It plans to start selling ads across its online portal and pay TV platform from January. In readiness for the move, Phil Townend, head of advertising for the Virgin Media portal, will report to James Wildman, managing director of Virgin Media's sales house Interactive Digital Sales.
While there has been some activity between the two teams over the past year - especially on sponsorship deals - until now, Virgin's 12-strong online sales team has mainly operated independently to IDS, which employs 86 people. The aim is to now fully integrate the team into the IDS offices and run multi-media accounts on agency business.
Wildman said: "The integration enables us to harness the value of our assets. Our ambition is to isolate the communication effect of our digital environments on advertisers' campaigns and to develop new commercial models that realise the value of this approach."
Townend added: "Digital trading is becoming more formalised between large agencies, clients and top digital media owners. The space between online and broadcast is coming together, with the increase of audio-visual consumption across new platforms, and agencies are increasingly setting up to be able to take advantage of this."
Azon Howie, head of broadcast at Carat, said: "We've been asking them to do this for a long time. We've wanted to make it as streamlined as possible to join up digital and TV and this move reflects that."
_1.jpg)
.jpg)