Ritzcovan joins Foursquare with a mission to change the world
Liz Ritzcovan has joined Foursquare as its chief revenue officer. In joining the company she said she believes that Foursquare can change the world, since 90 per cent of consumer spending takes place in the real world, not the digital world, and Foursquare aims to connect the digital with the physical world, using the analytics of human movement.

She said her first priority would be client centricity. “Foursquare needs to deepen our connection with our partners, explaining to business leaders why it’s critical to leverage more than a single Foursquare solution—be it ad campaigns with Pinpoint, measurement with Attribution, or location-based CRM and messaging with our Pilgrim SDK and Places API,” she said.

“Foursquare is more and more about bundling technology licensing, mapping capabilities, and marketing optimization in a suite of solutions. It’s the reason I joined, to help lead the team into packaging these broad solution sets for leading organizations and brands.

Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck said it was an honour to welcome Ritzcovan into the Foursquare family. “Liz is known for effectively scaling companies with both enterprise and media solutions, empowering teams for success, and taking a determined approach to excellence in client service,” said Glueck. “We are thrilled she’s bringing her acumen and focus to Foursquare at this exciting time in our growth.”

Inskin promotes four from within
Ad tech firm Inskin Media has announced three new appointments. Julia Burton-Brown, the firm’s international sales director, who leads Inskins international business efforts has been promoted to cover Germany. The Inskin commercial team in Hamburg will now report directly to her.

Evan Russell, who has led the UK commercial team over the past six years, has been promoted to the new role of commercial director, responsible for coordinating all revenue activity across the world, including new markets, new and different agency relationships, and direct brand client activity.

And Bart Dabrowski, has been promoted to the role of Creative Director. He has been with Inskin for over seven years and has a wealth of experience building innovative campaigns for some of the worlds best-known brands, matching creative flair with technological innovation.

Finally, Matt Newcomb, who established Inskins successful business in Australia, has now returned to the UK, and taken on the role of group publisher director.

Hugo Drayton, Inskins CEO., said: “It is a great testament to Inskins growing and maturing business that we are able to make a series of key internal promotions. Evan, Julia, Bart and Matt have already contributed significantly to Inskins evolution. They are all superbly equipped to take on these important senior roles to help drive the expansion of Inskin worldwide.”

Paul joins Bonzai to spreahead international growth
Creative technology platform Bonzai has appointed Tresa Paul to the newly-created role of ‘global head – marketing, to spearhead an intensive international marketing strategy. The appointment is part of a wider ambitious growth strategy designed to enable Bonzai to extend its reach into overseas markets.

She joins Bonzai from Ogilvy & Mather, India, where she was senior vice-president, working with brands including AT&T, Vodafone, Idea Cellular and Tata Tea. Her role will see her work closely with Bonzai’s co-founder and CEO, Rahul Pandey to ensure brand, marketing and sales strategies are strongly integrated and aligned.

“We couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Tresa to the Bonzai leadership team as we enter the next phase of our exciting journey towards global growth,” said Pandey. “For the past seven years, we’ve focused on building and refining our technology platform to create a more impactful and transparent way for Australian brands to engage with their customers. With a strong client base and growing each day, this next phase is about leveraging our current position and ensuring our marketing efforts fuel our global ambitions.”
Bonzai is headquartered in Singapore with offices in Sydney and Pune, India.

Waters takes on product director role at Engage Hub
Customer engagement firm Engage Hub has hired Karen Waters as it new product director. Based in London, she will be responsible for leading the product team and the wider organisation in their drive to help businesses strengthen their customer engagement solution offering, boost operational efficiency and deliver key brand messages across multiple verticals and markets.

Waters has over a decade of product management experience in the mobile and digital industry, with a particular focus on telecoms. Beginning her career as a software engineer, she moved to the product side, joining O2 Telefonica as a technical consultant, where she worked in key product roles across the company until 2014, when she was appointed head of global CRM at Brandtone. At Brandtone, she worked across both mature and developing markets in EMEA, APAC and LATAM, working collaboratively with start-ups and multinational organisations such as Unilever and Facebook.

Throughout her career, she has been a part of key projects that have shaped the telecoms industry, as well as witnessing first-hand how new technologies have drastically shifted customer expectations. She was responsible for leading Vivo’s product team as they set up Vivo Media in Brazil and developed the first geo-targeted media solution in Ireland, working with Heineken.

Initially joining Engage Hub as partner sales director, Waters’ new appointment marks one year at the company. She said: “I’ll be returning to a more product orientated role, heading up a team that that is dedicated to providing engaging experiences for clients and their customers. We’ve recently showcased our advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) through the introduction of our first intelligent IVR – whereby customers can now use text and chatbots rather than calling contact centres – and I look forward to working with the team to keep driving innovative new solutions like this, to make our businesses’ customer journeys more seamless and effective.”

G2 Crowd founders re-convene
B2B review platform G2 Crowd has announced that three of the its original founders are stepping into new leadership roles to advance the company to its next level of growth. Co-founder Godard Abel will return to the role of CEO. This will be the third tech venture he has built and led as CEO, having previously created cloud firms BigMachines, which was acquired by Oracle in 2013, and SteelBrick, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2016. Abel remained with Salesforce as SVP & GM of CPQ and led SteelBrick’s integration to make it one of Salesforce’s most successful acquisitions, before returning to G2 Crowd last summer as executive chairman.

Co-founder, Tim Handorf, who has acted as CEO for the past four years, will now become the company’s president and lead the product, engineering, design, research, as well as people and culture functions. And co-founder Matt Gorniak is returning to G2 Crowd as the chief revenue officer. For the past two years, he served as SVP of Global Quote-to-Cash Sales at Salesforce and turned SteelBrick into one of Salesforce’s fastest growing acquisitions ever.

“We’re thrilled to see the original leadership team re-convene to amplify the company’s growth and momentum,” said Arun Mathew, partner at Accel and G2 Crowd board member. “Since we invested last year, we have seen the company’s growth and potential expand, and now we’re confident that we have the proven leadership in place to really go to the next level.”