Spotify has appointed Ed Couchman, one of the top executives at Snapchat in London, as head of advertising sales for Northern Europe.
His new remit will include the UK, the Nordics and international campaigns.
Couchman is currently regional general manager of DACH (Germany, Austria and Switzerland), the Netherlands, Nordics and the UK for the owner of Snapchat.
He previously worked at Facebook and Channel 4 and brings market knowledge, after joining Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, as its UK general manager in 2018.
He is expected to start in January and will become part of a regional operation that is headed by Rakesh Patel, the head of enterprise sales for Spotify in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
The UK is its second biggest market, after the US, and generated $1bn in total revenues from subscription and advertising in 2021 or about £765m at the exchange rate at the time. That made the UK worth 10% of Spotify’s global revenues, but the Nordics is also a key region for Spotify, which was founded in Sweden and listed on the US stock market.
Most of Spotify’s sales come from digital subscriptions but advertising from music and podcasts is an important and growing revenue source for the audio streaming company. It has made a number of acquisitions and exclusivity deals in support of this, as well as expanding the range of podcast publishing tools it offers.
Ad sales increased 19% globally in Q3, with “strong double-digit gains in our podcasting business”, although the company said it suffered “some impact” from the “macro slowdown” in the world economy.
Spotify had 456 million monthly active users, including 196 million paying subscribers, at the end of Q3 2022.
This story was first published on Campaign.
