It’s official: Kelly Campbell is the new president of Peacock, NBCUniversal announced.
The appointment comes two days after Campbell announced that she was leaving Disney’s Hulu, where she had served as president for less than two years. PvNew previously reported that she was in talks about a top Peacock job.
Campbell will join the Peacock leadership team starting in November and will be based in the Los Angeles area. She will report to Matt Strauss, chairman of NBCU’s Direct-to-Consumer and International division.
In the role, Campbell will be responsible for Peacock’s streaming business and work closely with leadership across NBCUniversal’s TV, film, news and sports programming groups on Peacock live and original programming. She will take over for Gidon Katz, NBCU’s president of direct-to-consumer overseeing Peacock, who informed the company that he plans to leave for another opportunity.
“On the heels of Peacock’s success in its first year, we are thrilled to bring Kelly’s leadership and expertise to the team as we continue to accelerate Peacock’s vision and strategy,” Strauss said in a statement.
This July, Comcast said Peacock, its hybrid ad-supported/subscription streamer, reached 54 million total signups since its initial debut in April 2020 to Comcast customers (followed by a nationwide rollout in July). For the second quarter of 2021, Peacock had more than 20 million monthly active users — but the media company hasn’t broken out how many paying subs Peacock has.
Comcast also said Peacock would begin an international rollout later this year as a free add-on for Sky’s satellite TV customers in Europe, representing a base of some 20 million households.
Campbell originally joined Hulu in 2017 as chief marketing officer, taking over as president after the exit of former Hulu CEO Randy Freer. Prior to Hulu, she spent 12 years at Google, where she held a variety of leadership and marketing roles across the Google Ads and Google Cloud businesses. She began her career in investment banking at JPMorgan Chase. She graduated magna cum laude from Vanderbilt University with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
Campbell’s sudden departure from Hulu was announced Monday in a memo to staff by Rebecca Campbell, Disney’s chairman of international operations and direct-to-consumer, who said that Kelly was no longer with Hulu “effective immediately.” (The two execs are not related.) Kelly Campbell’s previous direct reports at Hulu will for the time being report to Rebecca Campbell until Disney fills the position.
