Southern Cross Media Group Limited has announced Brian Gallagher as its chief sales officer, effective July 15, 2015. This newly created role will see Gallagher take on a leadership role driving the entire sales operation across Southern Cross Austereo’s full suite of media channels and brands.

With a comprehensive media career spanning 30 years, Gallagher is highly regarded for his ability to drive innovation led business solutions and has a proven track record of effectively combining traditional media, digital media and branded content solutions to drive positive commercial outcomes for all.

Gallagher is a media executive with strong commercial and technical broadcast experience across both metro and regional media. He has worked in free to air TV, Pay TV, content marketing and production, technical broadcast, programmatic trading as well as broader entrepreneurial and global media strategy, for both established and start-up companies in Australia and globally.

Gallagher launched Ten’s ‘Business Development Unit’ which drove increased market share for the Network. He also launched the regional Nine Affiliate Sales which was the first TV sales unit in Australia to work with consumer research beyond TV ratings to drive revenue growth.

Southern Cross Austereo’s CEO, Grant Blackley, said: “I have set a refreshed and intensive focus on sales as a key priority for me as I step into the CEO role and Brian Gallagher is the right person to deliver that focus and fresh thinking across all of the group’s operations.”

“We’re thrilled to have a media sales executive of Brian’s calibre and experience across both traditional and digital media join our business. He will bring to SCA a new focus on the way we operate as one sales team nationwide and we look forward to his insights into driving revenue growth across all our traditional media, integrated solutions and digital sales platforms”.

Gallagher said of his promotion: “I’m incredibly excited to join Grant and the Southern Cross Austereo team at an important stage of the company’s development. I’ll be looking to drive sales growth through innovation and capitalising on SCA’s enviable heritage as a major Australian media company. ”