Left: Andy Curran (CEO Pubguard), Alan Ngai (COO Pubguard)
London, UK, 2 September – Pubguard, the malvertising and ad quality platform and a subsidiary of leading in-game advertising platform Bidstack Group (LSE:BIDS), has announced the appointment of Andy Curran as CEO and Alan Ngai as COO.
As CEO of Pubguard, Andy Curran will focus on positioning the company as the most agile platform to respond to the evolving threat landscape. Andy joins Pubguard’s leadership team from Bidstack where he was Head of Growth, responsible for scaling up and aligning the development and commercial teams within the group. He’ll bring these skills to PubGuard as he focuses on relaunching the product later this year.
“Pubguard is one of the most recognised companies in its space and has brought great value to Bidstack’s in-game offering since the acquisition last year,” Andy commented. “The company has now been fully integrated into the group, ready for a relaunch, and this coupled with the recent shift in market dynamics means now is the perfect time to ramp up and scale to fulfil its massive potential for growth.”
In his role as COO of PubGuard, Alan Ngai will support Andy in solidifying the company’s position as the world’s leading independent malvertising platform. He’ll lead on Pubguard’s day to day operations and business growth is driven forward by continuing to expand its services across all media channels. In tandem, Alan will continue to lead the programmatic product development side of Bidstack’s in-game offering.
“Having worked in ad tech for almost 10 years, the Pubguard role is a unique opportunity to help tackle an ongoing issue that has plagued the industry since I started working in the programmatic space. I’m excited to be a part of this company’s future successes,” Alan said.
Justin Wenczka, Founder, will be stepping into an advisory role as he explores new opportunities. During his tenure, Justin brought accountability to the ad exchange, removing the opportunity to serve inappropriate creatives to audiences. As a result, Pubguard has achieved success not only within the ad tech space but also with leading names from the gaming industry.
Justin commented: “I’m incredibly proud of my work taking Pubguard from a conversation to a pre-sold, VC-backed, PLC-exited company. This was a massive achievement for everyone who contributed throughout the years and I’m confident that the Bidstack team can now take Pubguard to the next level. I’m looking forward to new projects on the horizon for myself, and I’m very happy to be advising a diverse range of executives and investors moving forward.”
About Bidstack
Specialists in native in-game, Bidstack are redefining immersive advertising in the gaming space. Bidstack bridges the gap between gamers, game developers and advertisers by enhancing the gaming experience with rich, real world advertising. We deliver targeted, native in-game ads to gamers globally – across multiple platforms (mobile, PC and console).
Bidstack is the first company to develop technology that allows adverts to be served programmatically into natural spaces within video games. They are creating an entirely new ad category and are at the forefront of engendering change in the advertising industry.
About Pubguard
Pubguard is a malvertising and ad quality platform. Their proprietary technology performs in-depth behavioural analysis across in-app advertising to identify offensive, malicious and inappropriate ad content. The company reviews billions of ads per month using advanced image and code recognition technologies to block and flag problematic malware and offensive ads.
For more information, please visit: www.pubguard.com
