Streaming radio player Pandora has named Presto marketer Sally Kiernan as its group marketing director.
The company has also tripled the size of its marketing team taking it from two to eight people - a move Pandora’s Australia and New Zealand managing director Jane Huxley says readies the business for its next phase of growth.
“Pandora is well and truly in the process of reinventing itself for the future,” she told AdNews. “The company was founded in 2000, and it’s now time for the disrupter to disrupt itself, and over the last months and weeks Pandora has come out to market with strong of innovations that indicate the direction that we’re going in.
“Many people know Pandora as having one product, one proposition around streaming radio and one business model being our ad-funded model, and as we move into the next chapter of Pandora the next 15 years on our aim is to become a 100-year company.”
Huxley is referring to Pandora's move into the on-demand music sector in 2017, putting its offering squarely against Spotify and Apple Music. Due to these announcements coming from the brands’ headquarters in the US, Huxley wanted to empower the marketing team, under Kiernan’s leadership, to be a driver for the business locally.
“Pandora is evolving from the old Pandora to the new Pandora,” she says. “We have the products, the programs and the events rolling off the production line. One of the reasons I needed to create this new group marketing director role is to introduce the new Pandora [to the market] and to represent the breadth of new businesses we’re moving into.”
Kiernan was most recently marketing director at Presto, where she was responsible for all aspects of marketing. She has more than 15 years experience working in senior marketing roles. Before joining Presto, she was head of sales and marketing at UBank, a subsidiary of NAB. She has also held marketing roles at Vodafone, Yahoo! and Fairfax Media’s former real estate offering sold.com.au.
Kiernan replaces Nicole McInnes, who left the business in May to take up a role at eHarmony.
Other staff who have recently joined Pandora’s marketing team are Rachael Townsley as trade marketing manager; Alvin Santos in data analytics; and Stephen Murdoch as retention marketing manager.
The business is also looking to add a few more roles to round out the team in PR, product and events. They will join Claudia Rossi, who leads insights and research across the group.
Kiernan told AdNews that she’s excited to join the growing team at Pandora. “What excited me about this role was that it’s an amazing international brand, but it’s doing exciting things locally as well," she says.
"The further I got through the process and the more I found out what Jane and the team were doing the more excited I became. I can’t wait to get started.”
She will join the team on 7 November.
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