Our Team

President: Matthew Skallerud
Currently heading up our new New York City office
Matt Skallerud, president of Pink Media, specializes in LGBTQ+ online marketing, targeting gays & lesbians via content marketing, social media, programmatic ad banners, mobile smartphone apps and more. He also specializes in search engine optimization (SEO), key word / search advertising (PPC) and social media analytics. He's been in the LGBTQ+ online industry for almost 30 years now.

Matt Skallerud began his online career in May 1995 with the launch of GayWired.com, which became one of the top 3 LGBTQ+ websites worldwide. Having worked with companies, large and small, for more than 20 years to reach the LGBTQ+ online consumer through this site and others, he is now focused on the most cutting-edge global innovations in programmatic ad buying, social networking and Web 2.0 technologies. He empowers his clients to reach the LGBTQ market using the most advanced techniques taking hold in the online marketing world today, including Real-Time Ad Bidding (RTB), Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, YouTube, blogs and others.

In addition, Skallerud is the former Board Chairman of the International Gay & Lesbian Travel Association (IGLTA) and has served on the boards Travel Gay Canada (TGC) and the LAGLCC. He is actively involved with key national LGBTQ+ organizations including the NGLCC, Out Professionals and Lambda Legal, just to name a few.
- Matt Skallerud on About.me

Brief Intro: Matt Skallerud has been in the LGBTQ+ digital space for over 25 years now, first with GayWired.com and SheWired.com, and now with Pink Media and the #ILoveGay network, helping companies reach their targeted LGBTQ+ demographic.

Vice President: Fabrice Tasendo
Heading up our Los Angeles office
Starting in the mid-90s as the co-founder of GayWired.com, branded as the "best garage startup" by the Wall Street Journal, Fabrice has built an impressive career trajectory within the LGBTQ+ digital landscape. He became Vice President of communities and E-Commerce at GSociety, the very first publicly traded LGBTQ+ company, where he demonstrated his knack for innovation and leadership. Transitioning further, Fabrice assumed the role of Senior Vice President of Digital Strategies at Here Media in 2006, solidifying his position in the forefront of LGBTQ+ media. By 2011, he had transitioned to the role of Executive Vice President at Pink Media, a frontrunner in LGBTQ+ social media marketing. Throughout his journey, Fabrice has remained not just a professional but also an activist, educator, and marketer, driven by his passion to positively impact social change.
- Fabrice on About.me

Contact Us - use this form to reach any of us on the Pink Media team!

What We Offer:

Interpersonal Marketing Strategies - we work with you to develop a comprehensive media marketing strategy plan, incorporating traditional and digital PR, advertising and social media and bringing these strategies together into a unified marketing outreach.
Bringing social media expertise and implementation to advertising agencies and their clients.
Managing social media campaigns for clients.
Managing LGBTQ+ advertising campaigns, integrating social media with an overall marketing campaign, including editorial, print, television, e-mail marketing and banner ads.

Our Core Competencies and Strengths:

Using social media in a way that ensures that all of the social media elements work together, from the blog to the Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts.
Using multiple platforms synergistically, ensuring that our social media techniques can be managed equally well via smartphone, laptop and tablet PCs.
Bringing a social media marketing strategy together with a more traditional online tools, including banner ads, editorial and e-mail.
Leveraging a strong foundation and set of relationships with key LGBTQ+ media players on local, national and international fronts as well as with media channels including online, print, radio and television.

Some of our Recent Accomplishments & Milestones:

2020 marked our 25 year anniversary in the digital LGBTQ+ marketplace
2019 marks our 12th year in hosting the LGBTQ+ Marketing & Advertising conference in NYC, and the 5th year of its evolution into LGBTQ+ Week NYC (www.LGBTWeek.NYC)
The launch of LGBTQ+ Brand Voice (www.LGBTBrandVoice.com and our position as one of the leaders in the LGBTQ+ online advertising & marketing world, bringing together the various touch points of social media, targeted banner advertising, LGBTQ+ influencers, etc. into a single, unified and cohesive marketing campaign.

Some of our Past Online Accomplishments:

We've been at the forefront of digital media since founding GayWired.com in 1995. We helped revolutionize gay media by creating the one of the first LGBTQ+ digital advertising platforms and media networks.
Online E-Commerce: we were the first LGBTQ+ company doing online retailing back in the mid-90s. We put a small variety of LGBTQ+ products online, including calendars, music CDs and CD ROMs, and for the holiday season of 1996, we were pleasantly surprised to see this incredibly huge, untapped interest in online retail sales. We expanded our inventory, and began working with companies such as 10% Productions and TLA Video to help them put their first products online and show them the power of online retailing in the LGBTQ+ community.
Online Dating: we put up the first LGBTQ+ online matchmaking service, focusing not on creating our own chat rooms and messaging program, but rather to work with existing software, which at the time was ICQ. We created an online, searchable database of gays & lesbians who were able to find one another and communicate instantly using our site and ICQ. As technology evolved, we launched the first personals where our platform allowed users to share as much as they wanted about themselves to find love. We would get thank you emails weekly from that free program.
Social Media Integration: we developed one of the first sites that allows for social media integration between almost all Web 2.0 platforms, including blogs, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and more. What's unique about this platform is that it does not distribute and share social media content among friends, such as FriendFeed and Google Buzz, but rather it distributes and shares social media content among PEER GROUPS, allowing for people of similar interests to keep up-to-date and informed on what is most important to them.

About Pink Media:
The buzz around social media is hard to avoid... whether it's all about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok or LinkedIn, the conversations people are having about these social media are growing louder and louder every day. Businesses are taking note and learning step-by-step how to ensure their organizations are relevant in these conversations as well... yours should be, too. What we do is break social media technology into bite-sized pieces, allowing you first to understand how Facebook can work for your business, and then expanding from there into the world of blogs, photos and perhaps even video, using these content tools to enhance your reach into your target market, whether they are searching for you on Google, following you on Twitter or monitoring your updates on LinkedIn.

This new medium of social media has a few key concepts that are important to any social media marketing strategy... first, that your marketing efforts are shifting from "speaking to" your customer to "speaking with" your customer. This "speaking with" style changes everything... no longer is it OK to put a message together and simply put it out there in the form of a display ad, e-mail campaign or press release. Speaking with your customer means communicating in a more personable, human voice. Speaking with your customer means they get to speak back. And speaking with your customer means that your conversations are more transparent and available for others who can chime in and participate as well.

The other key concept in social media is that it is all connected and works together. When a blog is posted or a photo is uploaded, these "content elements" are now out there online working for you. Once your social media network is set up, a blog posting would feed into Twitter, your Facebook fan page, your LinkedIn Group and will appear prominently on Google Search. Your photos and videos would do the same, updating your entire social media universe in all of the "touch points" you have set up, whether those are the basics (Facebook and Twitter) or more specific to your industry (TripAdvisor, Yelp, IGLTA's social media feed, etc.) With one click of the "publish" button, social media takes your message far and wide and does the best job of any medium in delivering your message to those that specifically want to hear from you... your target audience!

This is what Pink Media does for you. We help you to build your social media content networks and then develop and implement a strategy that integrates your content into the social media universe that is specifically matched to your industry. We stay specialized in the LGBTQ+ marketplace, as we can then reach even deeper into this niche for you, drawing on our 20+ years of experience in the LGBTQ+ online industry and putting these years of experience to work for you.

Pink Media is a Certified LGBTQ+ Business Enterprise

About PinkMediaWorld.com Network of Sites:
Centered around highly advanced features of the Internet including blogs, social networking and online video, the PinkMediaWorld.com Network of LGBTQ+ Sites includes PinkBananaTravel.com, PinkBananaBiz.com, PinkieB.com and more... all designed to bring the best of today's Internet technologies and experiences to LGBTQ+ users worldwide, including integrations with FaceBook, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn and more... integrations with a distinct gay & lesbian flair!

These sites combine curated content based upon their specific niche (business, travel, etc.), and merge that with both a membership/profile system and a business directory, helping to maximize a business's opportunities to be discovered and explored by the LGBTQ+ community online.

Content Curation [n. kon-tent kyoo-rey-shun]
"The process of an individual (or team) consistently finding, organizing, annotating (contextualizing) and sharing the most relevant and highest quality content on a specific topic for a target market."