Veteran executive Matt Sommer has been named chief technology officer of Dallas-based Imaginuity, a fully integrated traditional and digital marketing agency.

Sommer has spent 25 years in many key aspects of managing and growing organizations, including fostering innovation, pioneering and evangelizing product vision, and leveraging data and analytics, Imaginuity said.

“As our original chief technologist, I’ve been looking for an executive with both the vision and the experience to meet the moment,” CEO Taylor Calise said in a statement. “There is so much attention on artificial intelligence, and Matt was researching and understanding AI while others were still panicking about Y2K.”

Calise believes that marketing technology is at a “historic inflection point,” one that the new chief technologist is “uniquely prepared to help us not only meet, but to further accelerate.”

Most recently, Sommer was owner of Emergent Systems, a consulting company that helped develop and implement applied generative AI solutions with a focus on data transformations.

Before that, Sommer was CEO and co-founder of MarketChorus, a software platform that used machine learning and natural language processing to understand people as a function of the content they consume.

Imaginuity said that for the real estate market, he created the first advertising technology tool built to drive direct, high-affinity traffic to owners’ properties using AI to identify events, activities, and attractions matched to potential renters’ interests in real-time.

Using tech to ‘drive the business forward’

Sommer said in a statement that Imaginuity has “the talent and technology in place to effectively grow and find new ways to get even more value from its data and technology platforms.” He believes that if technology is doing its job in marketing, “you shouldn’t even know it’s there.”

While other agencies are “scrambling to catch up on tools like analytics and AI,” the newly appointed chief technologist said, Imaginuity already understands the science and has “moved on to creating value by deftly applying it.” He emphasized that the company doesn’t use a tool for the sake of it, but rather because they understand how to make it “drive the business forward.”

Before MarketChorus, Sommer was vice president of research and development and co-founder of Engenium, leading the creation of a conceptual search engine. Sommer also has been a senior research scientist for both Avalon Data Systems and Raytheon, where he served as an AI researcher and engineer developing neural network-based speech and language classifiers for advanced digital signal processing applications.

Sommer has been issued 10 U.S. patents for inventions in text analytics, information retrieval, sentiment analysis, document clustering, audience analytics, and ad targeting.

With more than 30 percent of its workforce dedicated to technology roles, Imaginuity said it is imagining ways to make marketing smarter through data and technology.

Get on the list.
Dallas Innovates, every day.

Sign up to keep your eye on what’s new and next in Dallas-Fort Worth, every day.