Execs & Accounts: Critical Mass, ARF, Brightcove

Omnicom’s digital marketing group Critical Mass named Erik Thrane group account director. Thrane was SVP and interactive business director at Publicis in 2007, where he restructured the Interactive Services Group. He was group director of engagement management at Organic, and in 1997 he co-founded the interactive division of Young & Rubicam in Canada, where he worked for eight years and served as the division’s director. Thrane will work in the Toronto office of Critical Mass.

Kimberley Dedeker was named chairwoman of an Advertising Research Foundation advisory board. Dedeker is vice president of external capability leadership and global consumer and market knowledge at Proctor & Gamble. She will head up the ARF’s Online Research Quality Council Client Advisory Board.

Brightcove appointed Hisashige Hashimoto to lead Brightcove Japan. Hashimoto, is general manager of Brightcove KK, Brightcove’s Japan-based subsidiary. He spent two years as president and CEO at Paygent, a mobile auction escrow service. Prior to Paygent, Hashimoto worked in three different senior management positions for Macromedia KK. Presentcast, a Web TV distribution site, selected Brightcove Internet video platform for gorin.jp, the exclusive online video portal in Japan for coverage of the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

ContextWeb named Vishal Misra, a Columbia University associate professor, to its board of advisors. Misra is director of the Distributed Network Analysis Laboratory at Columbia University.