BuzzFeed has hired Future’s head of commercial, Caroline Fenner, in a sales leadership role across its Europe operations.
Fenner will join in May as commercial director for Europe, managing sales and account management for BuzzFeed's portfolio of brands, which includes BuzzFeed, BuzzFeed News, HuffPost, Tasty and Seasoned.
She succeeds Casey McDevitt, who left in November to become global agency partner at Snap. Fenner will report to BuzzFeed senior vice-president of client partnerships Brendan Kelly and work alongside other heads of region in Canada, Latin America and Australia.
BuzzFeed has also established a new-business team that will sit across BuzzFeed News and HuffPost. It recently worked on a brand partnership campaign with Visit Britain, which was activated across BuzzFeed and HuffPost.
Fenner will focus initially on strategic revenue growth across BuzzFeed’s main revenue lines of ad sales, commerce and licensing. The BuzzFeed UK commerce team is now in its third year and the licensing operation recently launched a Tasty cookware range .
Fenner told ±±¾©Èü³µpk10 she was approached by BuzzFeed, adding that she was drawn to the role due to the strength of its brands and that it is a solely digital publisher.
“Having worked on powerful brands like The Week, MoneyWeek and The Week Junior, I wanted my next role to work with really strong brands,” she said. "You see that with BuzzFeed, Tasty is flying and HuffPost was really interesting for me with my news background, being at [the] Telegraph, Evening Standard and at The Week. It’s just a great opportunity.”
Fenner brings broad experience commercialising news, which has included senior sales stints at the aforementioned titles and Dennis Publishing.
BuzzFeed News has traditionally struggled for profitability, and embarked on a round of redundancies to its editorial teams in the US and UK in the past week. BuzzFeed News shut down its domestic UK news coverage during the pandemic and now covers only social news, tech and celebrity content with a global focus from this market. Its sister title HuffPost covers UK news.
“Buzzfeed News and monetising Buzzfeed News is a huge focus for this year. So the target is to make Buzzfeed News profitable in its own right, which does include the UK,” a Buzzfeed UK spokesperson said.
“Obviously, Caroline's background with news products is a huge asset to us. But we've also created a new-business team which is going to oversee BuzzFeed News and HuffPost together. We've made HuffPost profitable, so we don't see any reason why this can't happen with Buzzfeed News.”
Fenner said that she is motivated to help BuzzFeed raise its profile in the UK after a challenging pandemic period that rocked many digital publishers.
“I think with my background being sort of agency-led, I will be able to open doors and help the team, and hopefully make an impact quite quickly,” she added.
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