- Meta Platforms, Inc’s (NASDAQ:META) veteran advertising product executive Dan Levy prepares to depart in May amid a months-long pruning of projects and staff.
- Levy, currently Meta’s vice president of business messaging, said in Meta’s internal social network post on Monday that he wanted to focus on family after losing a child to leukemia, Reuters reports.
- “I made this decision slowly (over the last 2+ years), and then all of a sudden,” he wrote.
- Levy has been at Meta for 14 years. Zuckerberg has flagged the business messaging project he heads for growth potential.
- In 2022, Meta replaced Levy as head of ad and business products.
- Previously, Levy ran Meta’s ads and business products division, now called Monetization. Veteran John Hegeman replaced Levy in 2022, becoming Levy’s boss.
- The Monetization unit supervised Meta’s transformation to Apple Inc’s (NASDAQ:AAPL) iOS privacy changes in 2021 which cut Meta’s access to the valuable user data around which it had built its targeted ad business.
- The division has tried to build in-app commerce features to compensate for that “signal loss” while using artificial intelligence to improve ad targeting precision, with mixed success.
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the business line – in which brands pay to use Meta’s WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram chat services will likely be the company’s “next major pillar” of sales growth.
- Last week, Meta disclosed a second major round of layoffs tied to a restructuring plan to kill off lower-priority projects and “flatten” layers of middle management.
- Another ad VP on the sales side, Michelle Klein, shared her exit plans this week. She led a marketing unit of around 1,000 people and steered the company’s rebranding from Facebook to Meta.
- Price Action: META shares traded higher by 1.47% at $202.75 premarket on the last check Thursday.
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