Meta alumni are on the move – and they’re bringing the world’s most successful ad playbook with them to the next generation of would-be ad platform greats.
OpenAI, the newest ad platform of the bunch, has gone furthest fastest, hiring hundreds of Zuck alums, including former top brass. But it’s not alone. Amazon Ads, TikTok and Roku (recently acquired by Fox) have all recruited VPs in product and sales with the same name on their resume: Meta.
The appeal of hiring Meta veterans is undeniable. These are the folks who build the ne plus ultra of ad platforms.
Meta’s ad platform is user friendly enough to serve both mom-and-pop advertisers and to (mostly) satisfy massive agency holding companies and picky brands with multimillion-dollar budgets.
Its growth has been staggering. Meta’s once astonishing Series B valuation of $500 million during “The Social Network” era has multiplied 2,000 times since then to a market cap north of $1 trillion.
Even critics have to give Meta its due.
“It pains me to say this, but I think they were one of the best, [most] well-run companies in the industry for the longest time,” said MiQ CMO Jordan Bitterman, a media agency vet who was at Digitas and Mindshare during Meta’s rise.
Now, thanks to turmoil within, Meta employees are more poachable than ever.
Rolling layoffs have made the company feel unstable, not that morale has been all that great since the Cambridge Analytica scandal in 2018. The allure of leaving to join an early-stage platform on the upswing is a temptation that’s hard to resist.
The Meta alumni network, featuring OpenAI
OpenAI has been the most aggressive recruiter, and the most deliberate.
Long before the company officially launched its ads business in February, it hired former Facebook product leader Fidji Simo as its CEO for artificial general intelligence more than two years ago – a signal the ad industry didn’t miss. (Simo stepped down over the summer to focus on her health, but is…