Arbitron appointed Taher Behbehani to the newly created post of executive vice president, chief strategy and business development officer. He was most recently vice president of business affairs for Time Warner Cable.
Behbehani is responsible for extending the PPM platform to multimedia markets; Arbitron says the plan is to pursue that growth through business partnerships, acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing arrangements and strategic investments. “Arbitron has a solid, patent-protected platform technology for personal, portable and passive electronic measurement,” Behbehani said in the statement, “and my goal is to help the company create balanced business expansion strategies that will make the most of its technology and capital assets.”
Behbehani reports to Arbitron President/CEO Michael Skarzynski and will be based in Columbia, Md.
At Time Warner, Behbehani established several industry partnerships with Web search and display advertising companies, and led negotiations related to platform extensions for video delivery, advanced advertising, wireless, and Internet services. The 47-year-old has operational experience and planned and executed expansion strategies for publicly traded companies: 3Com Corporation, SourceFire Inc. and UTStarcom Inc. Behbehani’s experience includes the wireless industry; he ran 3Com’s wireless infrastructure business unit (CommWorks).
Behbehani earned a Masters of Science in Electrical Engineering from Yale, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
