2004
COED founded
Profile / Media & Adtech
David
Liebler
He built a magazine about college, then spent two decades chasing where attention went next.
He built a magazine about college, then spent two decades chasing where attention went next.
David Liebler runs strategic partnerships for the automotive business at Locala, a Paris-headquartered advertising platform that exists to answer one stubborn question: did the ad actually send anyone to the store? It is the kind of problem you only care about after years of watching dollars disappear into screens. Liebler has those years.
Before drive-to-store measurement, before the mobile gold rush, there was a magazine. In 2004 he started COED, a publication aimed squarely at college-aged men. It was print first, which already tells you something about the era and about his timing. By 2007 the whole thing had moved online, and COED Media Group became a national digital property whose stories got picked up by The Huffington Post and Maxim. He has been chasing the migration of attention ever since: paper to web, web to phone, phone to the parking lot of an actual dealership.
To say that I love COED is an understatement. It's the freedom and the feeling that you can accomplish anything you set your mind to.David Liebler, publisher's letter, CO-ED
Most people pick a lane. Liebler picked a question - where does attention live, and who will pay to reach it - and let the answer drag him through every medium of the last twenty years.
The magazine taught him audience. EatDrinkNJ, an iOS app he founded and ran, taught him that audience now lived in a pocket. STEARCLEAR, where he was CMO and partner, and SITO Mobile, where he climbed from account executive to senior director of new business development, taught him that mobile was not a feature but the whole field. Then came the part nobody expected from a man already running companies: at an age when most executives coast, he enrolled at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and earned an MBA, finishing in 2022.
The through-line is not a job title. It is a refusal to let the format he mastered become the format he's stuck in.
Launching a print magazine in 2004 was either brave or stubborn. He moved COED online by 2007 - early enough to matter.
EatDrinkNJ put a New Jersey food-and-drink guide on the iPhone, back when "there's an app for that" was still a novelty.
An Ivy League MBA after already founding companies. Most people study to start. He studied because he'd already started.
Locala used to be called S4M. In March 2022 - the company's tenth anniversary - it rebranded to Ask Locala (now simply Locala), recasting itself around local data and omnichannel measurement. The pitch is unglamorous and exactly right: prove that an ad moved a real human toward a real place. Mobile, programmatic, connected TV, display, digital out-of-home, all bent toward foot traffic.
Liebler's slice of that is automotive, the industry where his career began. He connects car brands and dealer networks to a platform that can tell them whether a campaign filled a showroom. After twenty years of selling attention, he's now selling proof.
You cannot be truly successful unless you love what you do for a living.A line he read once, and apparently took literally
The brand he built ran an annual "Miss COED" contest featuring women from campuses across the country. Some winners went on to their own notable careers.
He started in automotive at a dealership and a car-media company - and the automotive industry is exactly the beat he leads at Locala today.
Print, app, mobile network, omnichannel platform. The medium keeps changing. The job - reach the right person - never does.
A Columbia digital-marketing certificate, then a Cornell MBA, stacked on top of a career most would call finished. He kept going to class.
EatDrinkNJ was a love letter to where to eat and drink in New Jersey, in app form, before food apps were everywhere.
Twice a founder, repeatedly a partner. When the obvious move is to take a salary, he tends to start something instead.
Sources: LinkedIn · The Org · Wikipedia (COED) · MediaPost · BusinessWire · Crunchbase