Dinesh Gopinath

Mullen announced today that Dinesh Gopinath, Ph.D., has joined the agency as executive vice president, director of strategic analytics. Gopinath, who was selected after a review of 35 candidates, will lead the agency’s analytics practice, which plays a key role in modeling, predicting and optimizing communications strategies across a wide range of client businesses. Gopinath comes to Mullen from ChoiceStream, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., where he was chief solutions officer and active in using data for precision communications targeting and more personalized forms of communications. He has developed 1-to-1 personalization technology for clients including Zappos, Overstock, Borders, MTV, Yahoo! and AOL.

“In the hiring of Dinesh, we’re looking to further enhance our competitive advantage in gleaning data-driven insight,” said Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, chief strategy officer at Mullen. “Dinesh will provide an added edge to our precision targeting capabilities – in customer relationship management, digital, social media and beyond. He is a strategic and data analytics thought leader.”

“I‘m excited to join Mullen, focusing on the ROI of marketing and advertising while striking the right balance between short-term and long-term client business goals,” said Gopinath. “The timing is perfect,” Gopinath added. “The advertising industry is at a strategic inflection point dealing with the complexities of audience fragmentation, media proliferation, brand multiplicity, emergence of new technologies and the coalescence of advertising, marketing and selling.”

Gopinath had been with ChoiceStream since 2002, and some of his recent work there was in the development of personalized advertising and recommendation technology designed for so-called “advanced-TV” platforms. Previously, he was a principal with Oliver Wyman (formerly Mercer Management Consulting) and was at US West Advanced Technologies (Qwest).

Gopinath has a Ph.D. and an M.S. degree from MIT. His undergraduate studies were at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.