Profile of Jeremi Gorman, Snap's chief business officer, credited with turning around Snap's ad business, which is expected to make $1.36B this year, up 30% YoY
KEY POINTS — Snap in October hired Jeremi Gorman from Amazon, where she was most recently head of global field sales.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Snap hired Jeremi Gorman out of Amazon as chief business officer in October 2018, its ad business was the company's biggest question mark. This CNBC profile is the mid-arc scorecard: ad revenue expected at $1.36B this year, up 30% YoY, with Gorman credited for the rebuild.
The mechanics behind the number trace to product decisions like Snap Select, which gave advertisers fixed-CPM access to premium shows and vetted partners — a sales-friendly package that pairs with the Amazon-style field-sales discipline Gorman brought. The subsequent beats ($679M in Q3 2020, up 52%, then $911M in Q4 2021) are what turned a turnaround story into a recruiting target.
First-order effects
- Snap's advertisers shift from experimental buys to a structured sales operation run on Amazon's field-sales model, with predictable products like fixed-CPM premium inventory lowering the barrier for brand budgets.
- Gorman's own standing changes immediately: the profile cements her as one of the few executives with a documented record of scaling a social platform's ad business from the sales side.
Second-order effects
- Rivals building ad businesses from scratch start treating Snap's bench as a talent pool — realized when Netflix hired both Gorman and Americas sales VP Peter Naylor in 2022 to lead its ad-supported tier.
- Amazon loses institutional knowledge of how it sold ads at scale to a direct competitor in social advertising, while Snap gains credibility with the large brand buyers Amazon trained.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad-sales leadership becomes a transferable asset across media types: the same playbook that rebuilt Snap's business gets ported to streaming, making proven CBOs the scarce input in every new ad-supported launch.
- Platforms that turn around ad businesses via premium, fixed-price inventory push the broader market toward packaged, guaranteed buys rather than pure auction — raising the floor for what smaller platforms can charge.
The trend: As every media company bolts on an ad business, proven ad-sales executives like Jeremi Gorman become the most poached resource in the industry, moving their playbooks from social platforms to streaming.