Monster Worldwide’s executive vice president of product, marketing, and customer service plans to resign, effective September 21.
In a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the company said Bradford Baker is leaving “to pursue other career opportunities.”
In Baker’s place, the company has hired Art O’Donnell to serve as executive vice president for customer service and Lisa Poulos to serve as executive vice president of product development.
Both Poulos and O’Donnell most recently worked at Symbol Technologies. Poulos was senior vice president of HR and corporate affairs, while O’Donnell was senior vice president and general manager of the global services division.
Sal Iannuzzi, Monster’s chairman and CEO said in a statement these new hires “are experienced executives with solid track records in large global enterprises, and they will strengthen our accountability and responsibility for these critical areas.”
In May, the company hired Joan Blackwood to serve as chief marketing officer.
Revitalizing the Brand
Late last week the company also announced it has selected a new advertising and branding agency, BBDO Worldwide.
Iannuzzi said BBDO will help to “ensure a consistent approach to advertising and promotion across all of our businesses and regions, while revitalizing and reinvigorating the power of the Monster brand.”
The ad account is worth approximately $155 million, and previously was handled by the agency Brand Content.
According to Adweek, spending in overseas markets might take that figure well past $200 million.
BBDO will launch its new creative efforts during the start of the new job search season in January 2008.
Spammer’s Dream: Who Knew What When?
These management and advertising changes follow a tough month for Monster.
While there remains uncertainty over when security breaches first occurred, on July 23, Monster selected Cyveillance to protect customers from potential online fraud, offer brand identity protection, user privacy tools, and anti-phishing services.
At the time, Monster’s vice president of compliance, Patrick Manzo, said in a statement that “enhancing Monster’s defenses against phishing and other online fraud is a top priority.”
By August 17, software security company Symantec had sniffed out the phishing and said “such a large database of highly personal information is a spammer’s dream.” It immediately warned Monster about the problem, though Monster allegedly waited until August 22 to tell users its system may have been hacked.
By the end of August, Monster admitted that the “Infostealer.Monstres” bug that had infiltrated the company’s resume database and allegedly spammed upwards of 1.6 million users was not an isolated incident.