Ed Turner has joined VaynerMedia EMEA, based in their London office, as VP of Media EMEA. Formerly Global Agency Lead at Twitter, he was in charge of accounts with Dentsu and WPP, driving revenue growth through strategic initiatives, client incentives, product integrations, research and innovation. In his new role at VaynerMedia, he is responsible for overseeing all regional media operations, spanning strategic partnerships, planning and activation. His remit includes continuing to drive growth and innovation for new and existing clients through VaynerMedia’s modern approach to marketing and media activation. Prior to Twitter, Turner held roles as Director of Media for Little Dot Studios; Chief Media Officer at COPA90; and multiple senior executive positions across creative and media during a six-year tenure at Engine. Additionally, Vaynermedia has appointed a new VP of Client Partnerships, Sarah Cabey. Cabey joins from agency, Drum OMG, where she was a Business Director for over 5 years. She has over 12 years of industry experience working for agencies and in-house. At Vayner, Cabey will be responsible for overseeing the management of key accounts across EMEA and ensuring VaynerMedia retains its strong client relationships.
Watching That has announced two new appointments. Erica Crossen Venuto will assume the role of Chief Experience Officer, overseeing the entire customer journey from sale through renewal for some of the world’s top streaming customers including Channel 4, A+E Networks, and Discovery. Crossen Venuto joined Watching That in 2021 following a long tenure at Brightcove, and today’s announcement solidifies her reputation as one of the best Customer Experience professionals in the video space. Luc Benyon has been appointed as Global Director of Marketing. Benyon previously ran marketing for video intelligence AG, based in Zurich, Switzerland, culminating in its acquisition by Outbrain in 2022. He will lead the Watching That marketing team as it grows its customer base, and develops its brand presence through 2023.
VeraViews, the advertising technology platform built to deliver transparent and auditable invalid traffic (IVT) prevention, is delighted to announce the appointment of David Murray as Demand Director. Murray is a London-based commercial specialist with a wealth of advertising industry knowledge acquired during his time at a number of the largest, most commercially successful and well-known ad and media brands in the UK. Working within the rapidly expanding VeraViews sales team, Murray will lead demand sales, onboarding Supply Side Platforms (SSPs), Demand Side Platforms (DSPs) and Digital Advertising Networks into the VeraViews end-to-end ad stack. He will also support VeraViews’ mission to remove ad fraud from video advertising, increasing trust and value across the media ecosystem.
Ad tech company Adnami has appointed Joffrey Cabau as Partnership Director, FR and Tom Dolling as Agency Sales Director, DACH as it continues to expand across Europe. The news follows hot on the heels of the appointment of James Upson as Managing Director for UK and NL and Jeetesh Luhar as International Sales Director and as growing numbers of advertisers across the continent turn to Adnami’s high impact display and video formats. Cabau will focus on developing partnerships with brands and media agencies across France. He has over a decade of experience in the media industry, most recently at ad agency, Gamned! and at Alliance Gravity Data Media. He has also held senior roles at Teads and Dunnhumby. Meanwhile, Dolling will be focused on driving agency business across German-speaking markets. He has a successful track record in digital marketing, having worked in sales at Adform and as senior project manager operations at Sizmek, where he led WPP’s full-service management services project in the German market.
Global creator marketing agency, Billion Dollar Boy (BDB), has announced the appointment of Sophie Crowther as European Director of a new Community Management division. Led by Crowther, the launch of the division enhances BDB’s talent identification capabilities in European markets, building on its industry-leading creator database. The Community Management division is also responsible for strengthening talent and agency relationships, improving the industry experience for creators and clients and unlocking new opportunities to optimise campaign collaborations. Crowther joins BDB with over eight years of industry experience across the APAC and EMEA regions, following previous positions as Head of Talent at Brave Bison for over six years and, most recently, as Senior Influencer Marketing Manager at MediaMonks. Having worked with content creators worldwide and across a range of verticals, Crowther offers in-depth knowledge of the global creator economy and the value of creators within it. Crowther is supported by Tatum Greig, appointed as European Senior Community Manager following more than 18 months of experience at BDB in account management. Greig’s appointment to the division adds over five years of industry experience and an operational understanding of the agency’s account teams. Reporting directly into European CEO and co-founder, Thomas Walters, Crowther’s hire bolsters BDB’s senior leadership team and will support the agency’s objective to improve the standard of creator advertising.
Harry Sumner has joined Performance and Media agency, ROAST, as Head of SEO and Content. Sumner is the latest senior hire the agency have made to build upon a successful 2022, which saw turnover increase by more than 20%. Sumner will report into ROAST Managing Director, John Barham. He will be heavily focused on four core areas to further bolster their organic search offering; service sophistication, measurement of business impact for clients, emerging technologies, as well as further expanding the organic teams in both the Cape Town and Bristol offices. Sumner has specialised in Search marketing for almost a decade, having started his career at Performics, before moving to dentsu’s iProspect. More recently, Sumner held the position of Senior Search Director at iCrossing. He has also worked on the brand side as Search Lead for Sky.
CallRail, the intelligence platform that helps businesses of all sizes market with confidence, announced two new additions to its executive leadership team: Masami Middleton was named Chief Marketing Officer and Marius Smyth was named Chief Revenue Officer. Throughout her over 25-year career, Middleton amassed extensive experience developing go-to-market strategies, building value messaging, infusing the voice of the customer into marketing decisions, and managing metrics that optimize revenue team investments and performance. She has previously held marketing leadership roles with Accenture/eBay and Marketworks (now ChannelAdvisor), as well as strategy consulting leadership roles at Accenture, The Brevet Group, and Towers Perrin (now Willis Towers Watson). Smyth garnered extensive leadership experience during eight years at Google in a number of roles, including the Head of their UK/I SMB team, and over the last nine years growing and evolving the AdRoll business as CRO. During his tenure, he focused on scaling AdRoll’s digital advertising platform across SMB, Digital Agency, and Enterprise customers internationally. Beyond his go-to-market acumen and experience, Smyth is passionate about growing and developing high-performance, solution oriented teams.
Acoustic, a global marketing and customer experience provider for B2C brands, has announced that Mark Cattini has been named Chief Executive Officer (CEO), effective immediately. Cattini has served on the company’s Board of Directors since May 2022 and joins Acoustic as it evolves the marketing digital experience for its customers to meet the growing needs of today’s businesses. Cattini brings on board Adam Stewart as Chief Technology Officer and Jay Schaufeld as Chief People Officer, underscoring the company’s continued investment in its technology and talent. Cattini brings over two decades of experience as a successful CEO at enterprise software companies, including MapInfo, Autotask, and ClickSoftware. Cattini along with Adam Stewart and Jay Schaufeld start their roles immediately. Stewart spent 17 years at Autotask/Datto in the role of SVP, Engineering while Schaufeld brings over 25 years of experience as a human resources leader, including serving as Chief People Officer at ClickSoftware.
Seed (Amplify’s dedicated student and Gen Z marketing agency for clients including Spotify, Jack Daniel’s and Bumble) has hired its first Creative Director, Joel Menegazzo, in a move that signals the development of its newly established creative department and capabilities. Early on in his career, Menegazzo worked client-side at ASOS as part of the retailer’s Brand Partnerships team. Before joining Seed, he worked in the creative and strategy arm of Bambuser Plus, helping brands such as the immersive luxury retailer WOW Concept integrate live video shopping into their offerings. Prior to Bambuser Plus, Menegazzo was Creative Director at influencer and social agency Relatable where he worked across clients including Adobe (for example, The Adobe Creator Collective campaign which redefined influencer marketing into community building).
Benchling, the R&D cloud powering the biotechnology industry, has announced the appointment of its first EMEA General Manager, Bob Burke, and Benchling’s ongoing expansion across EMEA. The company has doubled its customer count in EMEA to over 200 in the last year, and now has a European team of over 120 employees. With 25 years of leadership experience across global tech and biotech companies, Burke brings a wealth of industry expertise to the position. Joining most recently from Okta, Burke held senior go-to-market roles focused on customer success, professional services and the renewals and growth business, while also seeing the company through a successful IPO and 50x growth in revenue.
Six Degrees has appointed Chris Blofield to the role of Chief Operating Officer (COO). Blofield joined the Six Degrees team on 3rd January 2023 as COO. Blofield is a senior technology and service leader with over 20 years of operational, commercial, and transformational experience. He joins most recently from Clario, a provider of clinical trial endpoint services, where he served as Global VP, Client Success. Previously he was with Rackspace, where he undertook a number of senior exec roles, including interim COO and VP – Customer Success and Operations for EMEA.
Node4, a hybrid cloud provider, has announced that Hannah Birch has joined the company as Managing Director Digital and Group Board Member. In this role, Birch will lead the Node4 Digital Business. She will strengthen the strategic relationship with Microsoft leveraging recent investments and drive client value with the integration of acquisitions, risual, TNP and Tisski. Prior to joining Node4, Birch spent 11 years at Accenture where she led the company’s UK Technology Business for Insurance and was a member of the Technology Leadership Team for the UK & Ireland. As part of her role, Birch held several leadership positions and was responsible for creating and leading high-performing teams, executing business and technology transformations and driving technology innovation to support her clients’ positions in the market. Birch started her career at Oil and Gas giant BP and later held leadership positions at Fujitsu Services UK and Computacenter.
Tecknuovo, a challenger technology consultancy, has appointed Renee Hawkins as its Chief Operating Officer. Hawkins joins Tecknuovo, which prides itself on being the antidote to traditional consulting with its Zero Dependency framework, with two decades of experience in the technology and consultancy space. She brings with her a passion for creating, influencing and driving strategies around talent and operations management and an intrinsic belief that skills are a key differentiator, aligning perfectly with Tecknuovo’s Deliberately Different model. Hawkins previously headed-up the Thoughtworks UK business and talent operations, focusing on optimising business value through every facet of the company. During that time she also became an executive sponsor for the UK Race and Ethnicity Affinity Group and has been recognised as Woman of the Year in Tech at the UK Women in Tech Excellence Awards.
Tembo, the tech-focused mortgage broker, has announced the appointment of banking and fintech business leader Jenny Watts as Board Chair. Watts previously held senior roles at businesses including Metro Bank, Molo Mortgages and Habito and brings over thirty years of highly relevant experience including B2C sales, HR, risk and compliance along with proven technical abilities, strong project management and business transformation skills. At Tembo, Watts will be responsible for overseeing the board and strategic direction of the company and working with key stakeholders and investors to ensure Tembo continues to grow each month while delivering a compliant service to its customers.
Pioneering healthcare IoT and medical device cybersecurity specialist, Cylera, has appointed a new Chief Operating Officer, Geyer Jones, as the firm looks to build on its success in the UK and U.S. healthcare sectors. Jones brings with him a wealth of experience, leading various business and operations functions across cybersecurity companies with managed services, enterprise software and SaaS businesses. Before joining Cylera, he was an Executive in Residence at Scale Venture Partners. Prior to joining Scale, he was Chief Strategy Officer at RSA, sitting on the team that led RSA’s divestiture from Dell, resulting in STG’s $2.1b acquisition. Earlier in his career, he held senior positions at Symantec and Riptech, helping grow its MSS business from $15m to over $150m.
Hotjar, the product experience insights platform, welcomes three new seasoned executive hires to its team. Celine Maher, Mattia Santin and Marta Abalos are taking on roles leading revenue, marketing and the people and culture teams respectively. Their appointments will help fuel Hotjar’s continued growth and momentum to help drive customer empathy with qualitative and quantitative analytics. Celine Maher joins Hotjar as the first Chief Revenue Officer and will lead the growth, expansion and success of Hotjar’s customer base alongside the sales, customer success and support teams. With over 16 years of focusing on go-to-market strategy and delivering excellent end-to-end customer experience, Maher will help Hotjar elevate customer value, bring new and old perspectives into its product maturity and uncover new revenue streams. Prior to joining Hotjar, Maher worked at Zendesk and New Relic where she led strategies focused on product-centric led growth across the EMEA market for commercial and business development. Mattia Santin is the newly appointed Chief Marketing Officer at Hotjar. He will lead Hotjar’s global marketing strategy and vision. Santin will focus on scaling the demand generation engine, continuing to develop a distinctive brand and building long-lasting relationships with existing customers. He will also work closely with Hotjar’s product and revenue teams on defining Hotjar’s road maps and driving cross-functional projects to grow the business. Previously, Santin served as the CMO for two scale up businesses such as Atida and Leavy and as Uber’s Head of Media for EMEA. He comes to Hotjar with over 15 years of experience across eCommerce, retail, mobility, travel and healthcare. Marta Abalos is now Hotjar’s VP of People & Culture overseeing the People and Culture team. Abalos will work to foster a diverse and healthy workforce as Hotjar continues to expand. Her career includes more than 10 years of experience improving people processes and talent development in growing organizations, spending the past 7 years at Stuart as their VP of People & Talent. During her time there, she led the team responsible for expanding a company from 40 people in 2 countries to 800 people in 6 countries, while ensuring a consistent employee experience with strong company culture and values. Abalos will help Hotjar build the foundations for this next wave of growth ensuring Hotjar has the resources and tools to provide the best employee experience to current and new employees.
Lumera, a software company dedicated to the digital transformation of the European Life and Pensions industry, has appointed Jonas Alfredson as Chief Financial Officer (CFO). Alfredson was recruited to Lumera from Outpost24, a cybersecurity vendor, where he has held the CFO position since 2016. He brings a wealth of financial management experience from public, private, and private equity-owned companies, including CFO assignments with software company Episerver and investment company Bure Equity. Alfredson is joining Lumera on February 13.
