Rakuten Marketing announced its appointment of industry pioneer Neal Richter, to Chief Technology Officer. Neal's expertise across 20 years of software experience, particularly his eight years pioneering programmatic real-time-bidding (RTB) infrastructure and data-intensive algorithms for publishers and advertisers, make him uniquely positioned to lead Rakuten Marketing technology innovation to drive new revenue opportunities for automated marketing. Neal serves as co-Chair of the IAB TechLab's OpenRTB protocol that standardized the process of RTB, the Deal-ID, the Native Ads format, and the recently announced ads.txt standard. Most recently Neal was CTO of the Rubicon Project, an early pioneer of programmatic supply-side platforms (SSPs).