Life360 Appoints Advertising Leader Donna Sharp as General Manager of Life360 Ads TMCnet News [October 27, 2026] | / | Life360 Appoints Advertising Leader Donna Sharp as General Manager of Life360 Ads SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) - Life360 (Nasdaq: LIF), the leading family connection and safety company, today announced the appointment of Donna Sharp as General Manager of Life360 Ads. Sharp will lead growth, monetization, and advertising strategy for Life360's network of 100M+ monthly active users and report to James Selby, Chief Revenue Officer. Sharp most recently served as a Managing Director at MediaLink and a Partner at United Talent Agency (UTA), where she was a core architect behind the rise of commerce media, designing the sales organizations, commercial models, and performance management approaches for many of the world's largest retailers. She also advised Life360 as it built and launched Life360 Ads, giving her a deep understanding of the business. "We've built a strong foundation, and the opportunity ahead is delivering high-quality, personalized ads that create value for our members and drive results for advertisers," said James Selby, Chief Revenue Officer of Life360. "Donna has spent her career turning companies with unique first-party data into scaled ad businesses. She already knows Life360 from her time advising us, and that familiarity, paired with her expertise, is exactly what we need to take Life360 Ads to the next stage of growth." "Families rely on Life360 every day, and that kind of trusted daily connection is rare in advertising. It's whatturns reach into real results for brands," said Sharp. "I've had a front-row seat to what this team has built, and I'm excited to take it to the next level, deepening measurement, building out our sales organization and expanding across screens, always with members at the center." Sharp is a frequent speaker on the future of marketing, commerce media, and the evolution of the CMO. She has been named an Ad Age Leading Woman, an Adweek 50 honoree, and a Campaign US Inspiring Woman, and is a She Runs It "Changing the Game" award winner. Earlier in her career, she spent more than a decade at Publicis Media, including as SVP at Starcom MediaVest Group and Business Director for Starcom China, working with brands including Walmart, Visa, Mars Wrigley, and General Electric. She holds a degree from Vanderbilt University and served on the Board of Directors for the Ad Council. Life360 Ads uses real-world signals to deliver relevant ads and differentiated results for advertisers, while creating value for members, including offers and savings that help make family life more affordable. Advertising is a core part of Life360's growth strategy, helping keep the core experience accessible and supporting continued investment in the products members rely on. ABOUT LIFE360 Life360, a family connection and safety company, keeps people close to the ones they love. The category-leading mobile app and hardware tracking devices empower members to stay connected to the people, pets, and things they care about most, with a range of services, including location sharing, safe driver reports, and crash detection with emergency dispatch. As a remote-first company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Life360 serves approximately 102.4 million monthly active users (MAU), as of June 30, 2026, across more than 180 countries. Life360 delivers peace of mind and enhances everyday family life in all the moments that matter, big and small. For more information, please visit life360.com. CONTACT Kristi Collura [email protected] [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage] |

Why Elisabeth Murdoch's sister group wants its ideas to behave like brands. ByMaureen Kerr, Contributor. Maureen Kerr covers AI, media and entertainment economics. Sep 23, 2026, 08:06am EDT Sep 23, 2026, 10:22am EDT Summary. SISTER Group, co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, has taken a minority stake in Anthony Freedman's Common Interest to develop entertainment with brands involved from the outset. The partnership comes as broadcaster and streamer budgets tighten, producers face pressure on IP ownership and direct audience relationships become more valuable. SISTER and Common Interest want to develop ideas as brands from the beginning, choosing formats around audience, budget and commercial goals rather than starting with a television commission. The model is less about brands replacing streamers than about building audiences and IP earlier, with ownership agreed project by project. Sister Group (SISTER), the studio co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch and Jane Featherstone, has taken a minority stake in Common Interest, the communications and entertainment group founded by Anthony Freedman. The investment underpins a partnership, announced on Wednesday, to develop entertainment with brands involved from the beginning. In a video interview with me, Freedman and SISTER Group CEO Lucinda Hicks described the deal as a response to a changing entertainment economy: tighter budgets from broadcasters and streamers, pressure on producers' ownership of IP and the growing value of building direct relationships with audiences. Neither company is saying how large the investment is. They are not disclosing how many projects are in development or what they cost, and no brand partners on the new slate have been named. Freedman is clear about what the stake is for. Partnerships are announced all the time, he says, and many are wafer thin, with little more substance than the headline of the press release. The equity is there to anchor this one. The capital goes toward Common Interest's branded entertainment work and its expansion in North America, and he says neither business has any intention of a merger. That makes this less a story about the size of a new financing model than about what SISTER wants the model to do. The group behind Black Doves and Chernobyl is looking for ways to build audiences and intellectual property without beginning every project with a broadcaster or streamer ordering it. In other words, brands are not simply replacing broadcasters and streamers as buyers. The experiment is whether entertainment IP can behave like a brand before anyone tries to turn it into a show. The breadth of the two groups gives them more ways to test that idea. SISTER spans film and TV, podcasts, publishing, live entertainment and digital-first production, while Common Interest's eight companies include Baby Teeth, which created and produced Finding Jamie, and Amplify, alongside brand strategy, cultural intelligence and communications businesses. Forbes Daily: Join over 1 million Forbes Daily subscribers and get our best stories, exclusive reporting and essential analysis of the day's news in your inbox every weekday. Freedman describes the combined capabilities as an embarrassment of riches: the partnership can choose the format around the audience, budget and commercial objective rather than deciding at the outset whether an idea is a television show, vertical series, podcast or live experience. What Jamie Oliver already owned. There is a useful contrast in Finding Jamie While He's Finding Himself, the vertical comedy created and produced by Common Interest's Baby Teeth for the Jamie Oliver Group in partnership with Life360, which I wrote about in August. Oliver, the British chef and television presenter, came to that arrangement with the valuable pieces already assembled. His business owned the underlying IP, operated its own channels and had an established audience. Life360 could finance entertainment around all of that without needing to own any of it. What it bought was access to attention Oliver had already accumulated. SISTER and Common Interest are proposing something earlier in the process. "We are trying to think about our content and our ideas as brands right from the beginning," says Hicks, describing a model that can begin with an audience or a community rather than with a script. The conventional economics of production explain the timing. The latest census from Pact, the U.K. producers' trade body, found that U.K. primary commissioning revenue fell 4.7% to about $2.2 billion (£1.65 billion) in 2025. Revenue from non-TV work, including feature films, events and advertising, has more than doubled since 2022. Hicks points to another pressure: producers giving up control of IP through their commercial relationships with the platforms, and with the streamers in particular. Brand money is one response, but retaining rights is not automatic. She and Freedman both say ownership will be agreed upfront, project by project. What has changed since 2010. Branded entertainment is hardly a new diversification strategy for production companies. In October 2010 FremantleMedia took a majority stake in @radical.media, the New York production company behind brand-backed series including Iconoclasts on the Sundance Channel, in a deal its parent Bertelsmann described as part of a plan to broaden and diversify the business through new business models and customer groups. What has changed is the surrounding economics. That deal came before streaming reshaped how television was financed and ordered, and before talent and production companies could routinely build distribution of their own through YouTube, TikTok and other direct channels. Today, controlling the relationship with an audience is itself an economic asset. Brands "really covet the audience attention that the entertainment industry has been able to curate," Freedman says. The opportunity, as he sees it, is to redirect some of the money spent renting attention through paid media into entertainment people choose to watch. That does not make every brand a commissioner. Freedman describes brand involvement as a continuum, from participation in a finished format through to funding a project from the start. Nor does it mean SISTER intends to make the next Black Doves with a logo attached. Hicks resists that reading as too narrow. The point of the combined portfolio is that the idea does not have to start as television at all. That is the real distinction. Jamie Oliver came to Finding Jamie with an audience, distribution channels and a brand already in place. SISTER and Common Interest are betting they can build those things around IP before a streamer, broadcaster or advertiser arrives to buy access to them. Less than $2/week.