Snap, as part of restructuring of its ad-sales group, upped Luke Kallis from head of West Coast sales to VP, U.S. enterprise business solutions.
His new appointment comes under the Snapchat parent company’s reorganization of its U.S. advertising team under chief business officer Jeremi Gorman from a regional structure to one oriented on business categories. In the reshuffle, initiated last month, Snap’s ad group now comprises three teams: enterprise (i.e., large brand advertisers), emerging advertisers and direct-response clients. On Snap’s first quarter 2019 earnings call, Gorman told analysts, “While we expect some disruption to our near-term business, we are confident that this is the right long-term structure.”
Kallis is now in charge of all major Snap client business in the U.S. He joined Snap in June 2015 and has focused on Hollywood studio clients. Previously, he spent over five years at Vevo as senior VP, national sales.
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Other senior members of Gorman’s team are Claire Valoti, VP international, who leads sales outside the U.S. Last month, Snap hired David Roter, who hails from Twitter and ESPN, as VP, global agency partnerships. Another key leader the org is VP of operations Radhika Kakkar, who joined in 2015 from Accenture.
Snap’s U.S. Enterprise sales team is now organized into nine verticals: entertainment, tech, auto, retail, restaurants, travel/industrial/energy, consumer packaged goods, telco/financial services, and health care/government.
Gorman, former head of ad sales at Amazon, joined Snap last November. She’s part of CEO/co-founder Evan Spiegel’s new crew of senior execs, recruited after a spate of high-level exits over the past year including chief content officer Nick Bell, head of ad sales Jeff Lucas, and CFO Tim Stone.
Snap is trying to sustain newfound momentum, coming after a redesign of the Snapchat app last year that turned off many users. In Q1 2019, the company topped Wall Street expectations on user growth and revenue, with Snapchat boosting its daily active user base for the first time in a year. It recently announced a new premium ad program called Snap Select, designed to let advertisers reserve and buy inventory for the top shows in Snapchat Discover.