NEW YORK: AT&T has hired James Lynch as VP of chairman communications to support chairman and CEO Randall Stephenson.
Lynch is set to start at AT&T in December, he said in a LinkedIn post. He told PRWeek that he will report to chief communications officer Larry Solomon, but declined to comment further.
An Airbnb spokesperson confirmed Lynch’s departure, but did not provide additional comment about a replacement.
Lynch was most recently director of executive comms at Airbnb, according to his LinkedIn account. Prior, he was director of corporate comms at Intel, leading executive comms for CEO Brian Krzanich with a 24-person team.
Lynch also held roles at American Express over the course of a decade, most recently as VP of corporate communications, working on executive comms, b2b positioning, global messaging, and HR comms.
Brad Burns, former SVP of corporate comms for AT&T Communications, joined Salesforce as chief communications officer in August, replacing Corey duBrowa, who left for Google. Burns supported business, mobility, entertainment, tech, and operations at AT&T with a remit including executive communications.
AT&T completed its $85 billion acquisition of Time Warner, now called Warner Media, in June. The Justice Department has appealed a lower court’s decision approving the deal. AT&T beat analysts’ expectations on revenue in Q3, but revealed that its DirecTV division lost 359,000 subscribers in the period.
Airbnb, meanwhile, has not replaced former CMO Jonathan Mildenhall a year after he left the company to launch his own agency, 21st Century Brand.
