Chikay Lo has been promoted to Performance Marketing Director at Cult Beauty. Chikay’s career in the performance marketing industry has been a hugely successful one, and she has now moved up to a senior position from her previous role as Head of Global Growth and Marketing Partnerships.
Chikay said: “I’ve been incredibly lucky to have been able to build an amazing team from scratch who look over the affiliate, influencer marketing, 3rd party partnerships and global growth strategy at Cult Beauty and have always worked through a performance marketing lens across these departments. In my new role, the other performance marketing channels (SEO/PPC/paid social) will also be moving into the team. With my superstar team and the amazing forces of tech and data from THG – we are truly excited to shape and grow the success of performance marketing at Cult Beauty.”
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Merkle has promoted Toby Benjamin to the newly created role of Managing Director of its media practice. Toby joined Merkle in 2018 to launch and lead its tech consultancy practice, advising clients on balancing inhouse and outsourced models and helping brands take more ownership of their media and data strategy to ensure total transparency.
Initially brought in to support the onboarding of the Nestle Global SEO project, Toby has since helped to strengthen and mature Merkle’s Google partnership and built out its consultancy offering winning new brands including Disney, Deliveroo, Paypal and Hilton.
In this new role, Toby is responsible for leading and growing Merkle’s market leading media business, which comprises PPC, paid social and programmatic.
Toby commented: “It’s an incredibly exciting time to be leading Merkle’s expanding media practice after such a standout year for the business. The team has done a fantastic job in getting us where we are today, and I look forward to further strengthening the collaboration between both media and CXM services where we are seeing huge growth and helping clients with their ongoing customer experience transformation journeys.”
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Adform has appointed Barbara Daliri Freyduni as a new Member of the Board. Barbara Daliri Freyduni is a seasoned business executive who brings more than twenty years of marketing experience for global brands to Adform’s Board of Directors. Her successful track record includes overseeing the European growth strategies for leading brands like Microsoft, Netflix, Google, and most recently Zalando. Barbara is the first non-Danish executive to join Adform’s Board of Directors and will contribute her advertiser-side insights on digital marketing to the company’s strategy decisions.
Barbara said: “I believe this is a transformative period in adtech and see Adform reflecting a globalisation of the industry and digital marketing more broadly. It’s very exciting to have a European company making strong inroads and carving out significant market share alongside the major American companies which have historically dominated the industry and innovation…”
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Bazaarvoice, Inc. announced that it has named Zarina Lam Stanford as Chief Marketing Officer. An established leader with global SaaS experience spanning North America, APAC and Japan, Europe, and other growth markets, Stanford brings over 20 years of experience in leading with a customer-centric, insights-driven, and outcome-based approach to marketing and business growth at numerous SaaS companies.
Zarina commented: “I am thrilled to be a BVer here at Bazaarvoice, an icon in the exploding UGC global arena where consumers openly share their sentiments for brands, retailers, and employers. Technology and connectedness have transformed traditional B2B and B2C businesses to a C2B2C marketplace where consumers are guiding businesses and brands on how best to serve them. It is up to businesses and brands to harness the power of the voices of consumers.”
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Permutive secured $75M in Series C from SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It brings Permutive’s total raised to date to $105M, with previous investors EQT Ventures, Octopus Ventures, and ACE & Company also participating. The funding will enable Permutive to grow its patented on-device technology and scale its Audience Platform to create a global privacy-first infrastructure for programmatic advertising, now a $155B industry.
Joe Root, CEO and Co-Founder of Permutive said: “Publishers are the foundation of the web, and the relationship they have with their users is the backbone of digital advertising. As privacy shifts the economics of the internet towards this publisher-owned web, a privacy-first infrastructure will ensure this next iteration of digital advertising is immune to privacy chaos, will scale, and thrive.”
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Performance marketing agency, Journey Further, has appointed Lauren McFarland, Katheryn Watson and Amy Jones to join its influencer marketing, digital PR and creative teams respectively.
Katheryn Watson from Jellyfish will be joining Journey Further’s London office as Head of PR. Lauren McFarland leaves her role as Senior Client Partner at Influencer to join Journey Further as Influencer Marketing Director. Amy Jones departs her role as Campaign Lead at Rise at Seven to join Journey Further as Senior Art Director in the agency’s through the line creative team.
Lauren said: “I’ve been watching Journey Further progress for a few years now, so when the opportunity emerged to get on board, it was a no-brainer. I feel incredibly excited to be leading the influencer department in such an ambitious and supportive business.”
Katheryn said: “It’s amazing to be joining Journey Further at a time when there’s lots of movement and growth! I’m excited to continue the development of the digital PR team by taking London by storm and putting our digital PR footprint on the map in the capital.”
Amy Jones said: “Every marketing agency claims to ‘do things differently’, but few genuinely do. Journey Further’s plans to inject big ideas into the performance marketing space attracted me to join the team. I’m super excited to be joining a department of great conceptual thinkers to shape even bigger and better brand campaigns.”
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Havas Media Group has announced the appointment of Kim Peatling to the newly created role of Head of Growth and Marketing. Peatling joins Havas Media Group from Dentsu X, where she spent just under three years as Managing Partner, Business Development and Marketing.
In her new role, Peatling will develop and lead Havas Media Group’s UK and Ireland growth strategy, from prospecting and conversion of new clients through to creating organic growth strategies across its existing client base. Peatling is tasked with keeping her finger on the pulse of what clients are looking for from their agencies in terms of evolved capabilities, working to identify the need for new product offerings in order to help further strengthen Havas Media Group’s position in the agency marketplace.
Kim commented: “The team has done a fantastic job of simplifying and strengthening the Havas Media Group proposition under three distinct brands over the past year. I’m really excited to have the opportunity to help further cement the group’s place in the industry and demonstrate how we can create the right experiences in an agile and flexible way in order to deliver meaningful outcomes for our clients.”
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Xandr, AT&T’s advanced advertising company and Rakuten Advertising announced the expansion of their relationship with Xandr’s Global Supply Evangelism Team (GSET) and the adoption of Xandr’s Monetize SSP.
Ulrik Morell, VP, Global Supply Evangelism, Xandr said: “We’re excited to partner with Rakuten Advertising and bring another strong sell-side publisher offering to our buyers. Through GSET we are able to support Rakuten Advertising’s global monetisation and offer their inventory to our customers. With the advertising ecosystem facing many upcoming challenges, Xandr is proud to partner with a major global publisher who is focused on directly benefiting their marketers and agencies.”
James Collins, SVP of Media, Rakuten Advertising added: “We always seek to align our partner opportunities to serve our customers’ best interests. Whilst we have a global network, it has always been important to us to operate through the open internet and ensure transparency with advertisers we work with. By partnering globally with Xandr and joining their marketplace we are able to offer our supply to in-demand partners. The Xandr marketplace also allows us to tailor outcomes, benefitting our goals and monetisation. Additionally, we are proud to partner with a company who prioritises a transparent ecosystem.”
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Partnership marketing agency Acceleration Partners has hired Tammy Porter as Vice President of B2B Partnership Marketing. Porter will lead Acceleration Partners’ B2B partnership marketing practice, focusing on building and executing Acceleration Partners’ B2B strategy while driving thought leadership across the partnership marketing space. Porter brings over 15 years of affiliate marketing experience, most recently serving as Director, Digital Marketing at GoDaddy.
Adrine Harutyunyan has also joined Acceleration Partners as the Associate Director of Influencer Marketing. She will lead Acceleration Partners’ influencer marketing practice, while helping Acceleration Partners grow its influencer account team and services. Harutyunyan has strong experience in affiliate and influencer marketing, previously working with CJ and Arxan Technologies.
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Outbrain Inc. announced that it has entered a definitive agreement to acquire video intelligence AG (vi), a Swiss-based contextual video technology platform for digital and Connected TV media owners.
Outbrain will acquire vi for an aggregate purchase price of approximately $55 million, funded by $46.75 million of balance sheet cash and 412,500 Outbrain shares. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022 and is expected to be accretive in the first year. Progress Partners acted as exclusive M&A financial advisor to vi.
David Kostman, Co-CEO of Outbrain said: “vi fits perfectly into Outbrain’s core strategy of providing media owners with technology to enhance user engagement and monetisation through relevant content and ads.
“The combination with vi will allow us to deepen our partnership with media owners, providing mid- and top-of-article video solutions. It will also expand our addressable market, introducing high-quality in-stream video inventory to support our brand advertisers. We see significant synergies between our companies and we are very excited to welcome the incredibly talented and experienced vi team to Outbrain” added Yaron Galai, Co-Founder and Co-CEO.