![]() ![]() She left home to attend the University of Leeds, where she met Jonathan Mendelsohn, a former Labour Party political strategist who now holds a seat in the House of Lords, making his wife Lady Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn wanted to be an actress, but observing the Sabbath made Friday night theater shows a nonstarter. Her mom ran a catering business and her grandmother was a haberdasher-two early role models for working women. Mendelsohn grew up as the eldest child and only daughter of observant Jewish parents. She gave one newly promoted advertising exec a bracelet featuring an evil eye, meant to keep watch on her behalf. They appreciated her enthusiasm, her interest in their perspectives and concerns, and her personal flourishes, like her thoughtful gifts. When advertisers have soured on Facebook-like during their 2020 boycott over hate speech and misinformation-they still seemed to like Mendelsohn. “Personalized advertising means I get to see things I’m interested in,” she says.Īs the face of Meta to major global advertisers, Mendelsohn’s charisma has served her well. Now the ads she and her daughter see are for wedding paraphernalia. She shares that her 25-year-old daughter is engaged. “I had to watch a lot of ads that had nothing to do with me,” she recalls. She uses an anecdote about growing up in England with one television set to deflect a question about the privacy concerns around targeted advertising. ![]() When asked about metrics for Facebook’s relatively new Instagram Reels, the short video posts that offer fewer opportunities for ads than Instagram Stories and Facebook’s feed, she says messaging is the future and launches into a story about shopping for shoes in Brazil via Meta’s WhatsApp service. That’s how she survived the acute phase of her diagnosis that’s how she plans to navigate her piece of Meta’s larger, existential crisis. Rather, it cemented her existing management style: to distill the task at hand into smaller, manageable pieces the big picture can be too overwhelming. Mendelsohn doesn’t pretend that her experience with cancer inspired any life-altering changes. It faces a dim economic outlook for advertisers whose dollars fuel Meta’s sprawling machine. But Meta’s current state has tinged the achievement: Over the past year, it recorded three straight quarters of declining year-over-year sales, and it has announced layoffs of roughly 24% of its workers. ![]() The promotion is a career feat for the Manchester, England, native who never set out to be a high-powered executive. With the departures of executives like Sandberg and Marne Levine, Mendelsohn, who reports to COO Javier Olivan, has become one of the most senior women at the global tech giant. She also oversees its business partnership network and global business engineering team. This February, Meta promoted Mendelsohn to head of its global business group, an influential job handling relationships with the large advertisers that contributed the bulk of Meta’s $114 billion in ad revenue last year. Throughout the ordeal, Mendelsohn kept working and continued to climb the ranks at Facebook, and now Meta. “People want Nicola to win,” says Michael Kassan, the well-connected CEO of MediaLink, a strategic advisory firm. Her theater-kid energy had endeared her to colleagues and London’s creative community. She loved her life her ad savvy aligned with Facebook’s purported mission to connect the world-a cause she deeply believes in. Mendelsohn also had that moment of clarity, except her diagnosis reinforced that she wanted to keep things as they were. Now, at age 51, she has no evidence of disease, and advocates for patients with the under-researched and underfunded illness.Ī cancer diagnosis can be a clarifying experience that prompts patients to reorder their lives. Her doctor first monitored her cancer’s progression, then she began treatment that continued until the pandemic, when Mendelsohn isolated at home because of her weakened immune system. After that horrible weekend, Mendelsohn vowed never to feel that hopeless again. She had follicular lymphoma, an incurable blood cancer that 25,000 Americans are diagnosed with each year. The results were as bad as she feared: The small lump was one of several tumors all over her body. “I felt a physical feeling that this is really bad-like you’ve been hit in the solar plexus,” she remembers. She spiraled, imagining the very worst, thinking about what she would tell her four kids. That Friday, she put her phone down and came back to see missed call after missed call from her doctor. She didn’t think anything of it, but a doctor suggested she get a scan. ![]() Mendelsohn had discovered an unusual lump near her groin. ![]()
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