Blippar has hired Omaid Hiwaizi, the UK chief strategy officer at Geometry Global, as its first president of global marketing.
Hiwaizi will be responsible for expanding and transforming the marketing efforts of the imagine recognition and augmented reality app as well as growing consumer adoption.
He will initially focus on the UK and USA which is currently where Blippar has its largest installed bases.
Hiwaizi is also calling a digital media agency pitch, with an ultimate goal of achieving 100 million users. This will be Blippars first formal media agency relationship with a significant initial media budget. Hiwaizi is running the pitch with the UK and US local leadership.
Prior to Geometry Global, Hiwaizi worked as planning director at both SapientNitro and Chemistry, and was a founder and planning partner at Crayon.
Hiwaizi said: My appointment comes off the back of recent Series C investment, which has enabled Blippar to change the game in Image Recognition from just recognising brands to objects in the world – eventually all objects – and provide information and inspiration to fulfill people’s curiosity, in the moment.
This means that there’s a requirement to significantly increase commitment to consumer marketing. Previously Blippar focused on tech and brand/agency marketing – leaving consumer marketing to the brands.
Ambarish Mitra, founder and chief executive officer of Blippar, added: As Blippar continues the evolution of its innovative technology platform and breaks into the emerging category of visual discovery, we are excited to expand to our world-class team. [Hiwaizi] will continue on our rapid growth track globally and help us move forward in realizing our vision to make the world blippable.
Hiwaizis appointment is one of three senior hires just made by Blippar and he joins Ariff Quli who has joined as chief commercial officer, North America and Xuejun Wang who has joined as vice president of Infrastructure.
It was announced back in March that Blippar had raised $45m in new funding from undisclosed investors.
