• by Mark Walsh  @markfwal, July 7, 2014

Ad tech firm PointRoll has named digital sales veteran Hal Trencher, senior vice president, sales. In the new post, he will oversee the Gannett-owned company’s roughly 50-person sales organization, charged with expanding its business in emerging areas like video and mobile.
 
Trencher most recently served as senior vice president of national sales from music video site Vevo. Before that, he was director of sales for consumer-packaged goods and entertainment at AOL. During an eight-year stint at Yahoo, he led sales for sports, entertainment, broadband and video. His traditional media background includes senior sales positions at Sports Illustrated Television and CBS Sports.
 
“The thing that attracted us with Hal was his long-standing history of working with brands and agencies, adapting to the next wave of principles in advertising and helping them understand what applications of new technologies mean for their businesses,” said PointRoll CEO Mario Diez, in an interview.
 
At PointRoll, that will mean helping clients harness expanded use of data and programmatic buying to launch campaigns that run across the Web as well mobile, social and video. A longtime player in rich media advertising, PointRoll earlier this year launched a rebranding including a new logo and revamped Web site, promoted with the tag line “Creativity is not a commodity.”
 
The updated site highlights the company’s ability to automatically deliver ad creative options tailored according to factors including ad format, geography, time of day and user behaviors. Gannett doesn’t break out revenue for PointRoll individually, but its digital business, which also includes ShopLocal and CareerBuilder, reached $179.7 million in the first quarter, up from $175 million in the year-earlier period .