The mobile marketing industry is ever-changing, and that applies to the people as much as the technology. Movers & Shakers is our regular feature following the hottest hires in the industry, so you can keep track of who’s joined which company, and what they’re doing there.

IAB hires heads of partnerships and marketing
IAB UK has hired Rachel Arch as its first head of partnerships and Tom Stevens as its first head of marketing.

Arch, who joins the IAB from Teads will lead the existing Membership Services team and be tasked with expanding the body’s membership base, while bringing a commercial focus to the IAB’s events, training and venue hire offering.

Stevens, who previously led marketing for commercial radio’s industry body, Radiocentre, will build a new marketing team under CMO, James Chandler, with a view to raising the profile of the IAB and ensuring online advertising is understood and represented fairly amongst its core audiences. These include advertisers, agencies, technology providers, media owners and government.

“As the IAB grows and the advertising landscape becomes more complex, combining Rachel’s commercial focus with Tom’s creativity and strategic approach to marketing will drive further value for the organisation, its members and the wider advertising industry,” said IAB UK CEO, Jon Mew. “I can’t wait to see the impact they and their teams will have.”

Representing over 1,200 members from across the advertising supply chain, IAB UK has the vision of building a sustainable future for digital advertising which it does through a broad range of initiatives including events, training, research, the Gold Standard and public affairs.

Google veteran Rohr takes marketing role at Uberall
Uberall, which provides location marketing solutions for bricks-and-mortar businesses has appointed marketing veteran Norman Rohr to the newly-created position of senior vice president of marketing. Rohr brings a wealth of experience to the role, having spent more than 15 years working in the technology and digital media industries. He has held senior positions on three different continents, for innovative startups, as well as at Google.

At Uberall, Rohr will head up all of the company’s strategic marketing activities. In particular, he will be responsible for accelerating the company’s go-to-market strategy, enabling retailers, restaurant chains and other local services companies to find and engage with new customers, increase footfall to their premises, and boost their revenues.

Before joining Uberall in Berlin, Rohr was based in Boston, where he was VP of global operations and strategy for video advertising firm, Pixability, responsible for the company’s sales and marketing operations. Prior to that, he headed up small and medium-sized business marketing for Google in Canada, having previously worked for the company in London, San Francisco, Tokyo, Toronto and Zurich. He has also held senior positions at Swiss speech technology startup, SVOX, helping to scale the company from 11 to 160 staff.

He said: “I am delighted to become part of one Europe’s great startup success stories. The company has already experienced fantastic growth, and I’m looking forward to keeping the momentum going. Some of the world’s biggest and most successful retailers, restaurant chains and services companies rely on Uberall to connect and engage with local customers in a more meaningful and profitable way; it’ll be my mission to help yet more businesses reap these benefits, and drive more customers to their doors.”

10 of the best for Impact
Impact has hired 10 new team members for its Customer Success Management, Business Development, Partnerships, Enterprise Sale and HR teams. The company offers a natively-integrated suite of products for fraud detection, marketing attribution and analytics, and creating and optimising performance partnerships.

Sam Parker joins Impact from Webgains as director of partnerships, to oversee the agency and wider strategic partnership function of Impact EMEA. The other hires include three newly-created roles of enterprise sales managers. Benatun Osborne re-joins Impact from Cake; Paddy O’Flynn joins from Dennis Publishing; and Sarah Gilbertson, who was part of the UK launch team for Groupon and most recently, affili.net will be working across Impact products to manage existing agency partnerships and forge new ones across EMEA.

The Customer Success Management team also expands, with three hires, Daniel Martins, Yumi Lewis and Kiara Fernandes. They previously held CSS roles at Cheetah Mobile, Amazon and Expedia respectively. They will oversee ongoing customer relationships by delivering customer success, business value and satisfaction to Impact partners.

There are three further new hires. Sophie Clark, Simon Bedding and Alex Barriff join the company as business development representatives.Their roles will involve prospecting potential new clients and researching high priority companies to generate business across the firm’s Radius, Altitude and Forensiq products.

Finally, Bharat Siyani joins as HR Manager EMEA, having previously held senior management roles at IgnitionOne and CH & CO Group.

“The Impact UK office has seen significant growth, especially since the recent rebrand to Impact and earning the MRC accreditation for Forensiq, by Impact,” said Florian Gramshammer, MD EMEA. “We see the increase in recruiting key team members, who bring extensive skills, as a vital opportunity to increase our client base and to effectively manage existing partners through our industry leading suite of marketing platforms and tools.”

Morrison to CEO, Kirshner to chairman of the Board, at Elite SEM
Digital marketing agency Elite SEM has promoted its president Zach Morrison to the role of CEO, while founder Ben Kirshner has assumed a new role as chairman of the Board.

The promotions follow a year of rapid growth – with an over 40 per cent organic increase in revenue in 2018 – driven by existing and new clients and a series of key acquisitions, including social advertising agency OrionCKB, email marketing and creative agency Email Aptitude, and Amazon-focused ecommerce agency CPC Strategy.

Kirshner founded Elite in 2004, and hired Morrison as his second employee. Under their leadership, Elite has evolved from an agency focused on search engine marketing into an online marketing firm with a comprehensive set of services designed to grow digital market share across the triopoly of Google, Facebook and Amazon, and collectively supported by Integrated Media Strategy and Analytics/Marketing Science teams. Today, Elite is one of the largest independent performance-based digital marketing agencies, with over $1 billion in managed ad spend.

“Zach has been vital to the success of our organization since the early days of Elite,” said Kirshner. “Hes earned the respect of our clients, vendors, employees, and our Board of directors, and personifies our core values through his unrelenting dedication to strive for greatness. Zach is well-prepared to lead our organization into the future, and Im confident he will continue to drive success across our organization and on behalf of our clients.”

As CEO, Morrison will continue to run the day-to-day operations of the company, lead the executive team that he has built over the past year, oversee the full integration of the recently-acquired agencies into a unified brand, make decisions about investment opportunities, and expand his role as a thought leader in the industry at large.

Following his transition from CEO to chairman of the Board, Kirshner will continue to develop partnerships, advise on mergers and acquisitions, and provide strategic guidance.

inRiver promotes Bäckström to CRO, Eriksson to CFO
inRiver, which provides SaaS-based product information management (PIM) solutions, has named veteran sales executive Jimmy Jeppsson Bäckström as its chief revenue officer, and Johan Eriksson as its chief financial officer,

The past year yielded tremendous growth for inRiver as the organization continued to strengthen its presence in N. America and expand operations in Europe, with a 40 per cent increase in new customers and a more than 50 per cent increase in recurring revenues.

New customers in retail and branded manufacturing within the fashion, construction, accessories, medical devices, food and beverage, and furniture verticals have grown the inRiver community to over 1,500 brands and 500 customers globally.

“Customer demand for a clear and consistent online and offline experience is driving digital transformation worldwide,” said CEO Thor Johnson. inRiver powers these global retail and industrial brands to engage their buyers and consumers everywhere, in any language, through any medium. Our experienced leadership team is focused on compressing the entire process of bringing products to market, online and offline for the very best customer experience. We have high expectations for 2019 in this exploding marketplace.”

UX brief for Katwa at Un.titled
Digital and eCommerce agency Un.titled has appointed of Sanjay Katwa to the role of lead UX designer. He has several years’ experience, having previously worked on major projects for Jaguar Land Rover, Warner Bros. Studio Tour, the NHS, and the English Institute of Sport.

He said: “I’m really keen to bring my enthusiasm and knowledge around all things UX design into the Un.titled fold and deliver game-changing UX for hungry clients. I have a real passion for building great things.”