Facebook's Sandberg Nominated To Disney Board
A big-name Silicon Valley addition to the Walt Disney (NYSE: DIS) board. The company just nominated Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg to its board of directors. In a statement, Disney Chairman John Pepper says Sandberg …
Context & Ripple Effects
Disney's nomination of Sheryl Sandberg lands at the moment Facebook has become an advertising force rather than a novelty: the network counts 350 million members spending 10 billion minutes a day on the site, and an eMarketer projection released this month forecasts Facebook overtaking MySpace in worldwide ad revenue in 2010, with $605 million flowing to Facebook against $385 million to MySpace.
As Facebook's chief operating officer, Sandberg built the ad business those numbers describe, so Chairman John Pepper is effectively recruiting the operator of the fastest-growing channel in digital advertising onto the board of one of the world's largest media companies. The nomination also comes as Facebook consolidates into its former Hewlett-Packard building near Stanford and keeps expanding headcount in Palo Alto — a company scaling up on every front at once.
First-order effects
- Sandberg now holds a director seat at a top-tier media conglomerate while continuing to run Facebook's monetization engine, giving her visibility into how a major content owner prices and packages advertising.
Second-order effects
- For Disney, the seat provides direct access to the executive shaping where brand ad dollars are moving — the same dollars eMarketer projects shifting decisively toward Facebook in 2010 — while rival media boards face pressure to add their own internet-operator voices rather than rely on traditional media backgrounds.
Third-order effects
- If media companies keep recruiting executives who hold operating roles at the platforms reshaping their industry, boardrooms become the meeting ground between Hollywood and Silicon Valley — and directors whose employers compete with the company they oversee will increasingly have to navigate conflicts of interest between platform and content owner.
The trend: Media conglomerates are pulling social-platform executives onto their boards as advertising budgets migrate toward networks like Facebook.