Roku Poaches Snap and Meta Veteran to Lead Global Ad Sales as Connected TV Race Heats Up

When Jay Askinasi walked out of Roku's offices last November to become Paramount's chief revenue officer, he left behind a vacancy at the nerve center of one of television's fastest-growing advertising businesses. On Wednesday, Roku announced who will fill it: Patrick Harris, a 25-year digital advertising veteran whose résumé reads like a tour of Silicon Valley's most lucrative ad machines .

Harris will serve as senior vice president of global media revenue, reporting to Roku Media president Charlie Collier from New York. He starts March 9 . In the role, he will oversee the full scope of Roku's global advertising revenue growth, performance marketing efforts, and media product innovations — a brief that places him at the intersection of traditional television advertising and the data-driven, performance-oriented model that has made connected TV the industry's most contested battleground .

The appointment comes at a moment of considerable momentum for Roku. The company reported fourth-quarter results last week that exceeded Wall Street expectations and issued a rosy financial outlook for 2026 . Roku's platform business, whose revenue mainly comes from advertising, is on the upswing, and the company is on track to surpass the milestone of reaching streaming households at an unprecedented scale — a position that would cement its status as the dominant gateway through which American consumers access streaming content . For advertisers, that reach translates into something the traditional television industry has long struggled to deliver: measurable, accountable exposure with granular audience data.

"Patrick has built and scaled high-performing teams, earned the trust of the world's most sophisticated marketers, and helped grow some of the most influential ad-supported digital platforms in the industry," Collier said in a statement . He described Harris as a "builder" who can help Roku expand both its traditional advertising business and its growing performance advertising operations — the kind of lower-funnel campaigns designed to drive specific consumer actions rather than simply building brand awareness .

Harris's career trajectory maps neatly onto the evolution of digital advertising itself. He began in the early 2000s at Ask Jeeves, moved into business development at Reprise Media (later acquired by Interpublic Group), and then spent five years at Microsoft helping build search advertising revenue for Bing . From there, he joined Meta — then still Facebook — where he rose over 12 years to become vice president of global channels, leading a team of 1,400 across 30 countries and helping to scale the social media giant's advertising juggernaut into a multi-billion-dollar operation .

Most recently, Harris served as president, Americas at Snap Inc., where he managed the company's largest business and advertising partnerships across the United States and Canada. He oversaw teams focused on agency partnerships, ad-tech integrations, media relationships, and creator monetization . It is a résumé that combines deep institutional knowledge of how major brand advertisers think with hands-on experience in the performance marketing techniques that increasingly define how advertising budgets are allocated.

"Roku is defining the future of TV advertising with the scale, data, and vision to make television a truly accountable, performance-driven platform for marketers," Harris said. "I came here because Roku has the assets, momentum, and the opportunity to drive impact at a scale few companies can match at such a transformative moment for the industry" .

The hire also underscores an emerging pattern: Roku's sales organization has become something of a proving ground for advertising executives across the media industry. Askinasi's departure to Paramount as chief revenue officer followed former Roku executive Alison Levin's move to NBCUniversal, where she now serves as president of advertising and partnerships . The fact that rival media conglomerates are actively recruiting from Roku's ranks says as much about the company's strategic positioning as any earnings report.

Roku may not be the industry's biggest seller of advertising, but it is quickly becoming one of the sector's most influential . Because the company was early to connect itself with consumers' interest in streaming, it has become more familiar with new behaviors and customs tied to broadband-delivered entertainment than many of its competitors. That early-mover advantage has given Roku a data asset that traditional broadcasters and even some streaming rivals cannot easily replicate.

Collier has signaled ambitions that extend well beyond simply defending Roku's current market position. "I think we can move from hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of advertisers," he told investors during the recent earnings call — a vision that suggests Roku wants to replicate the self-serve, long-tail advertising model that powered the growth of platforms like Meta and Google, but applied to the living room screen.

To that end, Roku has recently struck new alliances with other companies' demand-side platforms, opening itself up to broader programmatic ad buys. It has also launched an Ad Manager product designed to help smaller advertisers create and place television commercials — a tool aimed squarely at the small and regional businesses that have historically been priced out of TV advertising . Roku is placing new emphasis on helping advertisers drive performance, and Harris is expected to help, particularly as more media companies court not only traditional clients but small and regional marketers as well .

For the broader connected TV industry, the Harris appointment signals that the competition for top advertising talent — and by extension, for advertising dollars — is intensifying. Amazon, Google's YouTube, and the legacy media companies with their own streaming platforms are all vying for the same pool of brand budgets that is shifting from linear television to streaming. Roku's bet is that its combination of hardware scale, first-party viewer data, and platform neutrality gives it a structural advantage that no single content company can replicate.

Whether that thesis holds will depend in no small part on whether executives like Harris can convert Roku's household reach into advertising revenue at rates that justify the company's ambitions. The strong Q4 results suggest the trajectory is promising . But in a sector where Amazon can subsidize ad operations with e-commerce profits and YouTube benefits from Google's search data infrastructure, Roku's path to tens of thousands of advertisers will require more than momentum — it will require the kind of sustained advertiser relationships that Harris spent a quarter-century building.