Global brandtech group You & Mr Jones continues to attract high-profile executives, with the latest being Virginie Douin, who joins the five-year-old technology holding company as partner and head of ecommerce from Amazon, where she was head of global agency partnerships.
At You & Mr Jones, Douin will lead expansion and acceleration of the group’s ecommerce offering, including enterprise-level partnerships and mergers and acquisitions—she has been given $100 million for those acquisitions.
Douin previously led Amazon’s ecommerce and sponsored ads partnerships across advertising holding companies and consultancies worldwide, managing a global team. Douin first joined Amazon Advertising in 2014 and was initially based in France, where she started the agency and programmatic sales teams across France, Spain and Italy, and developed the first commercial agreements between Amazon and agencies.
Douin’s successes at Amazon include creating and executing the Ecommerce Acceleration Program (EAP), aimed at developing ecommerce capabilities, as well as leveraging Amazon’s API and AdTech integrations across brands, large agencies and consultancies. She also drove adoption of Amazon’s sponsored ads, and she was behind Amazon’s strategic partner programs such as the Amazon Sales Partner program and Partner Network.
“Our business is growing massively, with 400 open hires. Ecommerce is one of those growth engines, and with Virginie at the helm, it is set for exponential growth. In addition, she’ll be looking to deploy $100 million and maybe a lot more on acquisitions,” David Jones, founder and CEO of You & Mr Jones, told Adweek.
You & Mr Jones has seen rapid growth over the past few years, having completed a Series B funding round of $260 million at a $1.36 billion valuation in 2020. It boasts over 4,500 employees across the various companies it has acquired over the past five years, including influencer marketing firm Collectively, advertising and entertainment agency Gravity Road, and Oliver, which focuses on helping brands build in-house digital marketing capabilities.
Douin is one of several prominent recent hires at the company. Paulette Forte, formerly of the NBA, was added earlier this year as You & Mr Jones’ first chief people officer to help the company oversee its expanding employee base. Integral Ad Science founder Will Luttrell was recently added as partner and chief technology officer, former Mindshare global CEO Nick Emery was hired as founding partner of its media division in April, and Will Heins joined in May as partner in the media division from Mother. Douin will also join the DEI board at You & Mr Jones.
“I’m excited to join such a fast-growing and innovative company, and such a talented group of people. Ecommerce is absolutely central to the future of marketing and the group David and team are building is uniquely well-placed to maximize brands’ success with the increasingly large number of people shopping online,” said Douin in a statement.
