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B2B FEATURE PERSON
Penton Adds Senior Execs for Audience Development, Web and InternationalThursday, July 8, 2010 Penton Media is staffing up at the upper end of its executive pool. Three senior management hires were announced yesterday, and the company says the new leadership signals Penton’s focus on audience development, digital strategies and international growth. The new VP of audience development and research will be Brad Mehl; he most recently was a VP at manufacturing trade site ThomasNet.com and has also worked at LexisNexis. At Penton he will lead audience development as well as the research and analytics groups, which was moved from under the custom media group. This is a natural shift, according to Penton's SVP/business development manager Warren Bimblick. "The audience development group is there to look for audience. What the research group has been responsible for is researching and finding out about them," he says. The new VP of Internet technology will be Nino Tasca, recently with Ziff Davis and Meme Networks. He will run product development as well as the Web operations side. Penton CEO Sharon Rowlands is looking to Tasca to "strengthen our ability to get innovative products to market faster." Finally, based in London, the director of international sales will be Mike Hancock, recently of Reed Business Information. Hancock will be an independent international sales representative for Penton and explore worldwide relationships for the company. “Mike is a more opportunistic hire for us in that we believe we have a number of international opportunities to really expand and grow the business, but we haven’t got many feet on the ground outside of North American,” says Rowlands. “Bringing in such a seasoned executive as Mike, who has a lot of relationships and knows the market, will help us establish a presence.” Hancock supervised international sales for RBI and launched a European publishing division in 2000. Rowlands says that "after dealing with a tough market for the past 18 months, the business is now stabilized and we're focused on driving growth." Earlier this year Penton filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and emerged with a prepackaged plan of reorganization that eliminated $270 million in debt and infused the company with new investment from existing shareholders. Since then the company has announced new initiatives online, such as a collection of over 40 expert blogs (the “Penton Insight Blog Feed”) and plans to deploy b2b mobile apps and sites for some of its properties. “We’ve been investing in the last year in building out our digital framework and, in the next six weeks, we’ll be bringing a number of new products to market in our lifestyle/healthy living group and also in our agriculture group," says Rowlands. "Our aim is to provide more compelling content and tools for our audience, and reposition our products as real digital solutions for our vertical segments rather than, say, as magazines on the Web."
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