Facebook Hires First CMO Gary Briggs from Google
Mr. Briggs Replaces VP-Product Marketing Eric Antonow — Facebook has tapped a seasoned technology marketing executive most recently with Google to be its first-ever CMO. — Gary Briggs, who'd previously been chief marketer …
Context & Ripple Effects
Facebook has never had a CMO before — its marketing muscle has lived under product marketing, with VP Eric Antonow holding that brief until now. The company did name a marketing chief once before, an ex-AOL official back in 2007, so elevating the role to the C-suite marks a change in how seriously the company treats brand and consumer marketing.
The hire also extends an established pattern: Facebook pulled product director Tom Stocky from Google in 2011, and Briggs arrives straight from Google as well. That the story traveled same-day across CNET, AllThingsD and The Next Web reflects how much attention any Google-to-Facebook executive move draws.
First-order effects
- Eric Antonow is out of the top marketing seat, replaced by Gary Briggs as Facebook's first-ever chief marketing officer — a structural upgrade of marketing to C-level reporting.
- Briggs inherits a consumer-marketing mandate at a company whose revenue engine is advertising, making his remit central rather than ceremonial.
Second-order effects
- The Google-to-Facebook pipeline tightens further after the Stocky hire, giving Facebook more executives steeped in how a scaled consumer-advertising business markets itself.
- Peer consumer-internet companies face pressure to match the move, since a rival now fields a dedicated CMO for brand and user-facing positioning.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, maturing consumer-web firms converge on the full corporate playbook — CMOs, formal brand functions — as they shift from scrappy growth to advertising incumbency.
- Executive circulation between Google and Facebook hardens into a structural feature of the industry, with each company serving as the other's bench.
The trend: As Facebook matures into an advertising business, it is importing Google-trained executives to build out the traditional corporate functions it once ran lean.