The new additions will report to commercial director Shirlene Chandrapal. MacDonald will be responsible for setting sales strategy, managing the sales team, achieving financial targets and strengthening agency relationships.
The appointments will allow Chandrapal, who joined in September last year, to devote more time to strategy and product marketing.
Previously, MacDonald was head of agency sales at TMN Media, the e-mail marketing company, where she was responsible for new business, sales strategy, staff training and long-term deals.
Harkess will take charge of bringing "creative resource" into the business. Managing director Tim Brown said: "It means a number of things. Because of our behavioural targeting, we are able to segment users into various groups, and it is important to take some of the pressure away from agencies and have different creative ideas in each of those segments, to maximise the technology we have."
At 24/7 Real Media, Harkess provided design and production for the digital cable TV network, as well as media, search and technology divisions.
Brown added that the new positions had been created "for the simple reason that we have been growing and we are looking for more people. We decided we needed some key people with experience in the management team".
Earlier this month, Blue Lithium launched a new research system to prove the benefit of behavioural targeting called Blue Lithium Explore.
Firstly, attitudinal and demographic information is gathered for two groups of end users, one that has been exposed to a campaign and one that has not, and the branding effect is then measured.
Then, the exposed group is split into two, one that has been exposed to the behavioural targeting campaign and one that has not, to show how effective the campaign has been.
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