BuzzFeed Lands Tumblr's Lee Brown for Top Sales Job (Memo)

Yesterday, Re/code told you that Lee Brown, who left his job running Tumblr’s sales force last week, was going to be BuzzFeed’s top sales guy. And now BuzzFeed is making it official.

Greg Coleman, the executive who oversees BuzzFeed’s business side, announced the hire today. You can read his memo, provided to Re/code by BuzzFeed’s PR team, at the bottom of this post. Coleman’s memo also includes some other shuffles on the company’s sales team, which is looking to build on the $100 million-plus year it had in 2014.

Team,

2015 is off to a great start and we already have some exciting news. We are scaling our business in a big way with the hire of Lee Brown who has accepted the role of Chief Revenue Officer. Lee is a seasoned digital media executive, coming to us from Tumblr where he spearheaded their native advertising offerings as Global Head of Brand Partnerships and previously held leadership roles at Yahoo and Groupon.

Bringing over two decades of sales experience and leadership to BuzzFeed, Lee will be responsible for driving business globally with new and existing revenue streams. He is no stranger to leveraging technology and great storytelling to solve partners’ challenges.

Lee is not the only change to the sales organization. I’m thrilled to announce that Jonathan Perelman, VP of BuzzFeed Motion Pictures, has been appointed to lead a new strategic sales group that will focus on our booming branded video offering. Joined by Zach Davis and David Spiegel and more to come, this group will be working with the global sales team to bring their expertise in our branded video product to all of BuzzFeed’s partners. We’ve also reorganized the east coast sales into smaller, more nimble groups and elevated some incredible talent: Rebecca Silver, Kenley Bradstreet, Brendan Kelly and Keith Hernandez have been promoted to run new teams with the rest of our sales management.

I’m confident that Lee’s deep knowledge of mobile and social as well as his experience building collaborative and professional sales organizations will accelerate our already rapid growth in 2015.

Much more to come about our business team – research, international, creative services and social discovery – and more in depth plans for expansion in 2015.

Please join me in welcoming Lee!
Greg

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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