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 multi-million-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 still an advisor to OpenAI.)
Meanwhile, David Dugan, OpenAI’s head of global ad solutions, and Benji Shomair, its VP of monetization, both came to the AI platform after logging a dozen years apiece striking Facebook partnerships and building the advertiser customer base. It was Dugan who took the stage in Cannes this summer to formally introduce the ad world to ChatGPT advertising.
But the senior hires are only part of the story.
As of now, 10% of OpenAI employees list “Meta” somewhere in the experience section of their LinkedIn profile (a rough gauge of how many Meta-to-OpenAI employees exist). The ranks are filled with managers, engineers and mid-level employees from Menlo Park.
That influence is visible in the product.
“The platform looks very, very similar to the old Meta ad manager back in the day,” said Lara Koenig, MiQ VP of global strategy and partnerships, who is keeping close tabs on its buying user interface and capabilities.
To scale as quickly as OpenAI clearly wants to, Koenig said, “you need the simplest platform that is not going to break, and that has new features every day.”
Even OpenAI’s feature development roadmap – like conversion APIs – feels like a “Meta move,” she added.
Amazon Ads grows up
If OpenAI is the newest devotee of the Meta playbook, then Amazon Ads is the proof of concept. After years of work, Amazon’s DSP, fueled in part by an influx of Meta talent, has become the envy of the industry: simple and laser-focused on measurable results.
It wasn’t always that way. In the past, Amazon’s platform was roundly criticized for its clunky user interface and incompatible, in-house ad tech. To many, the gap between its potential and the reality signaled either Amazon’s arrogance, cluelessness or perhaps even indifference toward the advertisers sending it billions.
The fix came from outside. Amazon Ads hired numerous industry veterans from other platforms, including ex-Meta VP Kelly MacLean, the executive now leading Amazon’s DSP product and engineering.
“Complexity has always been a feature, not a bug, and I think that needs to be completely reversed,” she said of her work on Amazon’s demand-side platform. Her goal, she said, is to “continue to simplify” the DSP, even as it adds features.
TikTok goes its own way
TikTok, too, has made Meta hires in order to build its platform.
The app’s VP of product management, David Kaufman, logged three-and-a-half years at Meta, and a year more at Google. Blake Chandlee, the company’s former sales lead and president of global business solutions, spent a dozen years at Meta before joining TikTok in 2019.
A LinkedIn count puts the number of ex-Meta employees who now work at TikTok at around 700 – enough to sway the direction of the platform, but a far lower percentage than the ex-Meta crew at OpenAI.
That’s because TikTok’s ambition isn’t to copy Meta. It’s to build a platform that encompasses every other piece of the digital advertising pie, from in-feed ads to search and video, creator advertising and an integrated shop.
“TikTok has everything,” Kaufman said, when asked to compare the platforms. “I think it’s pretty hard to find that span of capability in one unified experience.”
Who does Fox hire?
And then there’s CTV, which has long struggled to attract the mid-market advertisers who are Meta’s bread and butter.
Roku, recently acquired by Fox, is betting it can change that dynamic by also putting a Meta veteran in a top ad role. Patrick Harris, who spent nearly a dozen years at Meta, became Roku’s SVP of advertising and partnerships this spring (by way of a two-year stint at Snap before that).
Smaller advertisers have long been intimidated by TV’s high production costs and complex buying process, your local carpet king or mattress giant notwithstanding.
“CTV platforms are in a race to bring in mid-market and lower-budget ad dollars,” said Sarah Caputo, founder and CEO of strategic marketing consultancy Fraction Method. “These are the barriers the self-service products at Meta and Google were built to compete against,” she said, “[and] ex-Meta are a natural fit to fuel CTV’s next phase of expansion.”
As the big TV programmers roll out their own self-serve ad platforms, they’re being built on the Meta model and, in some cases, by former Meta employees.
The talent factory
Across the history of ad tech, there have been a handful of companies whose alumni went on to do great things across the industry. DoubleClick, Razorfish, Yahoo and AppNexus all incubated many future industry leaders.
Often, internal turbulence has shaken talent loose, and Meta is no exception. It’s faced ongoing morale issues ever since Cambridge Analytica in 2018.
“While Meta’s ad business continues to print money, working inside the company is not the most stable environment,” Caputo said. “Repeated reorgs and flattened models where managers are now running teams of fifty have taken a toll.”
As a result, she added, “Meta has inadvertently created an enormous bench of highly trained talent who know how to build and sell measurable, self-serve ad products, but who are increasingly choosing to leave rather than wait out the next restructuring.”
Bitterman’s assessment was more blunt: “Google does a much better job retaining its employees,” he said.
The risk of leaving Meta
Not that leaving Meta isn’t sometimes a gamble.
Applying the Meta playbook works best if a would-be platform is on an up-and-to-the right exponential growth trajectory. Folks who left Meta for Pinterest learned this lesson the hard way.
Back when Pinterest was first getting started with its ad platform, the company brought over many Facebook employees eager to work on an early-stage ad platform – and grab the equity that comes along with that mission. Most notably, Tim Kendall, Pinterest’s president for six years, joined from Meta in 2012.
But many of those who migrated from Meta were humbled when it became clear that user growth at Pinterest could not come close to Facebook’s. Some of those early Pinterest employees boomeranged right back to the big blue mother ship.
OpenAI has its sights set on generating $100 billion in ad revenue by 2023 – but eMarketer thinks it could miss that target by 90%. An easy-to-use, Meta-inspired ad manager only gets you so far if the underlying platform stalls or the scale isn’t there.
Not that Meta’s dominance was inevitable, even though its success feels like a fait accompli in retrospect. Its ads team navigated pivots that would have sunk a platform with less capable employees. The ads team, in particular, dealt with many thorny situations – the shift from desktop to mobile, the integration of ads to Instagram, managing multiple ad boycotts and the PR crises that came with them – all while keeping ad revenue up double digits quarter after quarter.
That’s why ex-Meta employees are in high demand. They didn’t just build a great ad platform, they kept it great and functioning under pressure.
But two questions remain as the Meta diaspora fans out across the industry: Can Meta retain its dominance even as its employees apply the playbook elsewhere? And will any of these former Meta folks help build the advertising business that will eventually overshadow the social platform that wrote the playbook?