LinkedIn has hired a director of media sales to join its new European office in London, as part of a drive to increase the level of advertising it displays on site.
Henry Clifford-Jones has been tasked with driving media sales and establishing LinkedIn’s advertising platform across the European market by building relationships with agencies, clients and third parties. In Europe, LinkedIn currently sells only a limited amount of display advertising, to brands including O2, COI, Dell and Microsoft
Comments Kevin Eyres, European MD of LinkedIn, “We want to ensure that LinkedIn remains the professional network of choice in Europe and focusing on media sales is an important part of this. Henry’s years of experience in managing and leading rapid growth digital advertising businesses is invaluable to our ambitious growth plans.”
It is not yet known whether LinkedIn is planning an overhaul of its current interface in order to accommodate ads on the site. However it is known that advertisers will have the opportunity to sponsor professional networking areas including the ‘Answers’ section of the site where users put questions to other professionals. The European team is also known to be looking at a number of ways of increasing group functionality in general, to make it easier for professionals to network with peers.
Clifford-Jones joins a growing base of employees at LinkedIn’s European office, which was established in January in response to the professional network’s rapidly growing presence in Europe. Since launching five years ago, it has signed up six million users in Europe (1.5 million of whom are based in the UK) without the use of any pro-active marketing. The network has also witnessed a particularly rapid global growth spurt in the past few months, taking its total number of users from around 15 million to around 22 million since last November.
Clifford-Jones was formerly general manager at web content specialist Vibrant Media.
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