Tom Bowman, UK sales director of Microsoft portal MSN, has been
given a brand new brief to swell advertising revenue across Europe.
The 41-year-old internet advertising veteran moved into his new office
last week as MSN’s first sales chief for Europe, Middle East and
Africa.
One of the founding members of MSN UK, Bowman will now report to the
company’s regional director Mats Wennberg.
MSN already sells web ad space and sponsorship in 13 European
countries - including Germany, France and Switzerland - as well as South
Africa and Israel.
He will now work with Wennberg in launching an opening tier of European
MSN offices, deciding whether to build in-house sales teams or to
recruit an outside sales house. MSN already uses 24/7 in Sweden, Norway,
Denmark and Finland but is in negotiations to hire the company or a
rival in three more countries.
MSN, which has 5.2 million users a month, has created the new sales role
to improve the co-ordination of pan-European campaigns. However, Bowman
will also court advertisers that only want to spend in one country.
’Web advertising is not constrained by geography like off-line
advertising but it needs someone to co-ordinate sales for customers,’
Bowman said. ’We’ll have local autonomy but with a European
framework.’
Bowman is a founding member of the Internet Advertising Bureau and chair
of its marketing statistics committee.
He joined MSN in 1997, building the sales outfit from scratch with UK
sales manager Dominic Trigg, who has taken over Bowman’s job of UK ad
director.
Trigg oversees a team of five sellers but said he will appoint more
staff and is still looking for two sales managers to cope with UK
growth.
’MSN is a hugely expanding service,’ said Trigg. ’Last week we had 138
campaigns running at the same time whereas we only had 12-15 at any one
time last year. The UK is the primary growth market, I need to
concentrate on that while Tom looks at Europe.’
MSN is the latest web outfit to create a pan-European sales role. Last
month search engine Lycos promoted Anna Barez to sales director Europe
(Media Business, 25 October).
