Olive Media has promoted two of its longtime staff members to take over from former president Simon Jennings, who has left the company for a new executive role with Postmedia.
Jennings’ role will now be filled by Kristie Painting and Theresa Smith, who become GM/vice-president of sales and marketing and GM/vice-president of product respectively.
Both have been with Olive since its 2006 inception and have extensive experience in the digital realm with companies including Yahoo and MSN. Painting arrived at Olive from Yahoo Canada, where she worked as strategic account executive from 2002 to 2006, while Smith came to the company from Microsoft/MSN Canada.
“They’re both very experienced, phenomenal people with backgrounds in multimedia selling, heavily weighted in the digital space,” said Torstar Digital president Tomer Strolight. “They are two of the very best people in the online ad industry in Canada.”
Strolight said the organization had no need to look outside to replace Jennings. “The organization has a very strong culture and runs like clockwork,” he said. “We didn’t want to change anything there and they’re very comfortable working with each other.”
Strolight said Jennings played a “huge role” in building Olive Media and Torstar Digital. “He came onboard to create this thing, and it was mission accomplished,” he said.
