fbpx

Lightbox CEO Kym Niblock announces her resignation

Lightbox chief executive Kym Niblock announced in an email today that she has resigned, but will stay in her current role until the end of the year.

Niblock, who has been in her role since August 2014, says she has decided to move on to other challenges, but has not revealed what they will be. 

“I’ve had a terrific time at Spark and met some amazing people across New Zealand and within the media industry over my time here,” she says.

“I’m enormously proud of the team and the spectacular business we have launched and built in Lightbox. In 2014, we set out to change the way Kiwis watched TV forever and in this last two years, with your support, content and coverage, we’ve done exactly that.”

She says she wanted to give plenty of notice of her intentions in order to help with an orderly transition and will continue to lead Lightbox and the ongoing media strategy at Spark, working with home, mobile and broadband chief executive Jason Paris, until the end of the year.

“I’ve chosen to step away at the end of this year as by then I feel I will have essentially accomplished what I set out to do.”

Niblock’s resignation follows on from the recent departures of former head of programming and local content Maria Mahony, who took up a role as general manager for Bravo New Zealand, and former head of sales and marketing David Hine, who has since moved to MediaWorks as general manager of 3Now.

Hine was replaced by Mat Beder who is the head of marketing and commercial partnerships, while Mahony’s role was replaced with a content manager who will work with Lightbox’s marketing, insights, media ops, care and product teams to bring Lightbox’s content strategy to life, reporting in to Hema Patel who leads audience insights and content strategy. 

The Lightbox senior leadership team will continue to operate as they always have, she says, with Patel leading audience insights and content strategy, Andrew Lambert on content selection and acquisition, Beder on marketing, sales and partnerships and Jean-Louis Acafrao supporting technology and product.

And regarding her own replacement Niblock says: “Jason [Paris] is working on a plan and will announce when appropriate. We have quite a bit of time to plan.”

“For Lightbox it’s absolutely business as usual. It remains a highly valued and key component of Spark’s media plans and it will continue to deliver fantastic entertainment to New Zealanders,” Niblock says.

“We’ve built a terrific and rapidly growing SVOD brand in New Zealand from scratch, with some of the highest quality content in the world. All in just two years.”

About Author

Avatar photo

One of the talented StopPress Team of Content Producers made this post happen.

Comments are closed.