You & Mr Jones has hired Virginie Douin, Amazon’s former head of global agency partnerships.
Douin, who begins her role immediately, joins the agency as partner and will lead expansion and acceleration of the group’s ecommerce-focused business, including enterprise-level partnerships.
Douin is based in New York City, where she moved in 2017 to take charge of Amazon’s agency partnerships globally. There, she led its ecommerce and sponsored ads partnerships across advertising holding companies and consultancies worldwide, launching and managing a global team.
Douin joined Amazon Advertising in 2014, initially based in France, where she started the agency and programmatic sales teams across France, Spain and Italy, and designed and developed the first commercial agreements between Amazon and agencies.
At You & Mr Jones, she will be overseeing M&A strategy (with more than $100m to spend on acquisitions), leading group relationships with ecommerce platforms, overseeing cross-group integration and being a key resource for the company’s clients.
Douin’s key achievements at Amazon include creating and executing the ecommerce Acceleration Program, a partner scheme aimed at developing ecommerce capabilities, leveraging Amazon’s API and adtech integrations across brands, large agencies and consultancies. She also drove adoption of the most popular Amazon self-service ad solution available – Sponsored Ads (keyword-targeted ads that appear in searches on Amazon) – and was a driving force behind Amazon’s strategic partner programmes such as Amazon Sales Partner and Partner Network.
The pandemic has accelerated the use of ecommerce, and You & Mr Jones believes this will be a lasting trend. It’s estimated that online sales increased more than 32% in 2020. As people rely more on ecommerce, brands are accelerating the development of their presence in this area and it’s expected that $80bn will shift from physical, retail-centric media to digital channels, representing a 10% change in marketing spend allocation.
Douin said: “I'm excited to join such a fast-growing and innovative company, and such a talented group of people: ecommerce is absolutely central to the future of marketing and the group David and team are building is uniquely well placed to maximise brands' success with the increasingly large number of people shopping online. As the world’s first Brandtech group, You & Mr Jones has the opportunity to develop best-in-class services around ecommerce, bringing together a unique combination of tech, content, media and data, which will empower brands to implement full-funnel approaches inclusive of ecommerce, rather than treating ecommerce as a separate channel from their upper-funnel strategy.”
You & Mr Jones founder, David Jones, said: “We are obsessive about having both the best technology and the best talent. Virginie is an exceptional talent who joins us from one of the leading global technology companies and who brings with her the unique expertise she's learned inside the world's largest online retailer. I'm thrilled she's joined the group and even more excited to introduce her to our clients.”
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