Guest acquisition platform Siteminder has bolstered its senior management with a string of new hires including Mark Renshaw as CMO.
Renshaw joins the company after two decades working abroad in agencies, with his most recent role as global chair of brand practice at Edelman in Chicago.
He told AdNews the switch from agency to clientside had been something in the works for a number of years and the move to Siteminder also allowed him to return home but still be in a global company.
"I really wanted to work in a global environment. There’s not that many global companies operating out of Australia and not many within the tech space," Renshaw says.
"I wanted to be in both of those and just had a great chat with some of the team here which was inspired by kind of their purpose and where they were going but it was just a really good fit."
Prior to his tenure at Edelman, he was at Leo Burnett for more than 12 years as chief digital and innovation officer and has worked in both the B2B and B2C space with clients such as McDonalds, Adobe, Proctor&Gamble and Optus.
He plans to bring his agency experience creating marketing models, new brand playbooks and global market entry strategies to the team, as well as his background managing partnerships with a number of global tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon.
"I got to see how they thought about marketing but then I also saw the culture of some of the tech media platforms or media companies," he says.
"I saw how they worked and was able to create joint business plans between them about how you would transform and go to market around the world."
In addition to this, Renshaw says his focus will also be on helping Siteminder maintain "local relevance" as a global company as it continues to grow internationally and look at how it can merge strategies from both the B2B and B2C worlds.
Currently, Siteminder runs all its media and creative in-house while only engaging agencies for PR and communications.
While Renshaw says he is a firm believer in the hybrid model of working with agencies, the nature of being a tech company with "so much information and data" about customers means an agency may not be as connected as in-house teams.
That doesn't mean he won't consider an agency in the future.
"It’s great to have media in-house because it’s such an important part of understanding our audience and obviously having creative here as well," he says.
"It means we can really connect and control that in a much stronger way. So, will that always be the model? We don’t know, but maybe it will evolve over time. I’m a strong believer in having hybrid. I think we’ll continue to look at a bit of a hybrid model but having a lot of our capabilities in-house will be the focus."
Renshaw joins the team alongside Jonathan Bedford who has been hired as the company's new chief sales officer.
The company's latest executive hire follows a three-year peiod of 65% growth in hiring at all levels.
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