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CBM's email platform will get a boost from a new alliance with Arizona State University. Mercaldo told us, "Beginning August 18th, five seniors and graduate students at the ASU Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s PR Lab will have the “City Brand Email” platform as a class project, delivering to us a formal business plan on how to successfully market these custom City-based emails in every market, large and small."

"Recently, this PR Lab developed complete marketing strategies for our government’s Trade.gov website, and last semester completed comprehensive marketing analysis for Avnet and InfusionSoft. These students are cutting edge and extremely advanced individuals who frankly, I am more impressed with than numerous existing digital agencies already operating in the marketplace."

In addition the new service news, CBM announced the addition of five key members to their Executive Team - President Jason Banks, Chief Financial Officer Chris Buls, Chief Growth Officer Andrew Bart, Advisory Board member Ammar Kubba and Syndicated Featured Columnist Don Henninger.

CBM's addition of Henniger underscores the company's commitment to producing rich content for the network that will generate and continually grow traffic to CBM Sites. Henniger is a former Managing Editor of the Arizona Republic and Publisher/CEO of the Phoenix Business Journal. At CBM he will be  writing a weekly column for called “The Human Side Of Business.”

Mercaldo noted "new President Jason Banks has an incredible track record in our very space, with successful monetization and network building of city portals for over 15 years.  Jason

Don Henninger
CBM Syndicated Featured Columnist

also brings with him a proven team of outsourcing resources in the social media, programming, content, and platform building arenas.  Jason is full time with CBM as of this week, and we are very excited to have him lead our team."

Ammar Kubba
CBM Advisory Board Member

Of course, the name of new Advisory Board member Ammar Kubba (Founder & CEO of  afterTHOUGHT) is already well known to everyone in the domain space. Mercado said, "Ammar is the owner of the email “@identity” program that CBM is in the process of purchasing and installing on what will be 400 managed sites. Ammar has retained a 10% interest in the platform.  He has been a close friend of mine for many years, and his track record speaks for itself."

While CBM already has a big footprint in the U.S. their growth will not be contained by America's borders. Mercaldo said, "Our international portfolio is incredible. We expect all international sites, depending upon size, to be launched in early 2017.  However, we are presently not seeking or signing, except in special cases, any new (City).com brands until we address all of our existing brands under contract, and the content, SEO and monetization needs of them all."