NBCUniversal has named Alison Levin as its new president of advertising and partnerships. Additionally, Karen Kovacs has been promoted to president of client partnerships for the advertising and partnerships division.
Levin is currently employed at Roku and will start at NBCU next month. Roku will start the recruitment process to replace Levin immediately. During her time with the streaming and device company, Levin served as vice president of global ad revenue and marketing solutions and was the company’s first ad sales hire.
Levin will officially join NBCUniversal next month and will assume oversight of all advertising sales initiatives across national, local, SMB Growth, Peacock, sports and Olympic and Paralympic sales. Additionally, she will help shape the division’s new audience-focused sales strategy. Levin will report directly to Mark Marshall, the company’s newly appointed advertising and partnerships global chairman. Marshall was promoted to his position in late August of this year.
As for Kovacs, in her new role she will continue to lead all new and emerging client relationships while also gaining oversight of the company’s national offices. In this iteration of her role, she and her team will work to develop 360 partnerships with top CMOs in the industry. She too will report to Marshall.
“Alison is extremely well-respected across the advertising ecosystem for her focus on partnership as well as her innovative leadership in the connected TV and digital ad space,” Marshall said in a press release. “As a pioneer of the shift to data-driven selling, Alison brought instrumental value to the marketplace at large, and I have no doubt her acumen and experience will bring incredible value to our team. Karen Kovacs has been essential in the collaboration and growth of our enterprise partnerships with clients, and I could not be more thrilled to have these two talented executives join our broader leadership team in advancing our division forward.”
During her time at Roku, Levin led advertising for the company’s new product and go-to-market strategy, which included Roku’s streaming TV division. Prior to that, Levin was a sales executive at the software company YuMe. She has also held sales positions with IAC and BusinessWeek.
Kovacs comes from within the NBCUniversal family. Before this promotion, she was the executive vice president of client partnerships for the company’s advertising and partnership’s division. One of her most notable client efforts was the development and launch of NBCUniversal’s Family is Universal campaign.
