Media Headliner: Chips sets Yahoo! on course for the mainstream.(Mark Chippendale joins Yahoo! Europe)

An apprenticeship in interactive advertising at Sky should serve Mark Chippendale well in his Yahoo! role, Jeremy Lee says.

In the same week that one old-timer from TV sales, Mark Howe, left his job, another, slightly younger one, Mark Chippendale, started in a new one.

Chippendale's return to the media industry has been a long time coming.

After all, it has been ten months since he walked (some say flounced) out of Sky, a company he had been with since its launch in 1990, without a job to go to. But after some searching, he has now returned in the newly created role of executive vice-president of media sales for Yahoo! Europe.

No-one was really surprised when Chippendale (who is more commonly known as 'Chips' in media circles) left Sky. 'Any of the broadcast directors around town would have put a year's salary on it,' one TV director says.

The reason behind his departure was clear enough - Chippendale made no secret of his unhappiness that Nick Milligan was hired as his new boss by the managing director of Sky Networks, Dawn Airey, particularly given the history of antagonism between the two. Chippendale will know who his former Flextech counterpart, Howe, who left the company last week, should get in touch with as he adjusts to life away from the world of multichannel TV sales.

Unlike some battered media egos, Chippendale, at the relatively tender age of 44, was always destined to return to the industry. Over the past ten months, he was linked to a number of jobs, including Dave King's old position as the managing director of Emap Advertising and the chief executive's post at Virgin Radio. Incidentally, it is the job of the successful Virgin Radio candidate, Fru Hazlitt, that Chippendale now fills, albeit with a slightly tweaked job remit.