C-Suite Hires Boost Savanta in the US

UK-based research group Savanta has appointed two Boston-based executives to its leadership team, as it grows its presence in the US. Michelle Yaiser joins as Chief Product Officer and Stephen DiMarco as Chief Commercial Officer.

Savanta is part of marcoms group Next15, and offers customised research and consulting; data collection, including access to 100 million respondents through a proprietary platform; and branded intelligence solutions including reputation trackers BrandVue and MarketVue. The firm has teams in Europe, the Americas and APAC.

Yaiser (pictured above) worked as Assistant Professor of Web Design & Interactive Media at the New England Institute of Art for ten years, before joining Adobe in 2011 - here she worked in Content and User Research. She then spent six years at Forrester, latterly as VP, Data Insights and Engagement, and for the last three years has worked in senior Data Product roles at Interpublic - most recently Executive Head of Product, Creative Strategy for Kinesso. In her new role she will lead product, data and engineering, with a focus on building new AI-driven offerings on top of the company's proprietary data - including synthetic data, digital twins, and agentic research workflows.

DiMarco (pictured below) began his career in marketing at Comedy Central, before moving into a sales and marketing role at FX Networks, then helping to found and build digital intelligence and analytics company Compete, acquired by Kantar in 2008. He served as CMO and Chief Client Officer at MB and Kantar, then as Kantar's Chief Digital Officer before leaving in 2021 to work at Tubular Labs and then Progress Partners. Since 2022 he also founded and led strategy and execution consultancy Navigating Growth Partners. At Savanta, he will lead commercial strategy and execution, aligning sales with product and marketing to support the company's growth.

The company is online at www.savanta.com .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.