GumGum, the Santa Monica advertising technology company that describes itself as The Mindset Company, today created a dedicated global Agency Partnerships team and named six executives to its leadership in North America, the UK, Australia and other international markets. According to GumGum, the team will strengthen relationships with holding companies and independent agencies and help them apply the company's Mindset Graph and Relo Metrics data and technology to planning, buying and measurement.

The announcement, distributed through Business Wire at 9:00 a.m. Eastern time, names two early areas of work. One is integrating Mindset Graph insights into media planning and campaign optimization. The other is feeding Relo Metrics sponsorship intelligence into sports sponsorship investment decisions. No agency clients, holding company partners, headcount figures, budgets or commercial terms are disclosed.

ELI5

GumGum, a company that places online ads based on what people are reading or watching rather than who they are, has formed a team whose job is to work with the big advertising agency groups. The agencies are building their own computer systems, increasingly run by AI, to decide where their clients' ads go, and GumGum wants its data on audience moods and on sports sponsorship exposure to be one of the inputs those systems use. No agency deals have been announced: the team is the sales and integration effort meant to get GumGum's data inside those agency tools.

What the team is for

The framing of the announcement is specific. GumGum does not present the team as a conventional sales desk for its ad inventory. It presents the team as a route into the infrastructure agencies are building for themselves.

According to GumGum, the team "works directly with agency partners to understand their priorities and identify where GumGum's data and technology can support their efforts to build even more sophisticated AI-powered planning and buying systems." That is a supplier's pitch to the owners of those systems: GumGum wants its signals inside an agency's stack rather than only on its own media.

Katy Loria, GumGum's chief revenue officer, set out the reasoning in the announcement. "Holding companies and independent agencies are building the next generation of planning and buying infrastructure, and they need data they can trust inside those systems," Loria said. "The Mindset Graph and Relo Metrics provide differentiated intelligence to help agencies make smarter media and sponsorship decisions. This dedicated team will help translate that intelligence into meaningful partnerships, new capabilities, and better outcomes for advertisers."

Loria joined GumGum as chief revenue officer in September 2025, according to the company's announcement at the time, after an earlier spell in the same role at Comcast's FreeWheel.

Who runs it

The structure splits the world into North America and everything else, with one exception in Australia.

North America

Kristen Careccia leads the team in the US and Canada as Head of Agency Partnerships, North America, and reports directly to Loria. Her team includes two vice presidents of agency partnerships, Keith Millsopp and Carrie Israel.

International

Nick Reid, SVP and Head of International Agency Partnerships, leads outside North America. Oliver Nash, Head of UK Trading and Agency Partnerships, works alongside Reid. Both report to Loria.

Tarlyn McStay has been promoted to Head of Agency Partnerships, Australia. Unlike the others, McStay does not report to the chief revenue officer. According to GumGum, McStay reports to Matt Coote, Managing Director, JAPAC, which places Australia inside the regional management line rather than the central revenue organization.

Two gaps stand out in the map. GumGum's own boilerplate says the company operates "in over 19 markets across North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia." No named lead covers Japan or continental Europe. Reid's international remit may include both, but the announcement does not say so.

What agencies get access to

According to GumGum, agency partners will have access to its Mindset Portal, high-impact creative solutions, expanding OLV and CTV offerings, and Relo Metrics Edge and Census, along with opportunities for early access to emerging capabilities and enhanced TV solutions.

The Mindset Portal is the most developed of these in public. GumGum released a redesigned version in July alongside a Mindset Agent that turns an uploaded campaign brief into a custom targeting segment, with The Trade Desk named as the first platform to support activation. The workflow PPC Land described then ran in five steps: upload a brief or RFP to the portal, receive AI-recommended targeting queries, review why each environment fits, adjust the balance between reach and relevance, and activate in The Trade Desk. GumGum cited HEINEKEN, e.l.f. Cosmetics and the BBC as early users at the time but published no results.

The creative line has a longer history, at least in Europe. GumGum bought JustPremium, which PPC Land described as one of the largest rich media ad marketplaces in Europe, in August 2021 and retired the JustPremium name in March 2022. The announcement does not list the formats behind its "high-impact creative solutions." In the trade, the term usually covers large, non-standard display units such as skins, takeovers and scrollers.

The video items are less defined. The announcement refers to "expanding" OLV and CTV offerings and to "enhanced TV solutions," but gives no inventory volumes, publisher partners, formats or launch dates for either. Nor does it describe what Relo Metrics Edge and Census measure, or how agencies would license them.

What is missing from the list is also worth noting. GumGum Sports Media, the audience suite the company launched in September, does not appear by name.

The case GumGum is making about mindset

GumGum's commercial argument rests on a claim that targeting by context and "receptivity" can compete with targeting by identity. The Mindset Graph, according to the boilerplate in today's announcement, is "our AI-driven data engine" that "processes billions of real-time contextual, creative, environmental, and historical signals to match every ad with the most receptive audience."

The company first launched the Mindset Graph alongside a rebuilt GumGum Platform on October 3, 2024. That launch reorganized the business into three product lines: GumGum Contextual, formerly Verity; GumGum Attention, previously Playground xyz's Attention Intelligence Platform; and GumGum Creative, which then ran across 40,000 publisher partners and reached more than 820 million unique individuals a month, according to GumGum at the time. The company's case for contextual advertising goes back further, to a SPARK Neuro study it ran that found 43% more neural engagement and 2.2 times better ad recall for the most contextually relevant placements.

The signal list itself has shifted slightly. When the Mindset Agent launched in July, GumGum described the graph as processing contextual, creative, attention, environmental and historical signals. Today's boilerplate drops attention from that list. The announcement does not explain the change.

GumGum's own research suggests why an agency-facing team might be needed. In a survey report released on October 28, GumGum said 81.5% of US marketers surveyed agree that mindset advertising can outperform identity-based targeting. The same release said 59.8% of US marketers would still default to identity-based advertising for their next campaign. The survey covered more than 2,000 marketers across the US, UK and Australia; GumGum did not publish fieldwork dates or name a research firm.

The gap between stated belief and planned behavior is the market GumGum is trying to close, and agencies are the ones who build the plans. It echoes a separate finding: Taboola's survey of 326 senior marketers in the US and UK, published in October, found that 81% tend to keep targeting the same audience segments over time.

The sports half of the offer

Relo Metrics is the second asset in the team's portfolio, and it addresses a different decision: how much a sponsorship is worth, measured through exposure in venues, on broadcasts and across social media.

GumGum combined its advertising platform with Relo Metrics in October 2024, then describing the unit as its sports sponsorship measurement and analytics subsidiary and citing projected 2024 brand spending of $67.56 billion on sports sponsorships. In September 2026 the company went further and turned verified sponsorship exposure into addressable audiences across nine US leagues through GumGum Sports Media, using household audiences from VideoAmp. That launch, PPC Land noted, came with no performance figures, campaign results or pricing.

The measurement problem Relo Metrics sells into is real enough. The Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement argued in August that sports audience measurement has started behaving like market infrastructure, listing the value of sports sponsorships among nine persistent measurement challenges and naming Relo Metrics as one of four vendors measuring logo prominence, exposure duration and screen share. The same CIMM paper put US sports media rights payments at $14.6 billion in 2015 and $29.3 billion in 2025, citing S&P Global.

At the Sports Media launch, VideoAmp's revenue chief argued that brands had largely defended sponsorship spending with proxies rather than proof. The pitch to agencies is that sponsorship budgets could draw on the same kind of exposure data that informs media plans. Will holding companies treat Relo Metrics as a currency inside their planning tools, or as one vendor report among several? Today's announcement does not say.

Why holding companies, and why now

The agencies GumGum names as its targets have spent the past two years consolidating data and building proprietary systems. When Publicis Groupe agreed to buy LiveRamp for an equity value of $2.5 billion in May, PPC Land set the deal against Publicis's own Marcel platform, WPP's purchase of InfoSum, now inside its WPP Open AI operating system, and Omnicom's Omni platform, built around Acxiom's RealID and shown at CES 2026, weeks after Omnicom closed its acquisition of IPG in November 2025.

Those systems need inputs. They also cost money to run. By August, agencies were turning AI tokens into a margin business as agentic spend stalled, and by September agencies such as Dept and PMG were metering AI usage by the token, with one Dept employee consuming 1.5 million tokens in a day.

That context explains the wording of Loria's statement. A holding company running its own planning and buying system decides which external data sources it plugs in, and on what terms. For an independent company such as GumGum, being one of those inputs is a different business from selling inventory to an agency trading desk, and a team dedicated to agency integration reflects that shift. What remains unclear is the commercial model: whether GumGum expects to be paid as a data licensor, as a media seller whose inventory is bought through the agency stack, or both.

What the announcement does not say

Several basic facts are absent:

  • The total size of the team beyond the six executives named
  • Any holding company or independent agency that has agreed to integrate the Mindset Graph or Relo Metrics
  • Pricing, licensing terms or revenue targets
  • Timing or details for the "enhanced TV solutions" and "emerging capabilities" offered through early access
  • What Relo Metrics Edge and Census do, and whether they are sold separately from GumGum media

The announcement closes by saying the team "advances GumGum's vision to transform advertising through a deeper understanding of audience receptivity." That is a statement of intent, not a result.

The company behind the team

GumGum was founded in 2008 and is headquartered in Santa Monica. In February 2020, PPC Land reported that the company had raised $22 million in a Series D round after reaching $155 million in global revenue in 2019. A $75 million investment from Goldman Sachs followed in April 2021, and by March 2022 GumGum had more than 400 employees across 19 regions and over 30,000 publisher partner websites, according to PPC Land's report on the JustPremium rebrand.

The leadership has changed since the 2024 platform launch, when Phil Schraeder was chief executive. By July 2026, PPC Land was reporting Marcus Startzel as GumGum's chief executive. The company does not publish revenue figures, and today's announcement adds none.

The geographic footprint, meanwhile, has barely moved on paper. GumGum described itself as operating in 19 regions in 2022, in "19+ markets" in 2024, and in "over 19 markets" today. The new team's structure, with leads in the US and Canada, the UK and Australia, maps onto the English-speaking markets where GumGum's survey work and sports products are concentrated.

Timeline

Summary

Who: GumGum, the Santa Monica advertising technology company founded in 2008, and the six executives named to its new Agency Partnerships team: Kristen Careccia, Keith Millsopp and Carrie Israel in North America, and Nick Reid, Oliver Nash and Tarlyn McStay internationally. Chief revenue officer Katy Loria oversees the team, with McStay reporting to Matt Coote, Managing Director, JAPAC.

What: A dedicated global team to work with holding companies and independent agencies on integrating GumGum's Mindset Graph and Relo Metrics data into their planning, buying and measurement systems. Agency partners get access to the Mindset Portal, high-impact creative, OLV and CTV offerings, Relo Metrics Edge and Census, and early access to emerging capabilities. No clients, headcount, pricing or terms were disclosed.

When: Announced today, November 4, 2026, a week after GumGum's mindset survey report and less than two months after the GumGum Sports Media launch.

Where: The team covers the US and Canada, the UK and Australia, with an international lead whose exact remit is not specified. GumGum says it operates in over 19 markets across North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.

Why: Holding companies are building their own AI-driven planning and buying systems and choosing which external data feeds them. GumGum wants its contextual mindset signals and sports sponsorship measurement to be among those inputs. For marketers, the question is whether these data sets become standard inputs inside agency tools or stay as optional extras bought through individual vendors.