Lunch with the CEO: Last week, Martin Weiss exchanged ideas with the next generation of international managers. He personally welcomed the young colleagues of the new Burda MORE International Trainee Programme.
Burda-CEO Martin Weiss is reorganising his team and creating a central, strategic product management unit that is supporting the Burda profit centers. The goals of the new unit are providing consistent, early support for major market and technological innovations via the holding company, investing in the right fields for the future and equip-ping the entire Burda Group with the relevant know-how it needs from a single source. To head this unit, the company has appointed one of the leading innovators in the media industry to the newly-created post of Chief Product Officer: Stefan Atanassov (39), Chief Product Officer at the Seven.One Entertainment Group and before that Managing Director of ProSiebenSat.1 Digital. Since 2018 he has been responsible for the digital platforms in the core business – entertainment. During this time, he expanded the product portfolio in the fields of audio, interactive entertainment and live & on-demand video, and also reor-ganised the product and technology unit. Prior to that, Stefan Atanassov was Chief Operat-ing Officer at the subscription-video-on-demand portal maxdome (now Joyn), and previ-ously director of Digital Entertainment & Commerce Strategy at ProSiebenSat.1. Before joining ProSiebenSat.1, he spent three years at the Management consultant Group McKinsey & Company, where he progressed to the position of Engagement Manager. In that role he was responsible for projects in the areas of product strategy and digital trans-formation in the automotive, engineering and telecommunications sectors.
For key partnerships and cooperations as well as centrally managed initiatives such as the sustainability program getting better, Martin Weiss has created the position of Head of Corporate Development and successfully secured Anne Karoline Frizen (31) for this re-mit. She has been with Burda since 2020 and is currently first and foremost the lead for getting better in Corporate Business Development. In her new role, she is responsible for the design and set-up of the initiative, as well as for drawing up balance sheets for green-house gas emissions, planning and executing measures to reduce CO2 levels, and devel-oping a dedicated carbon offsetting strategy for the company and partner organisations. Parallel to this, she has been accountable for a range of additional functions, including the CEO's presentations and events, and also worked on project management in the digital datahub and other business development issues. Before Anne Karoline Frizen came to Burda, she spent six years in the strategic planning unit Monitor Deloitte at the Deloitte Consulting, most recently as a project director. While there she was chiefly responsible for automotive industry projects relating to self-driving vehicles, e-mobility, production trans-formation, and financial services.
Dr. Sophie Ahrens, who has been establishing and managing Burda's Corporate Busi-ness Development section since 2013, and reporting directly to the CEO, is taking up a new post on July 1, 2022 with Acton Capital, one of Germany's leading venture capitalism companies.
