Scott VanDeVelde

As adware firm Claria morphs into a personalization and behavioral advertising firm, it has replaced president and CEO Jeff McFadden with Scott VanDeVelde, who was most recently its SVP of global sales, and it has promoted CMO Scott Eagle to executive vice president, writes Adweek. SVP Mitchell Weisman has left the company. He was in charge of adware distribution partnerships, including with file-sharing service Kazaa, with which Claria stopped working in July.

Jason Fairchild, a former Yahoo Overture sales exec, has joined the company as VP of business development and will focus on expanding relationships with web publishers for new Claria services, including personalization and behavioral ad targeting.

McFadden was cofounder of the company (called Gator, at the time) and named CEO in 1999; he steered the company through a wave of lawsuits over its business practices and privacy-related complaints related to the downloading of its ad-serving software.

Claria now believes its software can instead be used for personalization - the very reason Microsoft considered buying Claria before backing out after negative publicity over Claria's controversial history.

Claria has launched BehaviorLink, an advertising network that buys remnant inventory from publishers and resells it as targeted inventory based on the browsing behavior of its 50 million software users. It also plans to officially launch PersonalWeb, via which web publishers offer users personalized content in exchange for downloading tracking software; the collected data would target advertising to users through the BehaviorLink ad network.