Microsoft’s former Asia boss for advertising and Ninemsn commercial director Jason Scott started today as CEO of Allure Media, which has a strong-line-up of licensed international business, technology gaming and lifestyle sites including Business Insider, Gizmodo and Lifehacker.
Scott, a widely regarded digital operator who served with Euro RSCG during it’s hey day as a leading online agency more than a decade ago, has been on gardening leave after quitting Microsoft’s regional HQ in Singapore and returning to Sydney late last year.
He started today as Allure Media CEO, now owned by Fairfax Media, and told AdNews he had immediate plans for “sharpening-up” the company’s advertising offer but was upbeat about Allure’s current business model.
“The business runs very efficiently,” he said. “We’re taking world class content from the US which starts the day in Australia and then we add our own content on the run here through the day. We are producing a lot more content more frequently.
“If you think about digital content and all the pressure that is on the bigger publishers around that, the economics of their business model makes it bloody hard to produce compelling content based on the old model.”
Scott would not be drawn on plans for Allure’s expansion on acquisitions or new content alignments but said the company was growing its audiences rapidly – launched in 2007 and backed by Daniel Petre’s tech investment firm Netus until its sale to Fairfax earlier this year – News Corp Australia sold its interest in the firm - Allure is a top 20 online publisher in Australia with 3.5 million monthly unique browsers across sites such as Business Insider, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, POPSUGAR, Kotaku and Shopstyle.
Scott said his exit from Microsoft was “graceful” and came about because his next move with the tech giant was New York, a step “geographically in the wrong direction for my family”.
He left ninemsn to run global agency accounts at Microsoft’s headquarters in Seattle before agreeing with the then global advertising boss Carolyn Everson to run Asia to gain more commercial experience. Three months after agreeing to the move to Singapore, Everson quit to become global advertising boss for Facebook.
Allure’s founding CEO Chris Janz has left the company.
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