Vocanic makes series of senior hires

Vocanic has made a series of hires, with several senior appointments included.Rebecca Ashby joins Vocanic from Mediacom to take on a new role of COO. Originally from Australia, Ashby moved to Singapore 11 years ago after a five year stint in the UK. Working in Group M agencies for nine of the last 11 years, Ashby has been APAC client services director at MediaCom for the past four years.Vocanic has also created a second new role, that of regional executive creative director, hiring Brazilian Andre Amaral for the role. Amaral is tasked to build the social content production team, grow the creative teams in each of the regions and lead the overall creative direction for Vocanic.In another new role, regional head of strategy and consulting Charlie Young joined Vocanic having moved to Singapore three years ago with MediaCom and joins Vocanic after a year in SingTel in the GroupDigital Life department.Expanding the account management team, Reeve Chua joins Vocanic from Publicis/INEO where he led the award winning team that worked on Scoot. Also from Publicis/INEO, Andrew Loy joins Vocanic as senior account manager, having previously handled accounts such as BreadTalk, Food Republic and Virgin Active.Raja Amir Arshad also joins Vocanic as an account manager, having worked in the UK for The Luxe Nomad doing PR and online marketing.Expanding the research team, Aliyne Halim joins Vocanic as the social media analyst, having worked for adaQuest in the US in the same role.SueAnn Teo joins the project management team, with 9 years of experience with agencies such as Band, Reelloco and Mediacorp. Foo Yu Ting, Nicolette Ong and Chloe Goh have joined the content and community management team."I’m excited about 2015,” said CEO, Ian McKee.“Social media is maturing, brands are now allocating significant budgets and the opportunities we are seeing are better than ever before. With the new expanded team on-board, it looks like 2015 is going to be another excellent year.”“2014 was a great year for Vocanic. We accomplished the integration with GroupM and delivered significant growth. In the last few months we have hired a number of new senior staff to fill new, expanded roles, and to support the new clients.”Last week, Marketing reported the departures of several of Vocanic's senior staff such as general manager Stephen Thirgood; client services (social & digital) director Kristian Olsen; business development director (social media) Kimberley Olsen; regional head of creative Ivan Ng and head of engagement services Kelly Han. (See Vocanic Singapore sees senior departures).