I was a dev on a partner team (but have since moved on....) and there is a bit more backstory. Kivin wasn't an exec at Amazon, he was 1 of 4 product managers at the time. Only Pinsky remains from that group still on the team. Kivin wasn't my favorite person to work with, but he also clearly had different expectations about the job and responsibilities than what he actually did. He often was frustrated and felt dejected.

Munira has retaliated against others, and it's my understanding she has had "high" churn in her org over the years. Hence throwaway/AC.

For those who want to see the advertisement creatives, they are available here:

https://www.behance.net/gallery/5329673/Discover-Card-Concep...

Also, note that while the copy on the ads talk about "Receive a $10 gift card when you spend $20 on your discovery card", it was widely understood that the actual goal was to get customers to set their discover card to 1-click. This was the working assumption across the team.

You'll note in the description of the campaign, below, the excellent designer confirms this understanding:

    "Their main objective was to get customers to change their default payment method on Amazon.com to Discover."

This aligns with what Kivin contends.

Amazon Payments privately objected since Discover cards cost more to process than other cards, and so they contended that the advertising campaign would be a net loss for the company since the $500k or so in ad spend would not be made up by the $1MM or so in increased merchant costs. Since Amazon Payments and Amazon Ads are in different orgs and have separate budgets, only someone at Jeff's level or at Discover would see the net... and hence the reason Amazon Ads and Discover would do the deal.

The whole amazon ads program is one unmitigated disaster, both in terms of tech and business. It's a shame. So much of the rest of the company is really good, but it's the few bad orgs like this that tarnish what otherwise could be a neutral employment brand.