Science behind the screen

Baylen leads the product group at Leavened with over 15 years’ experience in marketing analytics and product development. Baylen specializes in providing innovative solutions to client’s measurement and optimization needs.

Before joining Leavened, Baylen was the Senior Vice President, Digital Media Analytics at Team Detroit Inc. (now GTB), working with such clients as Ford Motor Company, Lincoln Motor Company, Scotts, Bosch, and Compuware. While there, he provided insight, analysis and measurement solutions for all digital media initiatives and integrated these initiatives with holistic, cross-channel analysis. Prior to that Baylen was a software engineer at Beyond Interactive (now part of Media Com) building proprietary reporting and analytics tools.

Baylen received his B.S. in computer science from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

Sara leads the strategy group at Leavened with more than 20 years of experience in performance marketing, media, and data analytics. Sara helps her clients develop strategic marketing plans, design marketing infrastructures to support the measurement of marketing, and establish tools for campaign measurement.

Prior to starting at Leavened, Sara has worked as a strategic planning and analytics lead at DraftWorldwide (Now FCB), Y&R/Wunderman, McCann Relationship Marketing, and Publicis. In 2006, she co-founded a digital and CRM agency in San Francisco, which was later purchased. Her clients have included Google, GoPro, Sprint, Microsoft, Intuit, Hewlett Packard, Adobe, Electronic Arts, and Toyota. Sara has won many awards for her past work, including an Addy from the American Advertising Federation, a “ONE Show” Interactive Award from the ONE Club which champions excellence in advertising and design, an NCDM Database Excellence Award, and several ECHO awards from the International Direct Marketing Association.

Sara graduated from Indiana University's Kelly School of Business with a Bachelor’s of Science and earned a MBA and a Masters in International Business from Pepperdine University.

David leads the data science initiative at Leavened with over 15 years of experience in marketing analytics. David specializes in finding solutions to clients’ needs through data driven insights.

Before joining Leavened, David managed predictive modeling for American Express Global Merchant Services. Prior to Amex, David built the predictive modeling suite for Bloomingdales’ email marketing segmentation. David’s agency experience includes Omnicom’s Annalect as well as work across all four Group M agencies. During his agency tenure, David has worked on accounts such as P&G, AT&T, Nissan, Coca-Cola, Reckitt Benckiser, Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Diageo, Scott’s Miracle Gro, Panera, KFC, BMO Harris, and Chobani.

David graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh with an undergraduate degree in mathematics.

Rian leads all technology initiatives for the development of Leavened’s PROOF platform.

Rian brings over two decades of experience driving strategy, process and culture, with hands-on coding and infrastructure architecture skills.  Most recently, Schmidt was the CTO of Vadio, Inc., where he was responsible for the development of a streaming video platform that powered Shazam's video service and Pearl Travel Tech, a SaaS startup providing immigration assessments to Fortune 100 enterprise clients. He previously worked at Amazon as the Head of Labs Technology for Zappos.

Rian received his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, and his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.