Yell ramps up digital repositioning strategy

Yell has appointed its first ever chief strategy and business development officer and drafted in Barclays’ former CMO to help lead its transformation from being a directories service to an “eMarketplace”.

/c/h/s/yell160.jpg

As chief strategy and business development officer, Matt Anderson will be responsible for building global partnerships and developing new products as Yell paves the way for its digital expansion.

He joins from global management and strategy consulting firm Booz & Company, where, as partner, he was responsible for helping companies adopt digital technologies and platforms. Anderson was senior adviser on the team that developed Yell’s new business strategy last summer.

Yell is looking to generate 75% of its revenue from digital sources in the next three years.

The phone book publisher will focus on providing more digital services for small to medium-sized businesses and become a local “eMarketplace” to rival the likes of Gumtree as it looks to alleviate its £2.6bn net debt burden.

Separately, Yell has appointed former Barclays chief marketing officer Libby Chambers to its board as an independent non-executive director and member of the company’s remuneration committee.

Chambers, currently chief marketing and business development officer at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer LLP, will lend her marketing experience and knowledge of payments and credit card businesses to aid with the development Yell’s e-commerce repositioning.

In October Yell appointed former Mars marketing chief Jenny Ashmore as its first ever group CMO to help steer the company’s shift to becoming a digitally-led business as its print revenues decline.

Recommended

icon

Twitter’s brand ‘relaxation’ is just first step

Webops Temp

Twitter allowing brands to be more creative and strategic on the platform (‘Twitter gets thumbs up for giving brands page control’, MW 15 December) is certainly a force to be reckoned with, when done right. Brands will be able to show off their personalities and push rich content into circles that are digital-hungry. However, a […]

What does creativity cost?

Josie Allchin

Read the cover feature to find out why embracing creativity will be your most powerful strategy in 2012 Senior vice-president of marketing at Unilever, Marc Mathieu, tells us about how the company embraces creative thinking What are the three constraints holding your business back creatively? Find out here Nicola Mendelsohn, Partner at Marketing Week’s agency […]