Nokia board reshuffle sees new global marketing chief
Nokia has promoted its director of global brand management, Steven Overman, to the role of vice president, global head of marketing creation at Nokia, as the handset manufacturer faces increased pressure from its smartphone rivals.
Overman, who only joined the handset manufacturer in February, has been given the role following a marketing restructure by the mobile giant. He will work alongside Joanne Savage, director of global campaign creation at Nokia, who was promoted to the role in February from her role as senior global marketing manager for communities and navigation.
Formerly the global strategy lead for Team Nokia at Lowe Worldwide, Overman was responsible for the strategic and creative development of global campaigns for the Nokia N series line of multimedia smartphones across all audiences, touchpoints, channels and media.
At Team Nokia, he helped planners and creative leads at cross-channel agencies including Lowe, RGA, Jack Morton, Rivet (formerly DraftFCB), Momentum, Mediacom and FutureBrand to collaborare. It is understood he will assume similar responsibilities in his new role at Nokia, whose agency roster also includes Wieden & Kennedy and JWT in the UK.
It is understood that Overman will be located in the company’s UK offices, where marketing has been restructured over the last few months. On Monday (28 June) Ash Choudhury was appointed as head of digital marketing, Nokia UK & Ireland, joining from Fiat Group and has previously worked for Xerox and Canon.
Choudry will report to head of marketing at Nokia UK John Nichols, who was appointed in April. Nichols replaced Will Harris, who left to take on the same role in the mobile manufacturer’s South-east Asia and Pacific division.
Harris replaced Loren Shuster, who relocated to the company’s headquarters in Finland to become head of go-to-market operations.
The company has also appointed Craig Hepburn, former ecommerce head at STA Travel, to the newly created role of global head of digital marketing, which oversees its entire digital media activity. Hepburn will also manage Nokia’s media agency roster. He’ll report to Carol Soriano, Nokia’s director of marketing activation.
Although Nokia is the biggest mobile phone manufacturer, with a 36.4% market share globally in 2009, according to Gartner, it has lost ground in the smartphone market since 2007 with the launch of Apple’s iPhone and various Android devices.
The company recently launched a multi-million-pound integrated marketing campaign to promote its Ovi Maps service, with ads running on Yahoo, MSN and Facebook.
Nokia were unavailable for comment.
