DMG Media‘s global chief brand officer and managing director of US operations, Sean Walsh, is leaving the company after ten years.
Walsh, a former producer at Nine Network Australia and ABC News in the US before joining the Mail and Metro owner, is joining the executive team of a financial tech start-up.
Walsh was part of the team that helped to launch Daily Mail Australia with its former venture partner Nine Entertainment Co in 2013.
He then moved to New York in 2014 where he worked alongside then-Mail Online editor Martin Clarke to build its brand awareness in the US, where it is known as DailyMail.com.
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Two years later he helped to develop Daily Mail TV, a daily news show syndicated across the US which launched in September 2017 and won a Daytime Emmy in 2019, running for five seasons before ending last year.
Walsh took on his latest roles for DMG Media, which involved telling the stories of the company’s brands and acting as its chief spokesperson, in May last year. DMG Media will recruit a replacement and in the interim, Hayley Barlow will handle communications in the UK and Australia, and Nicole Hall in the US.
DMG Media chief executive Rich Caccappolo said in a memo to staff that Walsh has “played a pivotal role across our company over the past ten years” and praised his part in the “exponential growth” in brand awareness for the Mail across the US.
Caccappolo said: “He has also helped drive our explosive growth and leading market position on Tiktok.
“He has also been a friend, mentor and trusted partner to me and many of our colleagues for the past ten years.”
Walsh, whose last day at DMG Media is on 11 September, is joining Bilt Rewards, a New York-based start-up that allows people to earn rewards on their rent payments and was valued at $1.5bn in October, as managing director, external relations.
Walsh said: “These past ten years have been an extraordinary and life changing journey that I will be forever grateful for.
“I’m very proud to have represented the brands of DMG Media across the globe and I leave with sincere gratitude and respect for my colleagues, our dedicated readers and our commercial and external partners.”
Bilt’s founder and chief executive Ankur Jain said Walsh had been hired because he is “one of those rare executives who can drive growth at scale but also understands the startup hustle – having helped transform a powerful 125 year old newspaper brand from the UK into a global social media and digital news powerhouse”.
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