Krishan Bhatia, a longtime advertising executive who joined Amazon last year to expand its footprint on Madison Avenue and in the annual upfront sales market, is leaving the technology giant, according to a memo sent to employees on Friday.
“Krishan Bhatia has made the decision to leave Amazon,” a spokesperson for Amazon told reporters this weekend. We’re grateful for his contributions to the Amazon Ads organization, and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”
It is not clear where Bhatia will go next. Ad Age was the first to report on Bhatia’s departure.
Bhatia joined Amazon after more than a decade at NBC Universal, where he played a central role in modernizing audience measurement and building new revenue systems as the company explored e-commerce and data-driven ad partnerships.
At Amazon, he was tapped to assemble a sales team that could attract sponsors for Prime Video, Twitch and other properties as the company increased its push into live sports and original programming.
Amazon demonstrated its ambitions last year by staging a high-profile sales event on the opening day of “Upfront Week,” a slot typically dominated by NBC Universal and Fox Corporation. The move underscored Amazon’s effort to claim a bigger share of the ad market traditionally controlled by broadcast and cable networks.
At NBC Universal, Bhatia was also known for his work with a “joint industry committee” made up of major media companies including NBC Universal, Fox, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD), Paramount Global and Televisa-Univision. The group has sought to certify new audience measurement systems and gave early backing to Comscore and VideoAmp, challengers to Nielsen’s dominance in ratings.
Bhatia was considered a close ally of Linda Yaccarino, the former NBC Universal ad-sales chief who later became CEO of the social media platform X before resigning in July.
Amazon recently said it “exceeded our own expectations in upfront commitments” this year, citing advertiser demand for its new NBA rights, which it said “provided incremental volume growth for us in this upfront cycle.”
