Longtime Meta ad exec to leave company in May

A longtime Meta advertising product executive will leave the company in May, according to an internal announcement by Reuters, amid a months-long pruning of projects and staff that Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg has dubbed the year of efficiency. Dan Levy, currently the social media giant's vice president of business messaging, said in a post to Meta's internal social network that he wanted to focus on family after losing a child to leukemia.

He wrote that I made a decision slowly over the last 2 years and then all of a sudden.

A Meta spokesman confirmed Levy's departure and said business messaging would remain a strategic priority and area of investment for the company this year.

Levy has been at Meta for 14 years. Zuckerberg flagged his business messaging project for growth potential, even though he was replaced as head of ad and business products last year.

Previously, Levy ran Meta's ads and business products division, now called Monetization. He was replaced last year by John Hegeman, another long-time executive who had managed ads under Levy and became Levy's boss in his new role.

That larger unit was responsible for Meta's adaptation to Apple's privacy changes in 2021, a costly disruption that cut Meta's access to the valuable user data around which it had built its targeted advertising business.

The division has tried to build in-app commerce features to make up for signal loss, while using artificial intelligence to improve Ad targeting precision, with mixed success.

Business messaging is a part of the solution, as it could be used to monetize the popular chat app WhatsApp, which Meta bought for $22 billion in 2014, but has yet to make a lot of revenue.

Zuckerberg said that the business line - in which brands pay to use Meta's WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram chat services to sell products and manage customer interactions - is likely to be the next major pillar of sales growth.

Levy's departure comes after a difficult season for Meta, which last week announced a second major round of layoffs related to a restructuring plan to kill off lower-priority projects and flatten layers of middle management.

Michelle Klein, another ads VP on the sales side, also announced this week that she was leaving. She led a marketing unit of around 1,000 people and steered the company's rebrand from Facebook to Meta, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Meta confirmed her departure. Klein didn't respond immediately to a request for comment.