CBS Poaching Interactive Marketing CMO

The AP reports that CBS has hired Patrick Keane, a Google ad sales executive, as the Chief Marketing Officer of CBS Interactive. Keane was in charge of Google’s ad sales strategy. He’s now in charge of marketing CBS content on ‘emerging media platforms.’

From the AP article: “Keane . . . will be responsible for both monetizing CBS’ digital content and heading its online research, sales training and search engine optimization.”

I googled Keane and oddly enough, the #1 result was a post from July 2004 on Search Engine Lowdown, by none other than our own Andy Beal. Its title? “Google’s Patrick Keane Afraid of Search Engine Optimizers.” Back in ’04, Keane spoke at AD:TECH. From the post:

Patrick basically replied that there is no way to improve your rankings on Google and that any claims by a SEO company were false. He suggested that a few simple “design changes” were all that could be done and that a SEO firm wasn’t needed.

I guess he got over that opinion.

All in all, this seems like a good way to express that there’s no hard feelings over the erstwhile CBS/YouTube content deal.