Nine Entertainment has announced its has appointed Grant Bingham to lead its programmatic sales offering, in a move that completes the senior appointments to the publisher’s aligned digital sales structure.

Bingham, who was previously head of publisher services at AOL, takes on newly-created position of director of programmatic sales, and will head up both Nine Digital’s trading desks relationships and continue to develop the publisher’s programmatic offering to agencies and their clients.

Michael Stephenson, chief sales officer at Nine, said programmatic is a major focus and a significant growth opportunity for the company.

“Grant has a rare background in that he has both a deep technical knowledge of programmatic and also frontline sales management experience,” he said.

“He will be charged with making sure we continue to build out our programmatic offering and are well placed to serve the trading desks as the market evolves from a hand-held sales model towards a greater focus on the automation of the sales process.”

Bingham’s appointment comes just a week after Nine Digital announced a number of key changes to its digital sales leadership, with the appointment of Fairfax Media’s Pippa Leary as commercial director of digital sales.

Leary’s appointment was part of a strategy by Nine to invest more in senior digital sales roles, with the publisher signalling it would focus on the key areas of programmatic sales, content-led sales, video, mobile and native sales.

As part of these changes, Nine last week announced changes to its senior digital leadership team, which will report to Leary and now consists of: Ben Gunn (director of agency sales), Amy Schubert (director of sales and content partnerships for 9Honey), Nathan Powell (director of digital product sales), and Bingham (director of programmatic sales).

Commenting on the newly-formed team, Leary said: “This is a great team and one that is focused on driving growth in digital for Nine.

“We are thrilled to have Grant on the team, and what makes him attractive for us is that he has specialist knowledge of serving video programmatically. There are few people in this market with his depth of experience.”