As MTV Networks (NYSE: VIA) ad execs begin meeting with marketers and media buyers for this year’s upfront, the Viacom unit is putting some finishing touches on reshaping its digital team. Later this morning, MTVN will announce that Suzanne McDonnell (image, left) will lead the Digital Fusion unit, while Heather Hopkins will add SVP of marketing and sales development to her existing role as GM of the Tribes vertical ad network. Both McDonnell and Hopkins will report to Kevin Arrix, who was promoted to EVP of Digital Advertising Sales just three months ago.
The personnel changes follow the departure of Nada Stirratt to become MySpace’s chief revenue officer in October; two months later, Digital Fusion’s GM Jason Witt joined Stirratt at MySpace (NYSE: NWS) as an SVP focusing on research, integrated marketing and creative services.
McDonnell and Hopkins will be charged with binging more creativity to MTVN’s digital advertising, while Arrix sets the overall strategy. McDonnell has been with MTVN’s digital team for over two years. She started her advertising career in 1993 at a number of creative ad agencies, including Leo Burnett, Saatchi & Saatchi. Her last agency gig was at Berlin Cameron as a group account director. In a conversation last week, McDonnell told paidContent that she wants to drive the same kind of creative campaigns that are typically associated with traditional advertising on the digital side.
She pointed to a Subway-branded microsite MTV created called Subway Fresh Buzz as an example of the work she’s doing. The microsite includes a news feed that contains video clips of comedians and musical acts that appear across MTVN’s various channels. The clips are ranked according to how much “social media buzz” they’ve been getting.
Another current Digital Fusion campaign for McDonald’s uses the ad uses the Online Publishers Association’s pushdown ad format and contains a mix of entertainment news tied to Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report and music videos.
“Although Subway and McDonald’s are perennial advertisers on the TV network, they haven’t worked with Digital Fusion in over a year,” McDonnell said in a second interview on Monday. “Even though the relationship exists, the digital side has to earn advertisers’ attention. So we can’t just throw up a marketer’s logo on a website. Everyone knows that users have banner blindness and so the ad experience has to be as entertaining and as social as the content MTVN produces itself.”
Tribes’ Hopkins, who was at Publicis Groupe’s Digitas before joining MTVN in May ’08, will continue to run the ad networks, which are considered established at this point and don’t require the same level of attention as last year, when they were still being built up. Her added duties will include handling digital ad sales research and ROI. Those efforts recently got a significant boost from an ad targeting partnership that MTVN struck with audience data provider Quantcast.

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