4Sales restructures to accelerate digital growth and support industry changes

7 October 2019

Channel 4’s award-winning advertising sales division, 4Sales, today announced it has completed a restructure to increase the focus on client engagement, branded entertainment and growing its digital revenue success.

Jonathan Allan, Channel 4’s Chief Commercial Officer said: “We needed to accelerate the focus of our teams towards selling the benefits of TV direct to advertisers and invest in growing areas of revenue like branded content and targeted digital advertising. It’s crucial for us to remain agile as viewer behaviour changes and digital technology opens up new opportunities.”

 

Agency and client team

Matt Salmon, Head of Agency & Client Sales’ integrated sales team will treble its client sales headcount to enable closer relationships with advertisers and gain a deeper understanding of their business challenges.

Reporting into Matt in London will be newly promoted Agency & Client Sales Leaders, Chris Braithwaite, Angus Mitchell and new hire Kirsten Gillard, alongside Head of Nations & Regions Sales, Ewan Douglas, in Manchester.

Matt is also in the process of hiring a new Deputy Head of Client Sales role, who will lead the client sales strategy across the whole team, focusing on growing existing client investment and new to TV advertisers.

 

Digital sales team

David Amodio has been promoted to Deputy Head of Digital and Innovation, reporting into Jonathan Lewis, Head of Digital and Partnership Innovation, with three new roles created to deliver a brand-new data matching product and improved programmatic capability.

The pioneering ad-tech enables advertisers, for the first time, to match their own custom audience segments, delivering a sophisticated hyper-targeting capability on All 4 across mobile, desktop and connected TVs.

Additionally, linear and VOD sales teams have been combined at an operational level to enable closer integration of total AV campaign delivery.

 

Branded entertainment team and PL4Y

Creative solution and branded content origination will be enhanced with the creation of a new Branded Entertainment & Creative Leader role.

Reporting directly to Jonathan Lewis, this role will lead PL4Y creative solutions and the Branded Entertainment team, including the newly hired Matt Ford who will focus on creating social-first content for platforms, such as Facebook and Snapchat.

Brand partnerships team

Rupinder Downie has been promoted to Brand Partnerships Leader, reporting into Jonathan Lewis and responsible for working with clients and agency partners to deliver far reaching editorial partnerships including sponsorship of Channel 4’s popular shows and strands.

Recruitment for all new roles is currently underway.

In 2018 Channel 4 recorded its best-ever digital revenues up +11% to £138m and All 4 views grew by +26% YoY to 915m. Channel 4’s registered viewer base has now grown to 22 million and includes 70% of all 16-34-year-olds in the UK. 

Record revenue growth has been driven by recent digital ad innovations including extensive interest-based targeting capabilities, the launch of award-winning AI enabled Contextual Moments, and bespoke data-driven creative ad product, Dynamic TV.