Meta Loses Veteran Ad Official Amid Current Organizational Restructuring

Meta Platforms, Inc's META veteran advertising product executive Dan Levy prepares to depart in May amid a months-long pruning of projects and staff.
Levy, currently Meta's vice president of business messaging, said in Meta's internal social network post on Monday that he wanted to focus on family after losing a child to leukemia, Reuters reports.
"I made this decision slowly (over the last 2+ years), and then all of a sudden," he wrote.
Levy has been at Meta for 14 years. Zuckerberg has flagged the business messaging project he heads for growth potential.
In 2022, Meta replaced Levy as head of ad and business products.
Previously, Levy ran Meta's ads and business products division, now called Monetization. Veteran John Hegeman replaced Levy in 2022, becoming Levy's boss.
The Monetization unit supervised Meta's transformation to Apple Inc's AAPL iOS privacy changes in 2021 which cut Meta's access to the valuable user data around which it had built its targeted ad business.
The division has tried to build in-app commerce features to compensate for that "signal loss" while using artificial intelligence to improve ad targeting precision, with mixed success.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said the business line - in which brands pay to use Meta's WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram chat services will likely be the company's "next major pillar" of sales growth.
Last week, Meta disclosed a second major round of layoffs tied to a restructuring plan to kill off lower-priority projects and "flatten" layers of middle management.
Another ad VP on the sales side, Michelle Klein, shared her exit plans this week. She led a marketing unit of around 1,000 people and steered the company's rebranding from Facebook to Meta.
Price Action: META shares traded higher by 1.47% at $202.75 premarket on the last check Thursday.

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