WeddingGuideUK.com loses marketing chief

WeddingGuideUK.com, which has just picked up a Yell award for its popular bulletin boards, has parted company with its marketing director.

Sean Kyne, who has a direct marketing background and joined WeddingGuide at the start of the year, has left the company. He was unavailable for comment as Marketing Week went to press. WeddingGuide commercial director Steve Nicholson is unaware of Kyne’s plans.

Nicholson and Kyne joined WeddingGuide in January as part of a &£4m venture capital injection programme. At the time, WeddingGuide saw Confetti.com as a major threat and felt it needed to counteract this with more ambitious marketing than it had used since launching in October 1996.

Kyne oversaw a &£500,000 budget, but Nicholson claims “several tens of thousands” of pounds were wasted on ill-advised mass-market campaigns. However, he doesn’t lay the blame squarely on Kyne and states he “was simply executing what we had agreed as the strategy at that time”.

Nicholson says a new strategic focus will see WeddingGuide forging stronger, but fewer, alliances with some of the UK’s 12,000 wedding-related companies. He is sceptical about the opportunities for generating revenue from straight banner advertising and believes too many dot-coms are “obsessed with stimulating ever greater page impressions that can’t be monetised”.

There are no immediate plans to hire another marketing director. Nicholson, who will assume responsibility for marketing, says: “Trying to split the roles is a waste of time – there’s too much overlap.”