Raft of Senior Appointments for Booming Brandwatch

UK-based Brandwatch has transformed its leadership team with the addition of Guy Berruyer as Chairman of its Board, Fergus Gloster as an NED, Eva Klein as Chief Customer Officer, Dan Freund as Chief Sales Officer, and Ian Collins as CFO.

Brandwatch built its business on archiving millions of social media conversations each day and providing users with tools to analyse them, and a year ago merged with social media analyst Crimson Hexagon to create a new business under the Brandwatch name. Then in May it unveiled a new Consumer Research product, bringing together its original front-end platform with Crimson Hexagon's machine learning techniques and historical data archive. The firm has since introduced a 'new category' it calls Digital Consumer Intelligence, which combines social media, (other) digital, survey and first-party data and applies artificial intelligence and data science techniques to generate new customer insights.

Brandwatch says the new-look leadership will play a lead role in the growth of its business as it moves beyond its heritage in social media listening and evolves into a digital consumer intelligence specialist. Berruyer (pictured), who is also currently Chairman of the Board for Softomotive, served as CEO of Sage for seventeen years, helping to scale the business to over £1bn in revenue and more than 10,000 employees. Gloster, who is also an NED at Teamwork.com, Condeco and Brightpearl, was one of the founders of Salesforce's European commercial presence and led Marketo's European growth for more than four years.

Klein brings more than twenty years of experience in guiding customers, and most recently headed up customer success at HubSpot, prior to which she led global teams at Constant Contact, Invoca, Enservio and FatWallet. Freund was previously Chief Sales Officer at QuickBase, before which he worked at Oracle for more than sixteen years, growing the OracleDirect (now Oracle Digital) division and overseeing a 2,000-person team. Collins joined earlier this year, with more than 25 years' experience gained in roles including Global Finance Director at Christie's, Finance Director at Twentieth Century Fox, CFO at Marv Films and ten years in senior finance roles at EMI.

CEO Giles Palmer comments: 'This next chapter for Brandwatch will see more growth and an expansion of our offerings in digital consumer intelligence. We've hired executives and non-executives who are capable of running a company many times our size. It's an ambitious move and the best team I've ever worked with. I feel privileged to lead them, and I'm excited to see what we can build to help our customers be more successful'.

Web site: www.brandwatch.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.