Sports publisher GiveMeSport bolsters senior team with raft of hires from Vice, Lad Bible and Bauer
Online sports publisher GiveMeSport has made a raft of senior appointments from Vice, the Lad Bible, and Bauer Media, including the appointment of Mimi Turner as senior strategy advisor, paving the way for its future growth.
Mimi Turner joins GiveMeSport as senior strategy advisor
Mimi Turner joins as senior strategy advisor, tasked with developing a data strategy around how its audience responds to its content emotionally, working to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) and custom technology into the news flow, and helping the business on brand strategy.
Turner was the Lad Bible’s marketing director for two years and become the senior vice president of strategy at Vice in November last year, a role she left in May.
Meanwhile, Jack Bannerman, the group account director at Vice, joins as joint head of commercial partnerships alongside Adrian Manian, former senior agency partner at the Lad Bible.
Ryan Skeggs, who was formerly head of programmatic at Bauer Media and the Daily Mail, has been appointed programmatic general manager.
The hires form part of a broader expansion plan following the completion of GiveMeSport’s April 2017 acquisition by Canada-based AI company Breaking Data Corp. At the time, Breaking Data announced a line-up of non-executive directors including Matt Elek, the chief executive of Vice EMEA, Greg D’Abla, former CNN president, Roger Mitchell, former CEO of the Scottish Premier League and Ben Nicholas, head of global digital sales at IMG.
The publisher started as a social media consultancy that managed the social channels of 124 famous athletes and football stars such as Wayne Rooney and Rio Ferdinand, and has used its close links with these athletes to break stories about them on its site, Digiday reports.
Now four-years-old, the publisher has a global audience attracting readers from the UK, the US, Germany and Latin America predominantly, with offices in the UK and Canada. It has 26 million Facebook likes, trumping that of BBC Sport’s 13 million, Bleacher Report’s combined 13 million and Copa90’s 2 million. On Twitter, though, the publisher has a small presence with only 52,000 Twitter followers, compared to the millions of followers its rival publishers have.
The publisher has partnerships with McLaren Racing, the NFL and MBA. It claims year-on-year traffic to the site is up 60%.
Nick Thain, chief executive of GiveMeSport and Breaking Data, said: "Bringing in key new people is the first phase of a lot of work we are doing to build a next-generation media company that uses tech to understand audiences and really unpick how and why they engage with content.
"Our mission is to entertain audiences through the sporting moments that matter to them: that means understanding everything around the emotions of entertainment and combining that with data-driven relevance and targeting."
In a previous version of the article Goal.com was reported as having 16 million Facebook likes to its page. This number represented its UK Facebook page, whereas its total global Facebook likes accumulate to 55 million.