Out-of-home verification company Veridooh has appointed David Bell to its Advisory Council, where he will work alongside co-founders and co-CEOs Mo Moubayed and Jeremy Yang. The move comes as the company continues to expand its international footprint.
Bell was elected to the US Advertising Hall of Fame in March 2007. Over a career spanning more than four decades, he has served as chief executive of four major industry companies, including two large holding groups: Bozell Worldwide and True North Communications, both of which later became part of what is now Interpublic Group (IPG), and Interpublic Group itself. He previously led Knox Reeves prior to its acquisition by Bozell.
Following his retirement from Interpublic, Bell spent three and a half years as a senior advisor to Google, before joining Tim Armstrong as an advisor during AOL’s turnaround. In 2008, he partnered with Pegasus Capital Advisors to found gyro, a global B2B agency. Gyro was named AdAge’s Global B2B Agency of the Year in 2016, the same year Dentsu acquired it.
Bell is the only person to have chaired all four major US advertising bodies: the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the American Advertising Federation, the Advertising Educational Foundation and the Ad Council. He currently sits on the boards of Dstillery, Madison Logic, Ad.net, Valtech and PebblePost, and has previously held board or advisory positions with companies including Time Inc., DoubleVerify, Resonate, Creative Realities, YourTango and 33Across.
Commenting on the appointment, Mo Moubayed, Veridooh co-founder and co-CEO, said Bell had built and led several of the industry’s major companies over the course of his career. He noted that Bell had been an early backer of independent verification through his work with DoubleVerify, and said that experience was relevant to Veridooh’s direction in OOH. Moubayed said the appointment reflected confidence in the company’s plans, adding that Veridooh is currently operating in eight markets and that he looked forward to working with Bell as the company aims to establish independent verification as standard practice in the OOH sector.
Bell said he had generally been drawn to companies developing new approaches within their industries, pointing to his prior work with Google, AOL and DoubleVerify as examples. He said he saw a similar pattern at Veridooh, and that independent verification could help create greater accountability in OOH, increase brand confidence in the medium and address some of the barriers to increased spend. He said he was looking forward to working with the Veridooh team.
Moubayed and Yang founded Veridooh in 2019. The company is headquartered in Sydney, Australia, with additional offices in London and New York. It uses proprietary technology, branded SmartCreative, to track, measure and verify the performance of OOH advertising campaigns.
The company is the preferred independent verification partner for Omnicom Group and WPP Media in Australia, and counts brands including Google, Amazon, Mercedes, Pepsi, Unilever, Sony and McDonald’s among its clients.
The appointment adds an experienced industry figure to Veridooh’s advisory structure as the company works to grow its presence in international OOH markets. Independent verification has become a more prominent topic across advertising in recent years, as advertisers and agencies seek third-party assurance on campaign delivery and performance across various media channels, including out-of-home.
Bell’s background spans both traditional holding-group leadership and more recent advisory work with technology and adtech companies, giving him visibility across different parts of the industry’s evolution. His prior involvement with DoubleVerify, a verification business focused primarily on digital media, is likely to be particularly relevant to Veridooh as it looks to apply similar principles to the OOH sector.
For Veridooh, the appointment follows a period of expansion that has included partnerships with major holding companies in at least one market and continued work with global advertisers. Adding Bell to its Advisory Council is intended to support that growth as the company works to position independent verification as standard practice across the OOH industry more broadly.
