Jerry Hunter: Last News

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Patrick Harris, after nearly 12 years at Meta and Facebook, has joined Snap as senior VP of partnerships, leading both ad-agency and partnership teams at the company. Harris, who most recently served as Meta’s VP of global channels, is based in New York and reports to COO Jerry Hunter, who previously was Snap’s SVP of engineering. “We are so excited to welcome Patrick to Snap to help us scale our global agency and partnerships businesses. His experiences across both advertising and partnerships made him the perfect candidate to unify and scale Snap’s impact in these areas.” In addition, Snap has hired David Sommer as head of verticals, overseeing the consumer packaged goods (CPG) vertical for the U.S. Also based in New York, Sommer hails from shopping app Fetch, where he was chief commercial officer, following almost 11 years at Meta as head of industry for CPG, retail partnerships and shopper marketing.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Rob Wilk, most recently global head of advertising at Microsoft, joined Snap as the first president of Americas overseeing the Snapchat parent company’s sales in the region. Wilk, who is based out of Snap’s New York offices, reports to Snap COO Jerry Hunter. In the new role, Wilk will run sales across the U.S., Canada and Latin America and will be responsible for supporting and managing its largest advertising partners in the region. Wilk steps into the Snap job after the departure last summer of the company’s two top ad sales execs, Jeremi Gorman and Peter Naylor, who joined Netflix. “We were impressed not only with Rob’s hands-on experience building a large and growing advertising business, but also his approach to leading customer-centric sales teams and developing strong, sustained customer relationships,” Hunter wrote in an internal memo to Snap staff Monday.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Snap announced that it was cutting 20% of its workforce in a bid to contain costs — eliminating nearly 1,300 positions — and that the company will discontinue funding original series. With the moves, Snap estimated it will save $500 million in cash expenses on an annualized basis relative to the second quarter of 2022. That includes a $50 million estimated reduction in fixed content costs with the elimination of Snap Originals. Shares of Snap were up 10% Wednesday in mid-morning trading on the restructuring news, but the stock price is still down more than 75% year to date.