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The Independent Jobs Appointments

Independent News & Media hires Yahoo's Lia Bresnihan as marketing chief amid major digital drive

By Angela Haggerty, Reporter

July 22, 2014 | 3 min read

Former head of consumer marketing for Yahoo!7 – Yahoo’s Australian branch - Lia Bresnihan has joined Irish publishing company Independent News & Media amid a major investment into developing its digital offering.

Digital development: Fiona O'Carroll (left) and Lia Bresnihan

The company – which owns brands including the Irish Independent, Evening Herald and the Belfast Telegraph – is also hiring for 40 new digital roles in multimedia design, product management, mobile engineering, UX design and digital sales among other disciplines.

The development follows the appointment of Fiona O’Carroll as managing director of digital in October last year, who has since been setting up a team to drive digital revenue and growth.

Bresnihan, who was with Yahoo!7 for 18 months in Australia before returning to Ireland, told The Drum that the expansion is still in the early stages and the company is approaching the digital side of the business as if it were a start-up.

“Independent News & Media is a very large company but it’s always been a traditional print business,” she said. “They’ve recently made the decision to invest in the digital side and bring it up to speed and become a digital leader.

“The digital side of the business is essentially a start-up business, we’re really working as a start-up business. Fiona O’Carroll has hired a whole new team, including a head of HR and a CFO who started last week, and we are building up our own teams now.”

Bresnihan said the team was looking at everything “from an open canvas” and plans further down the line include building new digital products from scratch and developing data-gathering and personalisation capabilities.

Identifying distribution of content methods is also high on the agenda, and the company recently signed a partnership deal with Clear Channel to bring bus stops to life for users who tap their smartphones on independent.ie promotions.

“We’re looking at our audience from a vertical perspective; we’ve got news, business, sport, life and style and entertainment, so we’re really looking at those audiences on a unique level and asking what people want out of entertainment, how they want their content, when they want it, what kind of content they want, and we’re working backwards from there.

“We’re in the research phase at the moment but we’re looking to compete on a global level.”

The Independent Jobs Appointments

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