Donna Speciale, a Madison Avenue veteran who has led advertising sales at WarnerMedia’s cable-TV operations since 2012, is expected to leave the company, according to four people familiar with the matter, marking the latest high-profile executive departure from the former Time Warner since AT&T acquired it in June of last year.
WarnerMedia declined to comment and Speciale did not respond immediately to queries sent via social media. Her anticipated departure was reported previously by The Information. Gerhard Zeiler, the executive who was named chief revenue officer of WarnerMedia and who oversees its relationships with advertisers and distributors, has been in the midst of putting his stamp on the unit, these people said, and restructuring operations.
The move is likely to raise some eyebrows among the company’s advertisers, many of whom have counted on Speciale for years to devise unique ways for them to stand apart from rivals and create lasting connections with consumers. Before joining Turner, the TV operation that is one of the main engines of WarnerMedia’s engines, Speciale oversaw media investment at MediaVest, the former division of Publicis Groupe, and enjoyed years-long relationships with advertisers such as Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola and Kraft Foods. Her departure wouldn’t come as a complete shock, given recent changes at WarnerMedia, said one media-buying executive, but is likely to create some confusion among clients.
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Speciale would leave just months after the departure of David Levy, the Turner veteran who previously oversaw the company’s revenue operations and sports properties. Levy hired Speciale and the two had established a successful working relationship, with Speciale’s familiarity with advertisers complementing Levy’s broader oversight of content distribution.
Observers attribute the overhaul to a desire by AT&T management to put more of a push behind addressable advertising and data-based ad deals. AT&T has in recent months touted its ability to use its DirecTV subscriber base and technology and its new Xandr ad-tech unit to help marketers place commercials more precisely and in ways that will help them reach their most likely customers. Whether or not those efforts gain fuller traction remains to be seen. And yet, there is evidence that the needs of the company’s advertisers are changing: In the most recent “upfront” ad sales market, WarnerMedia saw new emphasis placed on the sale of digital inventory.
And yet, Speciale has been at the forefront of many of these trends. During her tenure, Speciale has pushed for deals with advertisers based on new kinds of metrics, including sales goals, website visits and consumer responses. She was early to call for the scaling back of commercial breaks, vowing in 2015 to run fewer commercials during certain programs on TruTV. She was one of the architects of a unit called Open AP, a collaboration with Viacom, NBCUniversal, Fox and Univision that worked to define audience categories in a more uniform way so advertisers could make more of these types of “audience-based purchases.” WarnerMedia said in April it would pull out of the group, choosing to rely instead on its Xandr operations to achieve that goal.
She has a long history in the ad sector of pushing new ways of thinking to match the new ways consumers gain access to their video favorites. During her tenure on Madison Avenue, Speciale has pressed for new definitions of video advertising and has never been shy about establishing new concepts. She proved instrumental, for example, in helping the CW launch in 2006, while serving as a media-buying executive. She persuaded Procter & Gamble to align itself with CW’s debut week of programming with a concept called a “content wrap,” or a promotions that ran the length of an entire commercial break and looked much like programming. Today, that idea is widely used across the industry.
There is speculation among ad buyers and others that AT&T might like to put someone in the lead ad-sales role who has a greater working familiarity with John Stankey, the AT&T executive who leads WarnerMedia. These observers suggest AT&T might choose someone from its Xandr unit to move into the post. One person with whom buyers are familiar is Rick Welday, an ad-sales executive who had been leading AT&T’s national ad sales business. Still, there is no signal as of yet that WarnerMedia has identified a new ad-sales chief.
WarnerMedia has seen an exodus of its top executives in recent months as AT&T has taken more of a hands-on role. Richard Plepler, the former head of HBO, left at about the same time as Turner’s Levy.