Ian Hocking, who joins from Ad2One where he was eBay’s Head of Agency and Programmatic Sales, will lead News UK’s renewed focus on working with its advertising partners on implementing programmatic campaigns across its digital properties.
The creation of a Head of Programmatic role comes as News UK creates new focus in its digital strategy around four key pillars – video, programmatic, mobile and branded content. Operating across The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times’ digital properties, Hocking will work as part of the new Strategy and Partnerships department led by Oliver Lewis to build relationships with key agencies and clients and deliver advertising product strategy.
The growth of programmatic campaigns on News UK’s digital properties will be supported by an enhanced data strategy, linking readers’ content consumption to their purchase habits. Leveraging this data, The Bridge programmatic offering will enable agencies and brands to target their campaigns at a focused, engaged audience on premium digital inventory, says News UK.
Dom Carter, Chief Commercial Officer, News UK, said: “This appointment is a sign that we’re open for business for agencies and clients that want to run their campaigns programmatically. We’ve got unique and in-depth data about our readers that enable us to offer an unparalleled level of targeting within an influential and engaged audience.
“The four pillars of our digital strategy reflect the key areas of growth in our digital business. We’ve put significant investment into video, we have a large and rapidly growing mobile business, we lead the market in creative and innovative branded content campaigns such as our award-winning “Surprise Party” campaign for Morrisons and we now have a market-leading, data-driven programmatic offering. Digital remains a key growth area for News UK, underpinned by our portfolio of high-quality, engaged audiences across The Sun, The Times and The Sunday Times.”
Ian Hocking, Head of Programmatic, The Bridge, said: “With nearly 21m unique users on The Sun’s digital properties and over 5.5m million on The Times and Sunday Times News UK brings together a large premium audience and rich data set and is consequently well-positioned to offer great value to advertisers at this pivotal moment in the evolution of digital trading. Working with our advertising partners we’re engaging in strategic discussions to enable the targeting of these deeply engaged, influential audiences using programmatic approaches.”
