Exclusive: Facebook Grabs Microsoft Global Ad Head Carolyn Everson
Apparently, it's not only in Google's pond where Facebook fishes for talent-the social networking giant has recruited Microsoft's global advertising head Carolyn Everson as one of its top sales execs.
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has been assembling a Madison-facing executive bench for years — in July 2007 it named a former AOL official as its marketing chief — and hiring Carolyn Everson away from Microsoft extends that build-out from marketing into global ad sales. The framing matters: BoomTown notes Facebook is no longer fishing for talent only in Google's pond, meaning its recruiting net now spans the whole portal-and-software establishment.
Everson ran Microsoft's global advertising business, giving her direct relationships with the large brand marketers whose budgets Facebook needs as it converts its audience scale into revenue. For Microsoft, the loss lands on the very team tasked with monetizing its own ad stack against Google.
First-order effects
- Facebook immediately gains a senior sales leader with worldwide agency and advertiser relationships, strengthening its pitch to big brands at precisely the moment it is scaling its ad business.
- Microsoft must backfill its global advertising sales leadership while competing with both Google and, now, Facebook for the same brand dollars.
Second-order effects
- Rival portals and platforms face pressure to sweeten retention packages for their own ad-sales chiefs, as Facebook demonstrates it will pay to import established seller relationships rather than grow them internally.
- Brand advertisers gain another credible large-scale buyer of their budgets, tightening pricing and service competition across display advertising.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the contest among web platforms shifts from product and engineering talent toward institutionalized ad-sales organizations, with senior seller moves becoming a leading indicator of where each platform thinks brand money is heading.
- Poaching from former partners and rivals raises the likelihood of contractual and legal friction over executive mobility as the platforms' businesses collide.
The trend: Web-platform competition is expanding from engineering talent raids to the recruitment of advertising-sales leadership, as social networks move to capture brand budgets long held by portals.