Fluency Progresses Agentic Automation Strategy with Appointment of Ad Tech Veteran Eric Picard as SVP of Product

Former Pandora and MediaMath Exec to Lead Product Strategy; Co-founder Eric Mayhew Moves into Chief Innovation Officer Role to Drive Vision and Fluency Labs

BURLINGTON, VT, UNITED STATES, April 16, 2026 /EINPresswire.com/ -- Fluency, the Digital Advertising Operating System (DOAS) for scaling paid media operations across all major channels, announced the appointment of Eric Picard as Senior Vice President (SVP) of Product. A seasoned product leader with decades of experience in ad tech and digital media, Picard joins Fluency after serving in senior roles at Microsoft, Pandora, MediaMath and Yieldmo. As SVP of Product, he will lead Fluency’s product strategy and shape the next phase of its AI-powered system of record to scale how agencies create and deliver paid ad campaigns across search, social and programmatic platforms.

Picard’s appointment comes amid a period of rapid growth for Fluency, following the close of the company’s $40M Series A funding round to further enhance Fluency’s automation and agentic AI capabilities. Fluency unifies and automates manual ad execution processes across all platforms into a single solution, serving as an advertising system of record for agencies and brands. The platform currently powers nearly $3B in annual media spend and more than 250,000 campaigns each month.

Picard brings nearly three decades of experience scaling platforms and driving revenue growth within advertising. Under his product leadership as Chief Product Officer at Yieldmo, the company doubled the size of its ad exchange in two years. At Pandora, he led advertising technology as VP of Product Management, helping build the world's largest digital audio ad marketplace and driving nearly 75% revenue growth over three years. At MediaMath, Picard served as VP of Product Strategy after the company acquired his startup Rare Crowds, whose technology became the blueprint for the Curated Marketplace, the first programmatic curation platform and the company's fastest-growing revenue segment for more than six years. A recognized thought leader in the industry, Picard co-authored the first digital impression standard, was part of the team that architected the first Real-Time Bidding (RTB) exchange and has served on the executive committee of the IAB TechLab Board of Directors.

Picard will lead Fluency's products as the company advances its vision for agentic advertising, where AI agents execute and optimize multichannel campaigns at massive scale with human strategists setting direction and maintaining oversight on decisions that matter. Fluency's platform already automates complex campaign management and enables data-driven decisioning based on real-world triggers, from inventory levels and weather to breaking news and virtually any business signal or external event. Picard will accelerate the evolution of that foundation into a fully agentic system, enabling agency teams to dramatically scale output, reduce operational complexity and redirect their expertise toward higher-value work.

“We're at a turning point in advertising: the ecosystem has become too complex for agencies to scale with manual processes and fragmented tools," said Picard. "Fluency gives agencies a new operating model, where human strategists direct an unlimited number of agents to execute and optimize campaigns at a scale no manual team could match. That's what agentic advertising looks like in practice, and accelerating that vision is why I joined Fluency.”

Picard will partner with Fluency President and Co-Founder Eric Mayhew, who will transition from Chief Product Officer to Chief Innovation Officer. Among other responsibilities in this new role, Mayhew will lead Fluency Labs, a dedicated space within the Fluency platform where clients gain early access to experimental tools and emerging advertising technology.

“We’re shifting AI’s role from being part of software to actually operating it. That shift is changing how agencies get work done–automating execution through AI so teams can focus on higher-value work,” said Mayhew. “I’m looking forward to guiding this vision through initiatives like Fluency Labs, and I’m confident that having Eric driving product will ensure our customers can win and grow in the future.”

Through Fluency Labs, clients will gain early access to experimental tools and new features. The program is designed to give agencies and brands an inside look to where Fluency is headed, with opportunities to share feedback and perspective on new innovations. Fluency Labs will offer access to a wide range of innovations, including agentic automation capabilities that direct campaign execution and optimization across platforms, to help advertisers to build the AI-driven workflows they need to scale their output without additional headcount.

About Fluency
Fluency is the Digital Advertising Operating System (DOAS) that transforms paid media operations into breakthrough outcomes by centralizing all major campaign execution workflows into a single solution. The AI-powered platform eliminates the most time and resource-intensive aspects of campaign execution, and automates campaigns across all major digital ad channels - including walled gardens and the open web. As a result, advertisers can activate, automate, and analyze any number of campaigns with unprecedented efficiency, working at a scale not previously achievable. Fluency powers nearly $3b in annual media spend. Its user base supports more than 250,000+ monthly campaigns for brands with 50,000+ locations. In 2025, the company ranked #1,278 on the Inc 5000, marking its third year in a row on the list. With a founding team that’s worked in online advertising since 1998, Fluency has certified partnerships with many major ad publishers and was named a finalist for the Technology Innovation in the 2024 Amazon Ads Partner Awards.

Al Moore
Fluency
PR@fluency.inc

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