Warner Bros. Discovery's advertising chief is leaving. Read the memo sent to staff.
- Jon Steinlauf, Warner Bros. Discovery's top ad salesman, will leave at year's end.
- Warner Bros. Discovery faces challenges with a $9.1 billion writedown and lost NBA rights.
Jon Steinlauf, Warner Bros. Discovery's top ad salesman, will leave the media company at the end of the year, according to an internal memo from Bruce Campbell, WBD's chief revenue and strategy officer, that was shared with Business Insider. The memo stated the move was Steinlauf's decision.
No replacement was named; the company said it would perform a search to find Steinlauf's successor and that he would stay in place until that time.
Whoever gets the job will inherit a big TV portfolio including CNN, HBO, and Turner, but also a slew of headaches. Warner recently took a $9.1 billion writedown due to the declining value of its TV business, and just lost its most valuable sports rights, the NBA, to Comcast's NBCU and other rivals. On the other hand, there's no shortage of top ad salespeople available for hire after painful consolidation cost cuts across legacy media companies like Disney and Paramount (and WBD, for that matter). WBD also could pick someone from inside its ranks; it recently elevated a few salespeople including Marybeth Strobel and Ryan Gould.
Among insiders, speculation has been building for a while that Steinlauf would be hanging it up before long. The longtime lieutenant of CEO David Zaslav was charged with helping rebuild the company after multiple rounds of layoffs and cost cuts following Discovery's acquisition of WarnerMedia. Steinlauf had to tie together disparate assets like WarnerMedia's CNN and Turner Sports with Discovery's lifestyle fare like "Shark Week" and "90 Day Fiancé" for ad buyers, a challenge made harder by a soft ad market and declining linear TV ratings. He also presided over a messy integration of two sales organizations, steep staff cuts, and a tough 2022 TV upfronts period, the time when networks do their biggest deals of the year. Steinlauf admitted at the time that the company was ill-prepared and left money on the table.
Steinlauf led Discovery's ad sales business since 2018 under Zaslav pre-merger, having joined Discovery through its acquisition of Scripps Networks.
Read the memo about Steinlauf's departure from the company below: