Sovrn Hires Carla Holtze Cell for Newly-Created Role of Managing Director of Commerce

Respected executive and entrepreneur with years of experience in commerce and identity will lead Commerce growth for publisher, merchant and affiliate network clients

Sovrn, a publisher technology platform that helps content creators earn and keep more of their revenue, today announced that it has hired Carla Holtze Cell as its first-ever Managing Director of Commerce. In this new role, Cell will be responsible for setting the strategy and executing the go-to-market plan for Sovrn’s suite of commerce products. She will report directly to Chris George, President of Sovrn.

“Commerce is an important growth area for publishers who are focused on diversifying their advertising businesses. At Sovrn, we uniquely bring together commerce, advertising, and data solutions, creating powerful opportunities to help our customers grow,” said George. “Bringing Carla on board positions Sovrn to accelerate its innovation in the commerce space in ways that will benefit our partners. With her strong background in data and commerce, Carla brings the ability to develop holistic solutions for publishers that truly leverage each aspect of their business and we couldn’t be more excited to have her on our team.”

Much of the commerce space has proven to be overly complex and inefficient for publishers, making it difficult to form strong relationships with merchants and deliver dynamic, relevant, and engaging shoppable content that drives revenue for both publishers and retailers. Sovrn Commerce is a reimagined solution that provides the freedom and control content creators need to efficiently manage their affiliate business through a simple, scalable all-in-one solution that allows them to understand, influence, and monetize the purchase behavior of their audiences.

“Sovrn has long been a company I have known and respected. I am aligned with its mission to be an ecosystem that supports the breadth of digital publishers — from premium publishers and platforms to independent influencers and content creators,” said Cell. “Specifically in affiliate commerce, I strongly believe that if you inspire content as a publisher, you deserve to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what I am setting out to do at Sovrn. There is much room for innovation, creativity, and data for publishers to further capitalize on their content, and I am beyond excited to be a part of solving that problem for our customers.”

Cell comes to Sovrn after co-founding Parrable in 2014, a digital identification SaaS company, where she served as CEO for nearly a decade. In this position, she led all aspects of the business, including the creation and launch of a patented identification technology to replace third-party cookies, enabling transparency, accuracy, targeting and attribution. An entrepreneur at heart, Cell also co-founded and served as CEO for Have to Have, a social commerce platform designed to drive monetization for publishers, ROAS for merchants and to gather rich customer intent data for enhanced retargeting. She also worked at the BBC and The Economist Intelligence Unit and began her career at Lehman Brothers in both New York and Hong Kong.

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