As part of a hiring binge that has seen it add 11 new staff members to its sales and operations team in the first quarter alone, AOL Canada has hired former BrightRoll Canada account director Alicia Elliott as its video sales lead.
According to AOL, Elliott (pictured) will be charged with “evangelizing” its suite of video properties to agencies and clients. She joins a new specialist sales team headed by Susan Byng, who joined the company from Microsoft at the end of February.
Elliott joins a team focused on cultivating high-growth sales areas such as video, mobile and programmatic buying, joining other recent hires including mobile sales lead Andrea Topping, and mobile and video monetization manager Marla Natoli.
She arrives at a pivotal time for AOL, which continues to make major inroads in the burgeoning online video space. According to February comScore data, its total video views grew 433% between February 2013 and February 2014, to just over 187 million.
Last month, it ranked third behind Google (2.8 billion views) and Facebook (513.6 million views) in terms of total video views, with its growth outpacing both the total video market (44%) and that of its top three competitors (132%).
AOL owned and operated sites also saw their unique visitors grow 4% year-over-year last month, bucking a downward trend for other leading portals. The Huffington Post has surpassed legacy news organizations to become the largest online news organization in the country (when compared to The Globe and Mail, National Post sites and The Toronto Star), with its monthly unique visitors sitting at 5.6 million in February, a 28% increase over the same time period last year.
AOL has spent the past several years building its organization to help its various entities achieve “podium positions” in the hugely competitive online space, said Joe Strolz, the former vice-president of Microsoft Advertising who was named general manager of AOL Canada in November.
“That’s where the bulk of our human resource investment has been over the past number of years, and we can see the results of that,” he said. “Now with that momentum, it’s a matter of making sure we’re positioning ourselves to be great partners to our agency customers.”
Strolz (pictured) said that lifestyle has been a key strategic area for AOL as it seeks to attract advertisers in key categories, including consumer packaged goods and financial services. Visitors to its lifestyle sites were up 36% in February to 3.2 million.
Online sales business is being increasingly segmented into two camps, he said. At one end is automation, represented by programmatic buying, and at the other is high-value content. “There’s precious little that is left in the middle, and increasingly less so,” said Strolz. “If that’s where the industry is going, when you look at your teams and the talent you have, it has to reflect those two ends of the spectrum.”
