Chief Digital Officer, Vijay Solanki, to exit SCA

It was barely a year ago that SCA lost its Head of Digital Clive Dickens to Seven West Media.

The company was none too pleased that it’s high profile international recruit had jumped ship after he had been with them for just 12 months.

Not to worry, there were plenty more like Dickens in the British sea and Vijay Solanki came highly recommended as a replacement.

radioinfo reported at the time: Coming from a similar background, Solanki had over 20 years of business experience and 15 years in digital leadership. He started to explore websites and mobile at Capital Radio in 1999, he helped NME.com grow, he launched Shazam, took Castrol into digitally driven global football sponsorship and used social media to help BlackBerry build consumer success.  Solanki has always had a passion for new technology and disruption especially when leveraging content.

Now, after Solanki himself has been with SCA for just over a year, he will be departing the company after he he helps to bed in a yet to be named successor. This, despite continued success and the dominant position of SCA’s digital, online and social platforms.

SCA CEO Grant Blackley said in a memo to staff this morning:

As you would be aware, SCA’s digital strategy is to focus on transforming the entire business rather than just operating a silo digital function.

To achieve this, 6 months ago we started this process by moving digital sales into the sales function enabling more sales teams to trade digital. Our new The Studio initiative will also help accelerate this.

In parallel, we have also moved digital content back into the content team. We have built a culture where all content teams recognise that content creation includes website, social, video content in addition to audio content.

The next phase of this development is to create a new technology leadership role overseeing digital technology, digital product development and data analytics along with our ICT functions. Our new Head of Digital and Information Technology will lead the existing digital and ICT leadership teams and work closely with Director of Engineering & Technology.

Over the past 12 months, SCA has made significant progress with the latest digital results indicating SCA’s digital audience is twice the size of any radio competitor.

Vijay Solanki, Chief Digital Officer has led this digital transformation including the creation of new product and data teams plus the initiatives outlined above. He will leave his role given we have achieved this stage of digital transformation.

I would like to thank Vijay for driving the new digital strategy, rebuilding the infrastructure, the creation of new products and launching our data function. We have made strong progress in our digital transformation and we are on track to fully integrate digital back into the business.

Vijay Solanki says, “I’m really proud to have played my part in driving digital transformation as part of the SCA digital journey. The strategy was always about enabling the entire business to step up in digital. Over the last year, we have built great products including RadioApp, mobile apps & websites, products like Facebook Live and initiatives like Omny Studio and A2X. 

The crescendo has been the recent Nielsen digital result showing SCA’s digital audience to be twice the size of any radio competitor. My team have been awesome.”

Vijay also says, “I’m keen to find the next challenge in Australia.”

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