ITV ends commercial team review with promotions

In his new role Faulkner will report to the yet to be appointed strategic engagement director and will be charged with ensuring the new strategic engagement team helps clients to better meet their objectives.

Prior to joining ITV in 2008 Faulkner was a senior strategist at the strategic communications agency Naked from 2005. He began his career at media agency OMD UK before moving to Coca-Cola as an insights manager.

The strategic engagement team sits outside the day-to-day trading team with a brief to help clients build their businesses by using the different marketing platforms ITV has to offer.

Elsewhere, ITV has appointed online sales manager Stephen Poole, sponsorship controller Bhavit Chandari and key account directors John Smale and Ben Louis to the new role of sales controllers.

ITV has divided its sales team into four agency facing groups and each of the four sales controllers will be charged with managing teams of between 10 and 15 sales people.

The sales controllers are responsible for online, sponsorship and airtime sales to their agency group and they will report to sales director Mark Trinder and a yet to be appointed additional sales director.

Simon Daglish, director of multiplatform and partnerships, ITV, said: "We have created a multiplatform customer facing sales team which is able to talk to our customers about all aspects of ITV.

"The strategic engagement team is all about helping clients build their businesses. We're changing from talking about ROI [return on investment] for ITV to ROI for our customers. We want to ask 'What is it that can make their businesses grow?'

"If we can help our customers' business become more successful and more profitable then they will come back for more and that's the whole point."

It is understood that around 12 people have left the business as part of the recent changes including group account directors Jordan Wisbey and Steve Chambers, as revealed by Media Week earlier this month.

Since joining ITV in August last year as managing director of commercial and online Fru Hazlitt has reviewed the commercial team as part of chief executive Adam Crozier's transformation plan.

In January, Hazlitt's review led to the shock departure of six senior commercial executives, including group commercial director Gary Digby and trading director Simon Lent.

Yesterday ITV announced the launch of a new ITV Player app for mobile phones and tablets on Google's Android operating system. The app is the first step in ITV's mobile distribution plan and offers seven days of catch-up content from ITV1, ITV2, ITV3 and ITV4.

This article was first published on mediaweek.co.uk