Online sales firm Gorilla Nation is hoping to ape its global success in a new market: Montreal.
The company’s Montreal office will be headed by Jean-Sébastian Tremblay, who has been appointed director of sales, Eastern Canada. Tremblay reports into Walder Amaya, senior vice-president, Canadian operations for Gorilla Nation Canada.
Tremblay, 36, comes to Gorilla Nation from the online job site JobBoom, where he was a team leader overseeing a five-person sales team. Before joining JobBoom, he spent four years (2005 – 2009) with Astral Media as general manager of Internet sales, playing a key role in the creation of its digital sales unit, Astral iMedia.
L.A.-based Gorilla Nation has offices in several major North American cities including New York, Chicago and Toronto, as well as overseas operations in London, Sydney and Melbourne.
The company owns and operates several websites including SheKnows.com, CraveOnline.com and TeenSpot.com, and is also the exclusive sales rep for more than 500 so-called “premium content” sites including NFL.com USMagazine.com, DailyMotion.com and Metacafe.com. Tremblay said another of his key objectives is to bring aboard French-language publishers.
“I’m really excited about joining Gorilla Nation,” said Tremblay. “It’s really well known in English Canada, but had no presence in Montreal. More and more, the Montreal agencies were looking to have someone who could speak French and was part of the local market.”
Tremblay’s mandate will be to grow Gorilla Nation’s presence and revenues in one of Canada’s most important advertising markets.
“We’re doing business here, but it’s not quite as good as when you have a dedicated staff for a certain market,” he said. “My main task is to grow our presence. As usual, generating revenue is the most important thing.”
Tremblay said he was attracted to Gorilla Nation because of the opportunity to grow an operation from scratch, as he did with Astral’s iMedia division.
“Building iMedia from scratch to what it is right now, I was very happy about what I’d done and I’m assuming I’ll do the same thing here for Gorilla Nation,” he said. “I’m very enthusiastic about this operation.”
