Echostar Corporation has hired industry veteran Tom Fochetta to serve as its senior vice president of Dish Media, the advertising and sales unit at its satellite and streaming television provider Dish Network.
Fochetta joins Dish Media from Samsung, where he served as the vice president of the electronic company’s sales and advertising unit for North America. Samsung offers ad inventory through its Samsung TV Plus streaming service as well as on some Samsung connected devices like smart TVs, phones and tablets.
At Samsung, Fochetta was particularly focused on Samsung TV Plus, building the free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) platform from the ground up. He helped Samsung forge and expand commercial advertising and sales partnerships with respect to the FAST product.
Echostar is hoping Fochetta brings some of that same magic to Dish Network, at a time when the company is increasingly focused on building out its streaming product, Sling TV. Last year, the company re-branded its own FAST platform as Sling Freestream, which offers hundreds of linear content channels and thousands of episodes of on-demand programming through the Sling TV app, without any subscription.
Dish is also harnessing the power of dynamic ad insertion technology across its Internet-connected set-top boxes associated with Dish’s traditional satellite television service.
“I am excited to join Dish Media and contribute to its continued success,” Fochetta said in a statement. “I look forward to working with the talented team and leveraging my experience to drive growth to the existing robust portfolio of innovative ad sales technology.”
“We are thrilled to welcome Tom Fochetta to the Dish Media team,” Gary Schanman, the Executive Vice President and Group President at Dish Video Services, said on Tuesday. “His extensive experience in advanced ad sales at Samsung, Amazon and Google and proven track record of success and innovation make him ideal to lead our exemplary media sales team and accelerate our company’s migration into more impression-based advertising sales. Tom is the ultimate choice to drive us into the future and help us set and execute our vision of a fully converged, omnichannel and data-driven advertising ecosystem.”
Echostar says Fochetta will work closely with the company’s executive team to execute on media sales organization and strategy. It wasn’t clear from the announcement where Fochetta will be based; he worked out of New York City while with Samsung Ads. Dish and Echostar are headquartered in Colorado.
Prior to working with Samsung, Fochetta spent six years at Amazon as their director of advertising sales. Before then, he worked as the vice president of sales at DoubleClick, moving to Google as its head of industry when the search giant acquired the ad platform. He also served as a board member of the Interactive Advertising Bureau for more than eight years.
