By Amara Osei

Spectrum will lose its chief marketing officer, Sharon Peters, and chief commercial officer, Adam Ray, at the end of the year, according to a staff memo obtained by ADWEEK. The memo, sent Monday by chief operating officer Nick Jeffrey, also eliminates the chief commercial officer role entirely.

The move restructures the internet service provider's leadership around what Jeffrey calls its core market strengths. What those strengths have actually delivered is the harder question his memo raises.

What did the memo actually say?

Jeffrey was blunt about the gap between Spectrum's assets and its results. He wrote: "I am increasingly convinced that our unmatched scale in broadband internet, our distinctive video assets, and attractive mobile offer are market advantages. However, in recent years we have failed to marshal those advantages into a winning strategy and have underperformed the markets, and our own expectations."

Read that admission carefully. The COO (the executive overseeing day-to-day operations) is not questioning the company's product portfolio. He is questioning whether leadership converted scale into share — and two of the executives accountable for commercial performance, Peters and Ray, are the ones leaving.

The memo outlines a new organizational structure, though ADWEEK's reporting does not detail what that structure contains beyond the departures and the elimination of the chief commercial officer role. Whether a replacement CMO will be appointed, or whether marketing will report through another function, remains unsaid.

Why does this matter for marketers?

The deletion of the chief commercial officer role signals more than a personnel change. It collapses a position typically responsible for monetization strategy — pricing, revenue growth, commercial partnerships — into a flatter structure.

For a company of Spectrum's scale, that choice usually means one of two things: consolidation of decision-making under fewer executives, or a prelude to deeper cuts. The memo does not say which. Jeffrey's framing — underperformance against "our own expectations" — suggests pressure that a reorganization alone rarely relieves.

Two senior marketing-side departures at once also leave a gap in brand and commercial leadership entering a new year, with no named successors in the memo.

For telecom and media marketers, the takeaway is plain: Spectrum has tied its leadership shake-up directly to an admitted strategic failure, and the burden of proof now sits with whatever structure Jeffrey builds next.

The end-of-year timeline gives the company roughly a quarter to prove that structure exists on paper beyond the departures themselves.