Roku veteran Kristina Shepard is becoming a member of NBCUniversal within the newly created place of EVP, Streaming and Efficiency Gross sales and Partnerships.
Because the chief of a newly fashioned crew, Shepard will carry collectively key gross sales verticals together with efficiency, small-medium enterprise development and all main East Coast impartial businesses. She can even forge horizontal partnerships spanning streaming, programmatic, retail media, social and the corporate’s FAST networks. Her new group will deal with demand diversification and the client-wide adoption of digital partnerships.
NBCU is heading right into a consequential hall on the gross sales entrance, with the fiftieth anniversary of Saturday Night time Reside subsequent yr, adopted quickly after by the Winter Olympics in Italy. Telemundo additionally has Spanish-language rights to the FIFA World Cup, which will likely be contested in the summertime of 2026 in websites throughout North America.
“Kristina has an distinctive observe file in constructing and rising new companies throughout programmatic, SMB and digital enterprises,” stated Alison Levin, President of Promoting and Partnerships, to whom Shepard will report. “She has seamlessly led a multi-billion-dollar streaming operation and has cultivated intensive shopper relationships that may elevate NBCUniversal’s place within the CTV panorama and increase our aperture in crucial rising workstreams. As the corporate approaches two of its most influential years in tv historical past, it is going to be important for us to proceed to diversify our income, and Kristina is the proper particular person to steer us into that future.”
Shepard was beforehand VP of World Promoting Gross sales and Partnerships at Roku, the place she oversaw the corporate’s world advert income, together with enterprise partnerships and rising media and leisure gross sales. She helped develop new relationships and partnerships with purchasers and businesses who went on to turn into key companions with Roku. Previous to Roku, Shepard labored in cellular advert tech.
“NBCUniversal has set the gold-standard for combining premium content material with world class innovation in opposition to a backdrop of seismic change within the trade,” Shepard stated. “What the crew has constructed to this point is extraordinary, and as know-how continues to affect media and promoting, I can not wait to be on the entrance strains of probably the most thrilling development areas of our enterprise. Collectively, we’ve an actual alternative to make tv a tangible, performant resolution for entrepreneurs of all sizes.”
