Two senior Facebook Australia execs will leave the company this month.
Former Microsoft advertising boss and Fairfax man Liam Walsh heads for Israeli marketing software company Kenshoo, AdNews has learnt.
It is not the first time Kenshoo has raided Facebook for senior staff.
Meanwhile, Facebook national agency relationship manager Lara Brownlow is heading to LinkedIn.
Facebook played down the impact of Walsh's exit and pointed out that Kenshoo was a strategic partner. The firm has built a social advertising management platform - which basically runs the numbers on which part of the chain led to a purchase or a booking and automatically allocates spend and creates social content. The firm has been staffing up in the Apac region over the last year as it looks to take market share from rivals such as Marin and has been working in tandem with Facebook to show marketers how to maximise return on Facebook ad spend.
Brownlow heads to rival social platform LinkedIn. She spent the last two and a half years developing agency relationships at Facebook following seven years at DMG Radio, which last month rebranded to Nova.
Walsh said he was “delighted to be joining Kenshoo and look forward to helping brands and agencies in the Asia-Pacific region optimise their search and social campaigns and get outstanding returns on their digital marketing investment.”
"We are seeing a rapid uptake of digital marketing automation and optimisation tools as brands aim to better engage with consumers and get value from their spend. The explosion in digital consumption means brands need to fine-tune their search bidding campaigns and sync them with their other digital campaigns."
He said that Kenshoo expected "to see more focus on marketers consolidating their search marketing and social advertising onto one platform", echoing the words of Kenshoo Apac/Japan MD Michel Van Woudenberg.
“The collision of paid social and search provides a real opportunity for marketers to improve the value of their digital assets, said Walsh.
Van Woudenberg said Kenshoo would continue to bolster its presence in the region. "The next frontier of digital marketing will revolve around helping agencies and brands to scale their campaigns across social and search marketing and fully understand the conversion path of customers," he said. "We expect brands across many sectors to move quickly in order to stay competitive."
“Liam has been a key part of the Facebook team driving our engagement with PMD’s across Australian and Japan. We are excited for his new opportunities and we look forward to working very closely with him in the future, as Kenshoo is an important PMD partner to Facebook,” said Kiran Raghavan, head of apac market development, pmd program.
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