Wal-Mart looks to China for new US marketing chief

NEW YORK — Wal-Mart is turning to its marketing chief in China to shape how it relays its message to shoppers in the U.S.

The world’s largest retailer named Tony Rogers as chief marketing officer for the U.S. on Friday. He will report to Greg Foran, president and CEO of Wal-Mart’s U.S. division starting in mid-January. Tony, a 10-year veteran at the company, has been the head of marketing and social media in China for two years.

Rogers succeeds longtime marketing chief Stephen Quinn, who retires next month.

Wal-Mart has also hired former Target marketing executive Michael Francis as consultant. Francis is best known for his nearly 30-year career at Target, where he helped create the discounter’s cheap-chic image through whimsical advertising.

Before moving to China,Rogers worked for eight years in the Wal-Mart’s marketing division. Before joining Wal-Mart, Rogers spent several years with Pepsi-Co’s Frito-Lay division.

*CORRECTION: A previous version of this story misstated Tony Rogers’ last name. The error has been corrected.

Wal-Mart looks to China for new US marketing chief

SocialCode Hires Steve Skrzyniarz as Chief Technology Officer

SocialCode, a Facebook Marketing Partner, announced today the hiring of Steve Skrzyniarz as Chief Technology Officer.

Skrzyniarz was previously the CTO of Dashbox, and has also been the CEO and CTO of Soundflavor. He also worked with Microsoft for nine years. With SocialCode, Skrzyniarz will lead the engineering team in building the next evolution of its advertising technology, analytics and application programming interface integrations.

SocialCode CEO Laura O’Shaughnessy welcomed Skrzyniarz to the company:

Social platforms are fueling an explosion of data about people, their behavior across devices, and ultimately their path to purchase. Marketers need technology to extract and act on those insights. Steve’s work will make marketing smarter for brands and more relevant for consumers.

Skrzyniarz is excited to get started, he noted in a statement:

SocialCode delivers business-critical insights centered around creative intelligence and consumer intent. SocialCode’s technology team has created a powerful platform, proven with the industry’s best strategy team and elite brands. I’m excited to take it to the next level as marketers accelerate their digital marketing investments.

SocialCode Hires Steve Skrzyniarz as Chief Technology Officer

Betfair appoints Johnny Devitt as new Chief Marketing Officer

Johnny Devitt

Betfair has appointed Director of Online Marketing Johnny Devitt as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO). Industry news source EGR Magazine, confirmed the appointment of Devitt who will take over marketing and branding initiatives for Betfair.

The operator had created the senior management role following the departure of former Brand Director Mark Ody as Betfair merges online marketing and branding responsibilities under the leadership of its new CMO.

Devitt has headed up Betfair’s online marketing strategy and initiatives since May 2014, he joined the company in September 2014 from competitor Paddy Power as Head of Marketing Platforms, Data and Acquisition.

An igaming marketing industry veteran Devitt had worked six years at Paddy Power heading up social media and display marketing initiatives for the operator. Devitt had also held managerial positions within Paddy Power financial spread betting team.

EGR Magazine confirmed that Johnny Devitt had taken up the new senior management role in March 2015, Devitt will work between Betfair’s Dublin and London offices.

Betfair appoints Johnny Devitt as new Chief Marketing Officer

Kim Martin named new Chief Strategy Officer at Meredith

Most recently, Martin served as President and General Manager of WE tv for nine years

Press Release:

DES MOINES, Iowa and NEW YORK, March 30, 2015 — Meredith Corporation, the leading media and marketing company serving more than 100 million unduplicated American women and 60 percent of U.S. millennial women, announced today it has named Kim Martin as its new Chief Strategy Officer. In this role, Martin will work with Meredith’s senior management team on developing corporate and business unit strategies – with a strong focus on Meredith’s millennial strategy across the Company’s multiple media platforms – and leading other key strategic initiatives. She will start April 13, and report to Meredith Chairman and CEO Steve Lacy.

Martin brings a blend of senior-level media management, content development, and sales and marketing skills to the position. Most recently, she served as President and General Manager of WE tv for nine years. In this role, Martin oversaw all aspects of the network, including marketing, programming, production, scheduling, digital media and new business opportunities. She was responsible for evolving the network brand to attract young, professional contemporary women. Martin shifted the programming strategy, expanded the digital footprint, updated the network image and attracted celebrity talent, which all contributed to substantially increasing revenue from both affiliates and advertisers.

“Kim brings outstanding skills and experiences to this position, particularly in the video content creation field,” Lacy said. “She has a proven track record of successful media leadership on a senior level, and cut her teeth in sales and marketing roles. Kim will serve as a valued advisor, particularly as it pertains to increasing our already strong reach to millennial women – as well as expanding our video strategy – across all our media platforms.”

Prior to running WE tv, Martin spent five years with parent company Rainbow Media, eventually becoming Executive Vice President of Distribution and Affiliate Marketing. In this role, she was responsible for the distribution and marketing of all the company’s networks, including AMC, Fuse, IFC and WE tv.
Before joining AMC Networks, Martin spent 10 years with Discovery Networks, rising to Senior Vice President of Affiliate Sales. She was instrumental in helping Discovery grow from a single network with 18 million subscribers to a multi-network company with over 300 million subscribers and brands such as Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, Travel Channel, Discovery Health and Discovery Espanol.

“I am excited to join Meredith and eager to work with the senior team on developing strategies to grow its already strong millennial audience that’s engaging content on multiple platforms and devices,” Martin said. “Given my background, I’m particularly enthusiastic about the video content creation opportunities for the Meredith brands.”

Martin holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Georgia State University and a Bachelor of Science degree in Political Science from Georgia College and State University. Martin has served on the Women in Cable and Telecommunications’ (WICT) national Board of Directors as Treasurer. She also is a graduate of WICT’s Betsy Magness Leadership Institute and Senior Executive Summit at Stanford University, and has served as a WICT executive mentor. Additionally, she has served on the national Board of the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing.

Martin was named by CableFAX as one of the Top 30 most powerful women in cable for five consecutive years, and is a Multichannel News & WICT Wonder Woman. She was also named to The Hollywood Reporter’s “Top 30 in Reality Television” list of honorees.

Martin currently serves on the Executive Committee of the Foundation Board of Trustees of Georgia College and State University. She is a Luminary Circle member and mentor for the Step Up Women’s Network, a national non-profit membership organization dedicated to connecting and advancing women and girls.

Kim Martin named new Chief Strategy Officer at Meredith

Behind the career: Dev Ganesan, Fishbowl's new president and chief executive officer

By Kathy Orton,

Dev Ganesan

Position: President and chief executive, Fishbowl, an Alexandria company that helps restaurants with marketing.

Dev Ganesan began his career working for consulting giants KMPG and Deloitte. After leaving the consulting world, he specialized in helping companies grow. He was chief executive of Trados, Intelliworks and Aptara before joining Fishbowl late last year.

How did you benefit from working at large consulting firms early in your career?

I always recommend to youngsters to work for a large company as soon as they come out of college before they jump into a start-up. I am a strong believer in that you need to go and work with some of the very large companies where you are trained well in systems and processes, and get trained to different ideas. I benefited from that quite a bit.

What do you like about working with companies that are in the process of transforming themselves?

I like the pace. I always call myself a wartime general. I’m not a peacetime general. I like that intensity where you transform parts of the business, put it in that growth stage and eventually create value for stakeholders. I love that piece. It energizes me to run fast. I love fast. That also fits nicely with my personality.

What appealed to you about the CEO position at Fishbowl?

There’s a shift going on from [advertisers] spending on traditional media to spending more on digital. And once it goes into digital, it’s all about getting to know the customers, engaging with the customers.

Ultimately, the restaurants want to drive in more revenue, more guests, and you can do that by engaging with the customers. But you can engage with them only if you know more about them. That’s exactly what we do. Today, we are providing analytics so that restaurants can get to know more about their customers, where you are going, how much you are spending, and then how to make you come in more regularly and spend more money. It’s all about data-driven marketing, and that’s why I found this job to be extremely exciting.

What do you hope to achieve in your new role?

The company has been an e-mail marketing company, but the beauty is they have a very large base of restaurants that trust them. The reason I’m here is to take them to the next step of basically doing a more data-driven marketing with a solid analytical platform.

Before you took the job, you took 18 months off to travel, but you also studied up on analytics. What did you learn?

I discovered that big data analytics is for real. A lot of people are saying it’s all a buzzword. More and more, it’s all about data. If I have a lot of data, I can see some patterns in the data. It’s all about patterns. Then I can start making decisions based on the patterns I am seeing. The larger the data sets, the more confident you will be in the intelligence you are getting from the data.

Can’t data be overwhelming?

I think that’s where a good analytical platform comes into play. You can’t do it manually. You need to give them data so that they can take action. I call it actionable insight. We are the action engine, and that’s where I am so excited about Fishbowl.

Fishbowl has already developed an action engine, which is e-mail and customer engagement. I want to help the chief marketing officers in the restaurant business run good campaigns, measure the efficacy of the campaign and give them more intelligence around the guests.

This is where many restaurants are going wrong, which is they think “I can do a loyalty program and I’m done.” But loyalty programs are easy because that’s an end. Once you’re already loyal, I know you’re coming. But how can I get others who are not loyal members to make them loyal? That’s exactly what we are striving to do.

What’s the most challenging part of growing a company?

The common theme is it’s not technology, it’s about people. If you have the right team and people around you and you get them to share the vision, then you can basically go and execute on anything. Bringing in the right team and making sure they fit well is a challenge. When you look at a successful company, it’s the team that made it.

What is the best advice you’ve received in your career?

The best advice is humility because the moment I walk up to somebody and say, “I’ve done three companies. It’s easy,” you fail. It’s not about you. It’s about trying to find a solution. Things change a lot. I feel like the advice I got early in life about having a good level of humility as a leader is very critical and has gone a long way.

— Interview with Kathy Orton

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Behind the career: Dev Ganesan, Fishbowl"s new president and chief executive officer