Pressboard’s Jamie Harju.
Native advertising firm Pressboard has opened a Toronto office and hired Jamie Harju, former head of content marketing at The Grid, to lead it.
Currently, the young Vancouver startup’s team is focused on developing its native ad platform, which acts as a “matchmaker” to help brands find content to sponsor. Now that the company is finished private beta testing, it has brought on Harju to draw in new clients.
As the company’s director of strategy and partnerships, Harju will hire and lead a team of account managers in Toronto, beginning in the new year.
Until The Grid shut down this summer, Harju was director of brand partnerships at the Toronto paper, and worked with Pressboard to build out its content marketing offering. Pressboard co-founder Jerrid Grimm said her understanding of content marketing, and the qualities that make branded content succeed, will be a big asset to the company.
“The Grid was one of the very first publishers that we had on board in Toronto,” said Grimm. “We all got along really well, and had the same viewpoint on how to bring editorial storytelling into brand sponsorships.”
He said the company has been expanding its business relationships nationally and into the U.S., necessitating a full-time sales presence in Ontario. Later next year, the company also hopes to establish an office in the U.S., likely in New York, and will be building out its data analytics and sales teams in Vancouver.
“We started working with some publishers in the U.S. — predominantly online publishers, like strong city blogs and online magazines — and we’ve just started working with some of the brands there as well,” he said.
At present, the Pressboard platform is adding 10,000 online stories each month. By early next year, Grimm said he expects to be moving that amount of content each day.
