REA Group has appointed former Afterpay executive Katrina Konstas as Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer from September. Her background is sales and commercial growth, not brand. That choice says something about where marketing leadership is heading.
When a company fuses sales and marketing under a leader who came up through revenue, it is telling you what it wants marketing to be accountable for.
REA Group has appointed Katrina Konstas as its new Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer, starting 1 September 2026. She replaces Kul Singh, who leaves in August after more than a decade with the property marketplace. Konstas joins REA's executive leadership team with responsibility for sales, marketing and audience across the group.
Look at the background REA reached for. Konstas comes most recently from Afterpay, where she was country manager and head of sales for APAC, and before that held senior sales and strategy roles at American Express. More than 20 years of leading sales and commercial teams. This is not a brand storyteller stepping into a marketing chair. It is a commercial operator taking ownership of sales and marketing as one function.
Why it matters
The job title says it plainly. Chief Commercial and Marketing Officer. Not Chief Marketing Officer. REA has bolted commercial responsibility and marketing responsibility onto the same seat and handed it to someone whose whole career has been about numbers on the board.
This is the direction of travel for senior marketing roles in Australia. The line between marketing and revenue is thinning, and boards increasingly want a marketing leader who can be held to a commercial result, not a campaign award. A marketer who cannot speak the language of sales and finance is getting harder to promote.
Konstas's experience leading sales and commercial teams, the background REA chose for a role that owns marketing
What to do about it
If you lead marketing, get fluent in the commercial numbers now. Revenue, margin, cost of acquisition, lifetime value. These are becoming the language of your job, not finance's.
Tie your marketing reporting to business outcomes, not activity. Reach and impressions do not survive a boardroom that thinks in revenue.
Sit closer to sales. The org designs that win are collapsing the two functions, and the marketers who already work that way will be the ones trusted to run both.
If you hire marketers, weight commercial instinct alongside creative craft. The market is repricing what a marketing leader is worth.
The appointment is a data point. The pattern behind it is the story.