The Bridge expands digital strategy team with two key hires

The Bridge, the commercial arm of News UK, has made two key hires in the ongoing expansion of its Digital Strategic Sales and Partnerships department. Milton Elias, previously Head of Mobile and Tech Futures at OMD, has been appointed as Head of Mobile & Video whilst Joanna Carrigan, previously Commercial Editor at the Huffington Post, will become Head of Branded Content.

The newly created roles complete the senior team within The Bridge’s new Digital Strategic Sales and Partnerships department led by Oliver Lewis, which was created to build relationships with key agencies and clients and deliver advertising product strategy. Alongside recently-appointed head of Programmatic Ian Hocking, these new hires will help drive the four areas of focus for The Bridge’s digital strategy – mobile, video, branded content and programmatic.

Working across News UK’s title portfolio, the Digital Strategic Sales and Partnerships team will help to drive a renewed focus in the company’s digital advertising proposition. Informed by The Bridge’s partnership-led approach, it will work with clients and agencies to develop bespoke campaigns that leverage the audiences, data and creative expertise within News UK.

Dominic Carter, Chief Commercial Officer, News UK, said:

Mobile, Video, Branded Content and Programmatic, all powered by the wealth of data our audiences provide us with, are the key areas of focus for digital advertisers in 2017 and sit at the heart of our strategy in this area. With three hugely experienced specialists on board, we can now offer clients world-class expertise in developing bespoke campaigns across our digital portfolio. These positions are being backed up by significant investments into each of the four pillars and create a unique opportunity to access our engaged, high-quality online audiences.”

Oliver Lewis, Director of Digital Strategy and Partnerships at The Bridge, said:

These hires complete the four pillars of our digital sales and product strategy, helping us to offer clients a complete portfolio of digital advertising services across our title portfolio. Broad-based digital expertise is no longer sufficient to help clients develop and execute the most effective campaigns, we need to be offering a more consultative planning service led by specific skill sets in each of the key pillars of our digital strategy.

With some of the industry’s leading experts in each of these areas and with nearly 21m unique users on The Sun’s digital properties and over 5.5m million on The Times and Sunday Times* we can offer our client’s world-class campaigns that leverage our engaged, high-quality audiences across our market-leading title brands.”