The New York Times appointed Sebastian Tomich head of its newly named Advertising & Marketing Solutions group.
Advertising and Marketing Solutions will focus on three key areas: media, partnerships and services. Accordingly, The Times has appointed three leaders to newly created positions: Amber Guild will join the company as president, T Brand Marketing Solutions; Lisa Howard becomes senior vice president and general manager, Media; and Andy Wright becomes senior vice president, Partnerships.
Tomich joined The Times in 2013 as vice president, advertising, where he led multiple national integrated sales teams across categories and founded and ran T Brand Studio, The Times’s brand marketing unit. He was most recently senior vice president of advertising & innovation, where he continued to lead the rapid growth of T Brand, oversaw HelloSociety and Fake Love (the two agencies acquired by the Times Company in 2016) and steered the company’s advertising innovation efforts. Before joining The Times, he was the director of East Coast advertising at Forbes Media. Tomich will continue to report to executive vice president and chief operating officer, Meredith Kopit Levien.
Guild joins The Times from The Martin Agency, where she was managing director of its New York office. Prior to that, she was president of brand consultancy and experiential design agency Collins from 2014-2016, where she guided the company’s vision, revenue and growth strategies and worked with a number of C-level clients on brand strategy, identity and marketing programs. She spent five years at digital innovation agency T3, most recently as SVP, managing director, and has worked in management roles at Ogilvy & Mather, Saatchi & Saatchi and Y&R.
On Guild’s hire, Tomich said, “We’ve been speaking publicly for quite some time about T Brand Studio’s work evolving to be more agency-like and felt it was the right time to bring on an executive with the vision and experience to bring us to the next level. We’ll head into 2018 with an already one-of-a-kind offering in Fake Love, a growing content strategy offering and we’ll be looking to invest in services that leverage The Times’s data and technology resources. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Amber come on board to lead these efforts.”
As SVP and general manager, Media, Howard will be responsible for The Times’s category-organized sales team in New York, its national sales offices in the U.S. and around the globe, as well as the group’s planning and operations teams. Howard was most recently senior vice president, advertising, where she oversaw The Times’s global advertising business, as well as the luxury, fashion/accessories, education, corporate and consumer products categories. She joined The Times in 2016 from WebMD, where she was executive vice president and chief of consumer strategy. She also held a variety of senior leadership positions at Yahoo!, Billboard and Condé Nast.
As SVP, Partnerships, Wright will assume leadership of a new division that will drive large-scale, integrated programs working closely with key advertising partners and The Times’s news, product and technology teams. He most recently served as senior vice president, advertising, and publisher of The New York Times Magazine, where he ran the commercial arm of the Magazine as well as a number of Times sales offices throughout the U.S., and the tech, telecom, auto, financial, real estate, travel and media categories. He joined The Times in 1997.