JCDecaux has announced a restructure of its sales team, including an unconfirmed number of redundancies.
The changes come following last year’s $1.2 billion take over of Australian rival APN Outdoor Group, a move that led to APN CEO James Warburton’s expected departure shortly thereafter.
Eleven new roles have been created, including six sales state directors and five group roles.
JCDecaux describes the reshuffle as making a ‘single point of contact’ access and in-depth experience across JCDecaux’s expanded product portfolio.
The sales team is led by chief commercial officer, Max Eburne and chief marketing officer, Essie Wake leads the marketing team.
Working closely with Eburne is General Manager – Sales, Oliver Newton, who takes responsibility for all agency, client and trading activities.
Commenting on the new sales team, Eburne said: “Our vision is to maximise ease-of-access for advertisers, while delivering greater sophistication, innovation and creativity than ever before.
“Media agencies will benefit from dedicated teams comprising sales representation, data and insights expertise, creative inspiration and trading resources, representing all assets within the JCDecaux portfolio”.
Newton added: “We have assembled the best sales team in the country who appreciate the current needs of advertisers and media agencies.
“We have listened to what the market clearly wants and as a result we are enabling agencies to have one point-of-contact, provide one brief and receive one response.
“We believe this client-centric strategy will help our advertising partners efficiently achieve their desired business outcomes and also be a key differentiator in the Out-of-Home market”.
Wake said: “Our new marketing team is committed to cementing the JCDecaux brand and its global market leadership position in the Australian and New Zealand markets, as well as working hand in hand with the sales team to deliver the most outstanding and strategic Out-of-Home solutions and in-depth audience insights through data analytics”.
As part of the restructure, JCDecaux has confirmed that redundancies have been made, though would not confirm how many.
Eburne told The Sydney Morning Herald: “As a consequence of consolidating the teams following JCDecaux’s acquisition of APN Outdoor last year, there has been inevitable duplication of certain roles, and unfortunately this has resulted in a number of redundancies across the sales and marketing functions”.
“Media agencies will benefit from dedicated teams comprising sales representation, data and insights expertise, creative inspiration and trading resources, representing all assets within the JCDecaux portfolio”.
JCDecaux’s current projects include attempts to install new payphone upgrades across Australia in conjunction with Telstra, however the process has been stalled in some states as the proposed works have been likened to “masquerading” advertising billboards as payphones.
Under JCDecaux, APN recently launched a supersized digital billboard on the Mitchell Freeway in Perth.
