Instagram hires Kristina Schake, formerly head of communications for Hillary Clinton's campaign and Michelle Obama, as communications chief
Kurt Wagner / Recode :
Context & Ripple Effects
Instagram is filling its top communications post with Kristina Schake, whose background spans Michelle Obama's office and Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign — a profile drawn straight from politics rather than tech PR. The hire lands in the middle of an active poaching market for communications chiefs: Uber had just pulled Jill Hazelbaker from Snapchat (itself a Google hire a year earlier), and Twitter brought in Anthem's Kristin Binns months before (its own senior comms director appointment).
The move also extends a familiar pattern of exec circulation between the platforms — Instagram had already taken product leadership from Twitter in Kevin Weil — and it foreshadows the structure that followed, when Rachel Whetstone ran communications across WhatsApp, Instagram, and Messenger before departing for Netflix.
First-order effects
- Instagram gains a communications chief with high-stakes political crisis experience at exactly the moment platform companies face growing public and press scrutiny.
- The hire intensifies the bidding war for a small pool of proven comms executives, with Uber, Snapchat, Twitter, and Google all having raided one another for the same roles.
Second-order effects
- Rivals respond in kind by recruiting from adjacent pools — politics, agencies, and each other — pushing compensation for senior communications talent up across the industry.
- As platforms compete on narrative as well as product, communications chiefs gain seats closer to strategy, mirroring how product leadership has already circulated between Instagram and Twitter.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, communications stops being a support function and becomes a strategic discipline at platform companies, staffed increasingly by veterans of campaigns and government as regulatory and reputational fights become permanent.
- A consolidated market for a handful of star communicators risks leaving smaller platforms without experienced crisis leadership, widening the gap between incumbents and challengers.
The trend: Platform companies are treating communications leadership as a competitive asset, cycling political operatives and rival executives through the role as public scrutiny of social media grows.