Ex-WPP digital chief to head streaming video company
Richard Collins, formerly global chief executive of WPP’s search marketing agency, mSearch, and UK chief executive of its digital media agency, mOne, has joined streaming video company Vividas as group chief executive.
Collins, 33, has spent ten years in the digital industry, initially as managing director of recruitment advertising site, Jobsite.co.uk, then as founder of Tempest Online Marketing, which he sold to WPP in 2001 and was merged with MindShare’s mDigital to create mOne. He joined WPP last May.
He has served on digital media industry committees for the Internet Advertising Bureau, the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising and the Institute of Direct Marketing.
Vividas Group is an AIM-listed developer and provider of video-streaming technology and related products that allow the distribution and playback of full-screen, high-quality television-style video on PCs. Video footage can be distributed via the internet, local networks or on discs.
The company’s technology was used by IBM last November to run a two-minute 16-seconds TV spot online in the UK, France and Germany, in a campaign devised by Ogilvy and Mather. It was also used by the IAB UK to screen speeches from Bill Gates, Lord Puttnam and Sir Martin Sorrell at its Engage 2005 conference last October.
Collins has also taken a &£1m stake in the company.
