Carat has appointed Mark Brennan to head of mobile from his role as emerging platforms director at MEC.
GroupM has made Chris Copeland, formerly head of GroupM Search, chief executive of new innovation unit GroupM Next. Cary Tilds, currently leader of digital media operations at GroupM-owned Mindshare North America, takes up the post of chief innovation officer.
Hearst Magazines UK has made former ad operations manager for Hachette Filipacchi Richard Swan its head of advertising operations for digital.
Last.fm has appointed Chris Price as its new head of music, to be based in Last.fm’s East London HQ and reporting into Tom Lisack, VP of content & artist relations for CBS Interactive Music Group. Chris joins from his role as the director of music programming for MTV’s nine UK music channels. Prior to that, Chris spent six years developing music strategy for BBC Radio 1, after five years in marketing and distribution roles for Sony Music Entertainment and the Warner Music Group.
Mindshare has promoted James Chandler from mobile account director, to the new position of head of mobile (a role left vacant by Claire Valoti before her move to MD of O2 Media).
PHD has brought over Steve Williams, group chief executive at Omnicon sister agency OMD Group, to become its president in New York.
Rightster has strengthened its management team, appointing Chris Townsley, formerly of Limelight Networks, as VP sales EMEA, Julian Humphryes, formerly of Endemol and RedLever as content solutions director and Channel 4’s Simon Voysey as media sales director.
Smartclip has brought in Andrew Ferrer as agency group head in the UK. Having previously worked for Channel 4, at smartclip Andrew will be responsible for sales and service activities facing the company’s expanding client roster, working across UM Media Planning Group, Initiative and smartclip’s Northern agencies.
Twitter is bringing on 17 new staffers in Dublin, Ireland, underscoring its larger aims to build ad revenues in Europe, following the hire of Google exec Stephen McIntyre in late February to lead sales out of the Dublin office and YouTube’s Bruce Daisley in January.
Yahoo announced this week that alongside ‘profound’ structural and organisational changes, it has laid off 2,000 employees – 14% of its workforce – saving $375m in costs. It has been conducting a search for a new worldwide sales head, who will also be boss of the US, Asia and Europe, Middle East and Africa sales regions. Rich Riley, who was recently running EMEA, is said to be moving to US sales, Rose Tsou is expected to remain in Asia and the company is looking for an EMEA sales lead.