Reach plc has poached a senior Facebook executive to take on a role developing new revenue streams.
The publisher has announced the appoint of Maureen McDonagh, pictured, to the newly created post of chief customer officer.
Maureen is currently industry head of retail at Facebook, and is due to join Reach at the end of January.
She will be responsible for “delivering a joined up data and customer strategy, working closely with the digital teams and steering a range of customer focused objectives”.
Said Maureen: “I’m enormously excited to be joining Reach at a time when the media industry as a whole is at such an inflection point in terms of how people consume news, the increasing power of the customer and their changing relationship with brands.
“The new role of chief customer officer is powerful recognition by Reach of the customer as one of their most powerful assets and I’m hugely excited by the challenge of nurturing this asset to help drive business growth.
“I’d also like to express a huge thank you to Facebook, where over the last six years I’ve had the opportunity to work with some truly inspirational leaders, talented colleagues, agencies and global brand owners. I leave a transformed UK business that has grown from 100 to over 3,000 people in the UK during my time and wish them continued success.”
Maureen will sit on the senior executive committee and report directly into chief executive officer Jim Mullen.
Jim said: “With her blend of media, e-commerce and customer loyalty experience, Maureen will be perfectly placed to drive our customer-centric vision and targets forward, ultimately helping us to continue to innovate and develop new customer revenue streams.
“I am delighted to welcome her to the Reach plc executive team.”
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Fair play to Reach for recruiting real digital experts (rather than ad reps reinventing themselves as ‘digital gurus’ ) to help them develop new revenue streams and sustainable business models using their own money unlike other groups who’ve been given substantial funding by Google to do so, I certainly have more faith in them being able to achieve this than others also on the same quest.
I wish her and Reach every success
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If these publishers believe the future for them is monetising online news as opposed to newspapers then they’re right to invest in recruiting staff with proven track records of success in the digital medium.
Watching the headless chickens around me scraping and scrapping to pick up all and any crumbs of money they can prize off local businesses to ‘invest’ In digital bookings would be laughable if it wasn’t so desperate.
The main problem being , as ‘Taverham’ points out,they’re print ad reps suddenly given a new coat of paint and reissued onto the public as ‘ online Digital experts’
It’s certainly the case where I am and from what friends in the industry tell me it’s the same story at other centres too.
From what I can see none are comfortable with the medium, don’t really believe in it and get by by baffling the poor business person with a few cobbled together digital facts and figures in the belief that as they know slightly less than them this should be enough to warrant a sale,repeat business, i am reliably informed, is low due to the advertiser being ‘once bitten twice shy’ and going elsewhere to advertise in a medium and publication they have more faith in and get better direct response from.
Perhaps if other publishers recruited proper online commercial experts rather than making do with reinvented ad reps from a print background, they’d have better success of making their web platforms pay.
I’m no expert,the trouble is neither are those purporting to be so
….and there in lies the problem
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