Hulu’s head of ad sales Peter Naylor has left the streaming company to take a job with Snap, where he will take the new VP of Americas position. Naylor’s responsibilities will include overseeing Snap’s business growth in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Naylor’s departure comes as Disney is folding Hulu more into its larger operations and comes two months after Randy Freer exited as CEO. In February, Hulu promoted Kelly Campbell to president to serve as his replacement under Disney direct-to-consumer chief Kevin Mayer.
The news was first reported by AdAge. Hulu declined to comment, but an individual familiar confirmed AdAge’s report. A Snap rep later confirmed Naylor was joining the Los Angeles-based company.
Naylor had led ad sales for Hulu for the last seven years. Hulu’s ad sales team will now report directly to Disney’s ad sales chief Rita Ferro in the interim. At Snap, Naylor will report to Jeremi Gorman, Snap’s chief business officer.
In January, Snap reported there were 218 million daily active Snapchat users by the end of 2019, and that the company had increased sales 44% year-over-year to $560.9 million.
You can read Gorman’s memo to staff on the hiring below:
Dear team,
I have some exciting news to share. Peter Naylor will be joining Snap as VP, Americas, effective early May. Peter currently serves as SVP and Head of Advertising Sales at Hulu where he’s spent the last six years building Hulu’s $1B+ ad business. He will be based in our New York office.
In this newly created position, Peter will report to me and be responsible for driving the continued growth of our business across the US, Canada and as we grow into Mexico.
I’m incredibly excited to work with Peter to amplify the already amazing work of our incredible US and Canada teams as we continue to grow revenue, and as we build out our Mexico operation, and to expand and enhance our brand and agency relationships, and gain even more market share.
We have seen success with Enterprise and Emerging working under a single threaded owner Internationally and believe that now is the right time to do the same in the Americas due to the size of our business and expanding marketplaces. As part of this new structure, Luke Kallis, VP US Advertiser Solutions, and Dominic Rioux, VP Emerging Advertising Solutions will report to Peter. Matt McGowan, GM for Canada, will also transition to Peter’s team. I want to applaud Luke, Dom, and Matt for the extraordinary work they’ve done to strengthen our business and help us rapidly accelerate our revenue growth. As mentioned, this structure will allow us to streamline our US and International Sales Orgs, with both Peter, and Claire Valoti having responsibility for both Enterprise and Emerging Sales in their respective regions, simplifying our structure both internally and externally.
David Roter, VP Global Agency Partnerships, will continue to lead our agency efforts, Global Brands, and Ads Partners teams and will continue to report to me under this new structure. Scaled Services, under Todd Miller, will also continue to report to me directly as we work to onboard new advertisers globally, as this too is a global org crossing North America, EU and APAC.
This new structure will also enable me to provide even more value to Snap in my role as CBO. We’ve accomplished so much in our work to evolve and enhance our customer facing business operations, and there’s more opportunity ahead, especially as we grow our engagement in new territories around the world. We are now on a path towards extraordinary growth, as a direct result of what our existing leaders have accomplished. As we scale, it’s important to ensure my attention is equally focused on our forthcoming revenue opportunities as our community expands, and that I do more to support our incredible Operations organization under the leadership of Radhika Kakkar.
I realize that announcing such a change in the sales organization at a time when we’re all sheltered in place, during a world health crisis, comes with challenges. It was obviously not our intention to do this when we couldn’t discuss it in person, but we are excited to move forward with this new structure and know you will all welcome Peter via Snapchat, email, and Google Hangouts as you get to know him virtually.
I want to assure our entire sales organization that we’ll continue to be thoughtful about supporting one another in this time, and find ways to win together. You and your leaders will continue to have unfiltered access to me and the rest of the leadership team here at Snap.
A little more background on Peter – prior to Hulu, Peter served as EVP of Digital Media Sales for NBCUniversal (NBCU) where he ran digital advertising sales for NBCU’s entertainment, news and sports digital properties. Before NBCU, Naylor served as the SVP of Sales for the iVillage Properties, which was acquired by NBCU in May 2006. Prior to joining iVillage, he served as Vice President of Sales for Terra Lycos. He started his internet sales career at Wired Digital. Peter is on the Board of Directors for the IAB, Ad Council, the IRTS Foundation and the TD Foundation, an not-for-profit organization that provides aid to children of wounded warriors.
Please join me in welcoming Peter when he starts. I’ll be gathering everyone for an all hands early next week and am happy to answer any questions you have when we get together.