Jaffer Ali (born 20 August 1956) is a US born entrepreneur and writer on the subject of online marketing and digital media. He is presently the CEO of Vidsense Inc., a company he co-founded with his sister Anisa Ali and cousin, Tom Zegar. Vidsense is an online video network. Ali is also the CEO of Nextera Media (Penn LLC) which manages Vidsense and owns interests in several associated assets including a video portal, EVTV1, a research company, BIGresearch, an e-commerce company, PulseTV and an e-zine company Gopher Central.
He has authored or co-authored four books ranging from Middle East politics to corporate ethics. He also has written more than 100 essays and articles on online marketing.
Jaffer Ali is the son of an immigrant from Palestine. Born in 1956, he grew up in the south suburbs of Chicago.
Jaffer received his B.S. degree in Business Administration from the University of Illinois in Champaign, IL, and pursued post-graduate studies in political philosophy at Arizona State University in Tempe. He left academia before earning his PH.D to follow his dreams.
Jaffer Ali has been engaged in the video business since 1982. He joined his family’s home video company, MPI Home Video at its inception. Nationally distributed titles of note among the more than 2000 different titles comprising MPI’s video library include The Beatles' A Hard Days’ Night, Help!, Magical Mystery Tour, The Honeymooners Lost Episodes, and The Super Bowl Shuffle.
In 1988, Jaffer co-founded a video catalog company, Fusion Video featuring more than 2000 titles covering a broad range of viewer interests.
In 1991 Ali left the family business and co-founded Fusion Fulfillment to take advantage of in-house operations and systems for his video catalog operation. Clients included Target, Marshall Fields, Garth Brooks, MGM, MCA Universal, Polygram Video, Nintendo and dozens of other entertainment related clients.
Ali sold his interests in both the video catalog operation and fulfillment companies in 1996 and co-founded Pulse Direct Inc., a direct response company created to market home video properties via television. Titles of note included Riverdance, Lord of the Dance, Muhammad Ali- Skill, Brains & Guts, and Honeymooners Lost Episodes.
In 2000 Jaffer Co-founded the online research company; BIGresearch. Utilizing Penn Media’s e-zine network, BIGresearch generated more than 130,000 online surveys for a variety of companies.
In 2004 Jaffer co-founded the video portal; EVTV1.com, which, two years later was ranked as one of the Internet’s top 50 destination sites for video entertainment. BusinessWeek also named it one of the top 10 Desktop Diversions of 2006.
Jaffer's current project is the Vidsense Video Snack Network. Conceived in 2008, Vidsense is an online video network.
Ali has earned a reputation as being a “contrarian” opposed to conventional digital industry thinking. Chief amongst his thinking has been a detailed critique of behavioral targeting (BT) as a marketing methodology. Not only does Ali think that BT employs long discredited mathematical reductionism, but it also employs unethical privacy violations.
Jaffer has been vocal in advocating a return to the golden days of advertising when creative approaches dominated the media landscape. By reintroducing a sense of wonder in advertising and addressing scalable reach, the media ecosystem can become a healthy place for publisher, agency and advertiser.
Jaffer has promoted the notion that excessive targeting works against what big advertisers really need; scalable reach. The online industry has eschewed trying to solve this problem in favor of stressing performance metrics, thus turning online media into a direct marketing channel. This also works against scale for big brand advertisers and in the process promotes an unhealthy media ecosystem.
