SamKnows

The boardroom comings and goings at Phorm continue as the UK Chief Executive, Hugo Drayton, left today ‘by mutual consent’.

A new role of UK managing director has been handed to Nick Barnett, who was Phorm’s commercial director. At the same time former Turner Broadcast Systems (Europe) president, Nan Richards, joins at Deputy Chief Executive Officer and former media and telecommunications analyst, Andrew Croxson, joins as Global CFO.

Drayton’s ‘mutual consent’ departure comes in the wake of Phorm deciding to concentrate its board in London, which itself was met with top level resignations by board members in America. At the time Phorm explained to SamKnows that the move to London was not a sign that it was giving up on the American market but rather that it made sense to have its board in the same city as its global CEO and its only publicly-announced trialist, BT.

This coincided with the appointment of two non executive directors in London, former Chancellor Norman Lamont, and Kip Meek, Chair of the Broadband Stakeholders Group. The company would not comment, at the time, as to who would replace the full time board executives who had resigned in America.

Hence today’s announcement reveals that Hugo Drayton’s apparent realisation it was “time to seek a new professional challenge” coincided with global CEO, Kent Ertugrul, appointing a new board based in London which was not going to be include the person who had run the operation out of capital city for the past two years.

With the new team in place Ertugrul announced that he believes “we have the right talent at both the board and executive level to deliver on the huge potential of our technology and the business opportunity that lies ahead. I believe that we are now uniquely placed to lead the introduction of privacy-assured behavioural advertising across the whole of the Internet”.

In a personal letter announcing his departure, Drayton thanked colleagues for their support and, despite Ertugrul putting in place a new board in the past week, pointed to his pride in recruiting “outstanding individuals to the team” over the past two years.

Tags: BT, Hugo Drayton, Kent Ertugrul, Nan Richards, Nick Barnett, Phorm