By Godson Umejiego, Bureau Chief, The Americas
Imaginuity has named Matt Sommer as its Chief Technology Officer. Mr. Sommer, an experienced executive and technologist, has spent 25 years in every aspect of managing and growing organizations, including fostering innovation, pioneering and evangelizing product vision, and leveraging data and analytics. He is uniquely suited to Imaginuity’s mission to blend imaginative thinking, innovative technology, and uncommon ingenuity to deliver transformative results for its clients.
“Imaginuity has the talent and technology in place to effectively grow and find new ways to get even more value from its data and technology platforms”
“As our original chief technologist, I’ve been looking for an executive with both the vision and the experience to meet the moment,” said CEO of Imaginuity Taylor Calise. “There is so much attention on artificial intelligence, and Matt was researching and understanding AI while others were still panicking about Y2K. Marketing technology is at a historic inflection point – a point that Matt is uniquely prepared to help us not only meet, but to further accelerate.”
Most recently, Sommer was owner of Emergent Systems, a consulting company that helped develop and implement applied generative AI solutions with a focus on data transformations. Prior to that, he was CEO and co-founder of MarketChorus, a software platform that used machine learning and natural language processing to understand people as a function of the content they consume. For the real estate market, he created the first advertising technology tool built to drive direct, high-affinity traffic to owners’ properties using AI to identify events, activities, and attractions matched to potential renters’ interests in real-time.
“Imaginuity has the talent and technology in place to effectively grow and find new ways to get even more value from its data and technology platforms,” added Sommer. “If technology is doing its job in marketing, you shouldn’t even know it’s there. While other agencies are scrambling to catch-up on tools like analytics and AI, we already understand the science and have moved on to creating value by deftly applying it. We don’t use a tool for the sake of it, we use it because we understand how to make it drive the business forward.”
Before MarketChorus, Sommer was vice president of R&D and co-founder of Engenium, leading the creation of a conceptual search engine. He has also been a senior research scientist for both Avalon Data Systems and Raytheon, where he served as an AI researcher and engineer developing neural network-based speech and language classifiers for advanced digital signal processing applications.
Sommer has been issued 10 US Patents for inventions in text analytics, information retrieval, sentiment analysis, document clustering, audience analytics, and ad targeting. He holds a bachelor’s in cognitive psychology from The University of Texas at Austin, and a master’s in neuroscience from The University of Texas at Dallas.
Imaginuity touches every aspect of the customer journey and has dedicated over 30 percent of the agency’s workforce to technology roles, imagining ways to make marketing smarter through data and technology. An all-in-one agency, clients rely on Imaginuity for strategy, creative, media, UX, brand work, and development of the actual technology platforms, where Sommer’s expert touch will be felt.
