Yahoo Beefs up B2B Marketing Team to Present Consistent Message

Yahoo’s top business-to-business marketing exec has rounded out her team. After just a few months with the firm, Mollie Spilman, SVP of global b-to-b marketing, has hired former Tremor, Viacom, and Cisco marketing and research execs to help present a more consistent message to agencies, publishers, developers, and other non-consumer Yahoo customers.

Shane Steele, former VP marketing at video network Tremor Media, will start with Yahoo later this month as VP global b-to-b marketing communications and operations, and will report to Spilman. Spilman came on board in January as part of a marketing department restructuring devised by Yahoo CMO Elisa Steele. Shane Steele will be responsible for Yahoo outreach to industry through its advertiser and publisher portals, blogs, and other operations. She’ll also head up an industry-aimed ad campaign set to break in June, according to Spilman.

Newly-hired senior director of b-to-b insights marketing, Lauren Weinberg, hails from Viacom, where she handled research for digital sales at the media firm. Reporting to Shane Steele, Weinberg is tasked with presenting a more comprehensive story to the market from an audience and consumer research and data perspective. She’ll work alongside Yahoo research teams including its ad insights group, which is part of the sales division.

The goal, said Spilman, is to bring “more consistency to the message of all the work we do…it seemed schizophrenic to the market.” She explained that currently some clients “have a hard time navigating” Yahoo’s proprietary research, and “don’t even know who to call to dive deeper.”

Tanya Andrade, previously with Cisco, started today as Yahoo’s new executive director of events, and will guide the company’s business-aimed events team of around 30 people. “The volume and sophistication of the events could probably turn up a notch,” said Spilman.

Spilman said her hiring spree is “done,” adding, “I really felt like I wanted to bring some fresh perspective and fresh ideas into the company.”