad Pioneers, a collection of in-depth interview with notable women and men from the first 20 years of digital media.
In this wide-ranging interview, Cory takes Jill and Marty through his journey starting in 1995 as a tyro at the dawn of the Internet, through the dot-com boom and bust, his time on-stage with Primus … to CMO-dom and Oracle Data Cloud … meanwhile providing a lucid explanation of exactly what a Data Management Platform (DMP) is, anyway, and a pointer to one of the all-time great pieces of content marketing.
