JOHANNESBURG—Kim Polley, former director of the Africa Practice, has been appointed to head up College Hill's corporate practice in South Africa, reporting to both Nick Williams, managing partner South Africa, and Tim Fallon, managing partner and head of global corporate practice. Polley previously spent five years as director for Southern Africa for the Africa Practice and has experience working with industry players across the natural resources, ICT and FMCG sectors.

PARIS—Andrea Colaianni has been named head of Social@Ogilvy in France. He brings extensive international experience in CRM, influence, media and point of sales. Having started his career in Italy, he moved to France to join 90:10 Groupe, a social media consulting group, and later worked in the social media department of the international agency Same Same, where he advised clients from the luxury industry such as Van Cleef & Arpels, Longchamp and Printemps.

LONDON—Ahead of the UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014, Curzon PR has been selected to support the exhibition Study of Russia, to be held in December 2013 at London’s Asia House. Curzon PR will handle event management and media relations.

LONDON—SportsDirect News, the online news platform for Britain's biggest sportswear retailer, has awarded its digital PR brief to creative communications agency, Boom! The firm will be focusing its efforts on building key strategic relationships with national online sports and lifestyle media and sports blogging communities and building and engaging with the site's social media channels.

MACCLESFIELD—Business-to-business PR consultancy Skout has appointed Michael Cavanagh as a consultant. Prior to joining Skout, Cavanagh worked on a number of freelance projects in the energy and utilities sectors. He has also held roles of corporate communications manager at Scotia Gas Networks and press and communications officer at South West Trains.