Longtime ad-sales boss Dan Lovinger is set to exit NBCUniversal as the entertainment giant restructures its sports ad sales, TheWrap has learned.
Lovinger, who recently oversaw ad sales for the 2024 Paris Games, will depart his role as president of Olympic and Paralympic sales for NBCUniversal as sales for the Olympics and NBCU’s sports vertical combine into an “expanded team,” NBCU ad-sales president Alison Levin shared in an internal memo. Led by Peter Lazarus, the division will “leverage a unified strategy across all sports assets to maximize revenue from our properties,” per Levin.
“Together, our team must be hyper-focused on growing the business, selling audiences first, and maximizing revenue for our big moments,” Levin wrote in the memo outlining shifts across several ad-sales divisions, including agency and major holding company oversight as well as local stations. “To best achieve these goals, we need a structure that enables our sales team to do what they do best — sell — while bolstering our support functions to more effectively handle operational tasks, speed up decision-making and streamline processes.”
As part of the shifts, which also include a new “pillar” to diversify revenue from “new advertisers and partnerships under a new EVP role,” Levin noted the company is “saying goodbye to some of our longtime colleagues and friends,” saying “our business is stronger today because of their hard work.”
Lovinger helmed ad-sales for the 2024 Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games, which opened up programmatic buying for advertisers of all sizes amid a shift to streaming. “We’ve added multiple distribution points through social partners and worked with those social partners to sell into them through ad adjacencies and branded content,” Lovinger told TheWrap prior to the launch of the 2024 Games. “There is no one single way to buy the Olympics anymore. Every advertiser has their own version of it.”
Prior to his role as president of Olympic and Paralympic sales, Lovinger served as EVP of advertising sales for NBC Sports Group, where he oversaw sales across the group’s broadcast, cable and digital assets. At NBCU, Lovinger also served as EVP of the entertainment advertising sales group as well as EVP of ad-sales and integrated marketing for Telemundo. Beyond NBCUniversal, Lovinger has worked across advertising sales and business development for MTV, CNBC, NBC International and Phase2Media.
“As we look forward, it is imperative that we support one another and continue to foster a culture of transparency and collaboration,” Levin concluded her memo. “I am incredibly bullish on our future, and with this new streamlined structure, I know we have the right strategy, the right assets, and the right team in place to grow our market share and better position us to succeed.”
Variety first reported the news.
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