Marie Claire and NME publisher IPC Media says it’s unifying the separate online ad sales staff from its individual magazines in to a single, new department. The new IPC Media Digital Sales will be led by current IPC Ignite group ad director Sam Finlay in the new role of digital sales head.
The division will have 27 advertising staff and an ad ops team of 12, which is likely to see two redundancies, IPC tells paidContent:UK. The team unifies ad sales across IPC’s five divisions, which each currently have their own online and print sales teams…
— Ignite (men and music: Nuts, NME etc)
— Southbank (women’s fashion and lifestyle: Marie Claire, Instyle etc)
— Connect (women’s weeklies: Now, Good to Know etc)
— Inspire (specialist and hobby: Decanter, Country Life etc)
— TX (TV listings and content: what’s on tv etc)
Online, the team will sell for sites like nme.com, goodtoknow.co.uk, trustedreviews.com and whatsontv.co.uk. Finlay, in the release, says it “will give our partners a clear point of access”.
Interestingly, Harry Harcus, currently head of ad ops over at IPC’s Time Warner (NYSE: TWX) stablemate AOL Advertising, will become IPC’s ad ops director. AOL restructured that unit in June after new CEO Tim Armstrong’s 100-day review prompted its renaming from “Platform-A”. International head Brendan Condon left for AOL in the US and a number of execs got new titles.