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Rovio appoints VP of marketing Kieran O'Leary to COO

CTO Petri Hyökyranta also moves to leadership team

Rovio appoints VP of marketing Kieran O'Leary to COO

Rovio has promoted its vice president of marketing Kieran O'Leary to chief operating officer.

As announced via a blog post, the new COO will start in the position from May 27th while continuing to be based at Rovio's headquarters in Espoo, Finland.

This move follows a 10-month stint in marketing and a 12-month period as the director of growth.

O'Leary entered the games industry in 2012 as a product manager on Watch Dogs at Ubisoft. He then moved onto further product and marketing jobs at Gameloft and Outfit7 before joining Rovio in 2019.

Alongside this, it was confirmed that O'Leary and chief technology officer Petri Hyökyranta will both become members of the leadership team for the Angry Birds maker

"Strong track record"

"While I continue to lead Rovio's strategy, Kieran O’Leary will work with studio leads monitoring operations on a day-to-day basis," said Rovio CEO Alex Pelletier-Normand.

"Kieran’s strong track record in heading marketing coupled with his determination for driving results make him the best possible person for the job and I am confident he will do an excellent job!"

He added: "An important pillar of our strategy is our 'Future of Gaming' initiatives. Much of this is naturally technology-enabled, for instance using machine learning to customise user experiences. Thus it is imperative that technology is represented in the leadership team through Petri Hyökyranta."

O'Leary previously delivered a session on 'fueling growth through user-centric UA creative design' at Pocket Gamer Connects Digital #2. You can watch the presentation in full below:

As part of Rovio's latest financial figures, it was revealed that Angry Birds 2 had earned more than $600 million in lifetime revenue.

More recently, Rovio partnered with Burger King to offer Angry Birds plushies and an AR experience.


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Deputy Editor

Matthew Forde is the deputy editor at PocketGamer.biz and also a member of the Pocket Gamer Podcast. You can find him on Twitter @MattForde64 talking about stats, data and everything pop culture related - particularly superheroes.