Twitter is shaking up its content team, Variety reported. The live-video business unit will disappear, with its functions going to the content-partnerships team. Kay Madati, Twitter’s global head of content partnerships, wants to adopt a more regional management structure, rather than one based on categories such as news, sports or live video. She announced the changes in an internal memo.
The move by Twitter to integrate the standalone live-content group into the regional-focused structure comes after the company announced around 30 new or expanded video pacts at its recent 2018 Digital Content NewFronts event in New York City. Those include deals with NBCUniversal, Disney/ESPN, Viacom, Vice Media and Will Packer Media. The partnerships span entertainment, news, lifestyle, music, gaming and sports, including expansions of existing deals with Live Nation Entertainment, Major League Baseball and Major League Soccer.
Twitter confirmed the changes to Variety, saying it wanted to streaming its content strategy. Over the past year, our global content partnerships team has made significant progress in bringing the best selection of content to Twitter, helping our partners better extend, scale, market, and monetize,” Twitter said in the statement. “To further accelerate this positive momentum, we’re taking steps to streamline this organization to enable increased efficiency around the world and better align with our global strategy and vision.”
With the new structure, the global content partnerships team will be divided into five regions, namely the US, Latin America/Canada, EMEA, Japan/Korea and Asia Pacifica. These regions will be run by executives who will all report directly to Madati, who joined the company from BET in the fall.
There will also be new appointments and departures. Laura Froelich, the previous global director of sports partnerships, will head the US operations, David Grossman, formerly Twitter ’s global head of entertainment, will lead US entertainment. Peter Greenberger, the former head of global news, will leave Twitter. Todd Swidler, the former Bloomberg Media executive hired to lead the live video group a year ago, will also leave the company. The lead members of the live-video team, namely Katie Wells, Nick Sallon and Bo Han, will move to Twitter’s Content Partnerships group. Meanwhile, Lara Cohen, who rejoined Twitter this past February as global partnerships solutions leader, will remain in the same role, reporting to Madati. Twitter wants to now hire new people for its live video operations, its Live Brand Studio for live-streaming branded content campaigns, for US sports and news and other functions.
