As Amazon ramps up its efforts to woo ad dollars that once were earmarked for traditional TV, it is also luring ad executives who tried to capture that money for TV networks.
Krishan Bhatia, previously a senior executive at NBCUniversal who ran the business aspects of the company’s ad-sales division, is joining Amazon as vice president of global video advertising for Amazon Ads. He will be charged with leading a global sales seeking to monetize Amazon’s growing video operations tied to sports, Freevee, Twitch and Prime Video.
He will report to Alan Moss, global ad sales vice president.
“I’m excited about the impact his wealth of experience in the media and advertising business will have for our customers in the streaming TV space,” Moss said.
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Amazon in January raided Disney to hire Jeremy Helfand, who rose from a position at Hulu to supervise all advertising innovation across Disney’s interactive businesses, and named him a vice president and head of advertising for Amazon’s Prime Video.
At NBCUniversal, Bhatia was deeply enmeshed with developing new systems of audience measurement, part of a growing effort by many TV companies to find alternative methods of counting viewership as audiences move to on-demand streaming. Her also worked on building new revenue systems and infrastructure as NBCU grew more vocal about its efforts to strike e-commerce and data partnerships with advertisers. He was known to be a confidant of Linda Yaccarino, the former NBCU ad-sales chairman who is now CEO of the social-media outlet now known as X.
He has also been involved with a “joint industry committee” backed by many of the biggest U.S. media companies that aims to gain industry certification of new types of audience-measuring technology. This committee, backed by Fox, NBCU, Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount Global and TelevisaUnivsion. recently gave early nods to technology from Comscore and VideoAmpe, two Nielsen rivals that have worked in recent years to challenge that company’s status as the media industry’s primary means of audience tabulation.
Bhatia may have to learn to work with Nielsen more closely. Nielsen is the primary tabulator of audience for Amazon’s “Thursday Night Football,” and Amazon and the NFL have both pushed to incorporate first-party data from Amazon in Nielsen’s study of that program. The move, if enacted, would mark a first step toward utilizing inputs from the companies Nielsen measures as it produces its widely used tabulation of national viewership, and many TV executives have denounced the plan.
