It's clever to announce management changes, or any potentially troubling news, late on a Friday afternoon. Everybody inside the company comes back the next week ready to start new, and hardly anybody outside the company pays any attention.
So kudos go to whomever at Netflix — ingoing or outgoing — wrote Friday's announcement that Chief Marketing Officer and 12-year company veteran Leslie Kilgore would be stepping down from day-to-day operations.
It's written to make the shift sound like a promotion. Kilgore is actually taking a position on Netflix's board, but as a non-executive director: i.e., an external director who isn't employed by the company. She's already been removed from Netflix's Management web page, but has yet to be added to the Board of Directors site. (Kilgore also serves on LinkedIn's board; before joining Netflix, she was director of marketing at Amazon. She's a pretty big fish.)
Stepping into Kilgore's spot is VP of Marketing (now interim Chief Marketing Officer) Jessie Becker — probably best known for authoring the 2010 blog post announcing Netflix's deeply unpopular price changes — and intriguingly, head of corporate communications Jonathan Friedland, who is getting a new title, Chief Communications Officer, reporting directly to Reed Hastings. Presumably, that title will come with more visibility inside and outside of the company and a seat at the head decision-making table.
Netflix has had its share of wrong turns in the last year, but CEO Reed Hastings has consistently argued that the company's decisions haven't been mistakes, but poorly timed or (notably) poorly communicated.
While Kilgore and Becker have helped popularize and grow Netflix for more than a decade, Friedland comes from the outside, a former Senior VP at Disney who joined Netflix more than a year ago. This shakeup frees up the company to set aside the Qwikster debacle and overhaul its marketing and communications strategy going forward.
That's good. I've argued before that the Netflix/Qwikster split and ensuing fallout showed that the company didn't fully understand the depth of customer anger at its pricing and content changes, and didn't have a sound strategy for directly (or better yet, preemptively) addressing that anger other than confusing name changes and endless apologies.
In short, as I wrote in September:
Perhaps the gods are pleased with this sacrifice, and will relent, that Netflix may grow and prosper and defeat its enemies once again.
Netflix did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
