IGN Entertainment Expands UK Management Team
Key appointments announced by IGN Entertainment in the UK and Europe
London 12th March 2008 - IGN.com, the UK's leading online gaming and entertainment destination, today announced the appointments of Adrian Watkins as Business Development Director and Rich Keen as Marketing Manager, both based out of Fox Interactive Media's London office.
Adrian Watkins' appointment is the culmination of eight years of digital client direct experience, most recently at Virgin Media where he led revenue generating partnerships in the online team. Adrian has been involved at a senior level with the UK's most high profile launches including www.virginmedia.com and www.visitlondon.com. At Virgin Media, Adrian was promoted to a position of key stakeholder and was also tasked with defining Virginmedia.com's Lifestyle section as a major consumer destination over 2007.
A skilled strategist and negotiator in the UK, Adrian has the key tasks of establishing commercial partnerships for the IGN brands across the gaming, film, and men's lifestyle verticals. Watkins' experience will be invaluable in building on IGN Entertainment's position as the most established and highly trafficked European destination for men 18-35.
Rich Keen has worked with the Consumer Lifestyle Media industry for more than 10 years, most recently at Dennis Publishing where he was print and online marketing manager for the publisher's men's lifestyle brands including Maxim, Men's Fitness, Viz, and Monkey. He will be tasked with building IGN's trade marketing effort as well as growing the UK consumer footprints across film, gaming and entertainment.
"IGN Entertainment has become an industry sensation doubling its UK audience reach and engagement in just a year since launching in London," said Justin Keeling, European GM for IGN Entertainment. "The fact that we're attracting key staff away from leading portals and established men's lifestyle publishers demonstrates the market's confidence in the online sector and our leading UK properties, and we look forward to significantly boosting both the commercial and brand profiles of our UK entertainment sites in 2008."
IGN Entertainment recently became the UK's number one online destination for males aged 18-34, with more than 4.45 million unique users visiting the network in January 2008 and over 2.75 million visitors a month to the IGN.com homepage alone (ComScore). Since the UK launch of leading men's portal AskMen.com in Dec 2007 usage has doubled its reach to 1.2 million UK readers in January 2008.
For further information, please contact:
Alice Regester - 020 3077 4087
aregester@myspace.com
About IGN Entertainment
IGN Entertainment, a unit of Fox Interactive Media, Inc., is a leading Internet media and services provider focused on the videogame and entertainment enthusiast markets. Collectively, IGN's properties reached more than 35 million unique users worldwide in the month of June 2007, according to Internet audience measurement firm comScore Media Metrix. IGN's network of videogame-related properties (IGN.com, GameSpy, FilePlanet, TeamXbox, Direct2Drive and others), is the Web's number one videogame information destination and attracts one of the largest concentrated audiences of young males on the Internet. IGN also owns and operates the popular movie-related website, Rotten Tomatoes and one of the leading male lifestyle Websites, AskMen.com. In addition, IGN provides technology for online game play in videogames. IGN is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, with offices throughout the U.S. and in Montreal.