TikTok is facing another potential ban as April 5th looms large on the calendar. One executive for the company is departing ahead of that deadline.
Blake Chandlee, the Global Business Solutions Head, who oversees all advertising sales and marketing for the digital video platform, is leaving the company.
“As our offerings become more technical and our client product solutions become more sophisticated to provide even more value, it is important that Global Business Solutions (GBS) and Global Monetization Product Technology (GMPT) operate increasingly hand-in-hand,” Chandlee wrote in a memo to staffers announcing his exit. “To enable this, I have decided its best to streamline under one department lead and will be scaling back my day-to-day role to an advisory one.”
Chandlee will officially exit TikTok on Tuesday, April 1st. He is not the only high-level executive to depart the company in recent weeks. North American ad sales chief Sameer Singh and U.S. general manager of agency business Jack Bamberger have also recently left the company.
The announcement comes as the platform sees the end of a 75-day extension on its potential ban come to a close on Saturday, April 5th. In January, the United States Supreme Court upheld a law banning the app unless it was sold to a company without ties to the Chinese Communist Party. After a brief weekend outage, the app was restored at the urging of incoming President Donald Trump. That 75-day extension was then enacted, allowing the company to explore a potential sale.
Some analysts have tabbed companies like Oracle and billionaire Frank McCourt as some of the more likely parties to strike a deal to purchase TikTok. However, no deal is immediately imminent as the deadline looms.
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