Rebecca Shropshire has left her role as director of digital commercial innovation at the CBC, and joined Toronto-based mobile ad tech company Juice Mobile as VP of sales, Canada.
In the newly created role, Shropshire will lead all Canadian sales operations, coordinating with Juice’s sales leads in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal. In addition to maintaining relationships with media agency clients and expanding Juice’s client base, she will also play a role in its Canadian trading desk strategy. She will report to CEO Neil Sweeney, alongside recently hired U.S. sales VP Jake Denny.
Previously, sales were handle by Sweeney, but he told Marketing that the company’s reached a scale where dedicated sales executives are a necessity. “We’re in full-on international expansion mode,” he said.
Shropshire has had experience in both media sales, at CBC and in earlier roles at Astral and Torstar, and in agency buying, as director of digital communications at UM Canada.
“She has a unique perspective on this market, because she’s sat on both sides of the conversation,” Sweeney said. “We work with both publishers and advertisers, so that conforms with what she’s done.”
Her experience in digital marketing, and especially programmatic technology, is another big asset, he said. Juice operates a programmatic demand-side platform in the mobile space, as well as an automated upfront buying platform focused on premium mobile inventory. Agencies and agency trading desks use Juice’s services to place ads on mobile apps and sites operated by big-name publishers like The Weather Network and Postmedia.
Shropshire’s extensive experience in programmatic began at UM, where she assisted with the Canadian launch of IPG’s trading desk, Cadreon, and its search engine marketing agency, Reprise Media. For this and other groundbreaking work she was honoured with a Digital Media Rock Star Award at the 2011 Marketing Awards.
She went on to handle much of CBC’s programmatic operations, and was one of the major influences behind the relaunch the Canadian Programmatic Audience Exchange (CPAX) this year.
Shropshire was with the CBC for a little over a year, having joined in August 2013. She’s the second top digital media executive to leave the troubled public broadcaster in as many months, the other being head of of digital media innovation Jon de la Mothe, who also left to join a tech company.
