Foursquare hires former Yahoo exec to head up ad sales

At its heart, foursquare’s new Promoted Updates feature that debuted last week is pay per action advertising — similar in many ways to the pay per click ads offered by the big search engines. So who better to sell them than one of the PPC industry’s most experienced salesmen?

Foursquare has brought in former Yahoo exec Rob Wilk as VP of Sales. Wilk was previously Senior Director of Search Account Management for Yahoo, where he led a team of people focused on managing search ad sales for Yahoo’s biggest clients.

Wilk was one of the first ten employees at Overture’s New York office before it became part of Yahoo. Before that he was a founding member of Razorfish’s search team. He’s a regular speaker at search marketing conferences.

Long known for having no sales department to speak of, foursquare has recently been beefing up that side of the business. Companies with large sales forces like Yelp and Groupon have gained more traction with retailers simply by having more people on the streets. Hopefully foursquare’s new push to add a sales staff will pay off in terms of increased revenue from retailers, especially now that they have an actual revenue generating product in the form of Promoted Updates.