oOh!Media has appointed former Virgin Mobile chief executive officer David Scribner as its chief customer officer, a new role to support the company’s strategy to deliver on its vision of being a new out-of-home media company.
oOh! said Scribner, one of the few former chief marketing officers who was elevated to CEO, brings proven experience in developing and leading customer-centric organisations in B2B and B2C environments, which beyond Virgin Mobile also included Optus, Nestlé and most recently True Local.
oOh! CEO Brendon Cook said the company recognised 18 months ago the need for a chief customer officer in order to lead revenue generation and support the business strategy that oOh! started developing in 2012 to evolve the traditional out-of-home company by 2020.
“We have been busy pulling everything together: From introducing powerful new data sets, to enabling advertisers to better reach and target their audiences, to introducing content across our inventory, to growing our existing network of classic and digital inventory while creating new opportunities for consumers to engage with advertisers at the right scale,” Cook said.
“To support this, we identified that we needed to change the way we engaged with our various customers. Our advertisers, agency customers and our property partners had changing needs and at the same time government and consumers’ expectations of out-of-home as a public space medium were also changing rapidly.
“It was clear that we needed to further instil a customer-centric lens to our business and as such we undertook an extensive global search to find a chief customer officer, a role that we kept evolving during the recruitment process.
“With the support of a selection committee also comprising our chairman Tony Faure and board member Joanne Crewes – who has proven global brand marketing and business leadership expertise – David was a clear standout from a field of high-quality candidates as the best person to help us continue to drive our transformation to a customer-centric organisation.”
Scribner’s role will be to help advertisers and property partners engage with audiences more deeply and to bring together key functional areas that directly support media buying clients including: sales, marketing, data and insights, content and creative services and client services.
Cook added while the role had been in the making for some time and was not in reaction to the Adshel acquisition, Scribner would be pivotal in bringing together the two businesses under a unified strategy and approach to market.
Scribner will commence with oOh! on October 8, 2018.