Yahoo! poaches new TSMS chief
Martina King, managing director of ITV sales house TSMS, has been poached after just three months by Internet giant Yahoo! to become its managing director for the UK and Ireland.
King will have an equity stake in the Web company, which offers information and shopping services as well as being an online navigational guide. It has a claimed 80 million users worldwide and is listed on the Nasdaq market in the US.
King was previously managing director of Capital Radio, where she spent six years, and before that she had a four-year stint at The Guardian.
She takes up the newly-created post at Yahoo! next month, des cribing it as “the opportunity of a lifetime”. She adds: “I really believed in what I was going to do at TSMS. I certainly wasn’t looking for another job.”
The UK and Ireland is Yahoo!’s next biggest market after the US. King’s brief will be to develop Internet use and increase income at the company, which has recently launched its own free Internet service provider.
She will report to the managing director of Yahoo! Europe Fabiola Arredondo.
King’s boss at TSMS, chief executive Jerry Hill, says she will be released from her job immediately because of the short length of her employment.
King was hired to woo the biggest advertisers and their agencies to TSMS and ITV in general – a different role to her predecessor Adam Rhodes who, as chief operating officer, focused more on operational issues. He left at the beginning of the year to join Efdex, an electronic food and drink trading company.
Yahoo! Europe has also appointed Jerry Glover, former managing director of the National Geographic Channel, to the new role of commercial director, Europe. He will be responsible for sales and distribution and brand and trade marketing.
