Blue Yonder Hires Mat Sloan as Head of Brand:Lab

In the UK, Leeds-based full-service agency Blue Yonder has appointed former Black Swan exec Mat Sloan as Head of its comms specialist Brand:Lab, taking over from MD Richard Heath.

Brand:Lab's expertise includes segmentation, message and touchpoint prioritisation, concept and ad testing, and performance tracking and optimisation. As well as Brand:Lab, Blue Yonder's offer includes R&D insight specialist Sense:lab, and an in-house tech incubator team, which invests company profits in creating insight tech for the core agency. Last year, the company was named 'Break Through Business of the year' at the MRS awards.

Sloan (pictured) joins from crowdsourced consumer research specialist Catalyx, where he served as Senior Director, before which he worked for predictive analytics specialist Black Swan as Senior Director, Client Strategy. Earlier he was Global Client Partner at Streebees, and a Director at Morar HPI (now Savanta).

In his new role, Sloan will free up Heath's time to focus on running and growing the wider Blue Yonder business. Heath comments: 'This is an important hire for us, on the back of our award and our recent growth. We are best known for our market leading R&D insight. Our new Brand:lab team bring a commercial, detailed and action orientated approach to consumer and market insight - all attributes Mat has in spades'.

Web site: www.blueyonder.agency .