According to media reports on Tuesday (December 19), citing sources familiar with the situation, Alphabet's Google plans to restructure its advertising sales department on a large scale.
It is reported that Sean Downey, who is responsible for advertising sales for major clients in the Americas, stated at a door to door meeting last week that Google plans to restructure its advertising sales team, but did not specify whether this includes layoffs.
The department currently has 30000 employees and is mainly responsible for liaising with major advertisers.
Another person familiar with Google's plan said that Google plans to reconfigure employees in the sales department of large customers, including possible layoffs.
The report also stated that at the time of the news of this restructuring, Google is increasingly relying on machine learning technology to help customers purchase more advertisements from its search engines, YouTube, and other service platforms.
A person familiar with the matter said that these advertisements are expected to generate billions of dollars in annual revenue for the company. For many years, Google has been providing such tools to better serve its advertising business, which can automatically suggest and create new ads that it deems effective for customers.
The problem now is that the new tool will bring great benefits, but it does not require too much attention from employees. The relatively low expenditure means that the profit margin of advertising revenue will be high.
In January of this year, Alphabet announced plans to lay off 12000 employees worldwide, equivalent to 6% of its global workforce.
It is worth mentioning that in early June, after the merger of Google Maps application Waze's advertising system and Google Advertising Technology, employees in the Waze application department were laid off.