Boyden s Leadership Series presents discussions with business and thought leaders from organizations across the globe. The series focuses on topical issues that offer executives, political leaders and the media insight into current trends in business and talent management in the global marketplace. This issue features Paul Yanover, President of Fandango. He discusses competition in the multiplatform world of consumer entertainment, the NBCUniversal tie-in, why marketing and kids provide all the clues, the mosaic of the right team, and putting passion over gaming the system in a career plan. Paul Yanover Paul Yanover has been President of Fandango, Inc. since October 2012. Prior to Fandango, he served as Executive Vice President and Managing Director of Disney Online, the entertainment and lifestyle digital product group of the Disney Interactive Media Group. Previously, he had served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Disney Parks & Resorts Online, of the Disney Interactive Media Group, which includes all of the online web activities, e-commerce, online attractions and informational sites representing The Walt Disney Company s (TWDC) theme parks and resort hotel properties. Mr. Yanover also served as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the Buena Vista Game Entertainment Studio, a new business unit of TWDC, which was founded to exploit emerging opportunities in the PC, video game and online entertainment business. Mr. Yanover began his career with Disney in 1991 with Walt Disney Feature Animation, ultimately becoming Vice President of technology and digital production for the group. Mr. Yanover s credits include Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, The Nightmare Before Christmas and Tarzan among others. In 1999, Mr. Yanover co-founded Ceiva Logic, Inc. He has been a Director of NTN Buzztime Inc. since July 2012 and has served as Director of Interactive Advertising Bureau Inc. He holds a master s degree in computer science from the University of Southern California and a double honors bachelor s degree in computer science and economics from the University of Western Ontario. Boyden: You recently took the helm of Fandango, in a newly created position. What attracted you to the role? Yanover: There are a bunch of things. I would say first and foremost Fandango s a fantastic brand. We are an innovative technology company with a great position in its market. But, at the same time, it s still small and it s still really early days. I felt like for me, having had a lot of corporate experience and some startup experience, it was the perfect confluence of a platform to take something and amplify it, and my role at Fandango allows me that. I also like that Fandango is integrated into a large media company. Boyden: So there s the best of many worlds? Yanover: Exactly. On one hand, we re an independent small innovative digital company. On the other hand, we ve got resources and capabilities that I can draw upon from NBCUniversal. I personally have that experience of having worked in both worlds.
p. 2 Boyden: Fandango has been on a roll for a while now. What are the key drivers that have fueled this growth and where does the company go from here? Yanover: I think we can boil the drivers down to three big planks. One, we ve done a great job of expanding our exhibitor relationships, and thus our supply of theaters. This includes the relationships with exhibitors and movie theaters, and the continued growth and trust they have in us and our ability to represent more and more screens across the country. For example, just last year we added AMC as a partner. Second is our massive growth in mobile. We have this huge installed base on our mobile app and it continues to grow. We are seeing an enormous shift in consumer engagement and commerce on mobile. We are ultimately serving people a complete out-of-home moviegoing experience. Last is our brand and user experience. Fandango has tremendous overall awareness and is truly well known for innovation, movie tickets and information, and customer service. A good example of some of this coming together is Fandango and Apple s mobile app, Siri. We are really early with Apple s Siri and its integration with Fandango, but that s a great emblem of our approach. We are serving people with innovation and technology, and our brand is showing up everywhere people think about movies. These three areas have particularly fueled the growth we ve seen in the last year. Boyden: The entertainment industry environment, from a consumer perspective, is more competitive now. Do you see it as more of an opportunity or a challenge? Yanover: First, it depends on where you sit in the ecosystem. There is just a lot more choice and more screens, of every possible size, in consumers hands literally in their pockets and their homes. Also, distribution and aggregation play a big role in getting more things in front of more people. From that perspective, there is definitely a lot of competition. For us, in particular, I still believe even with all this competition and all this choice, there is still a very healthy appetite for people to want to go to movies in a theater. In North America, this is kind of a ritual on a Friday or Saturday night. For us, it s still a huge marketplace. What we are trying to do is activate that experience and improve it rather than expand to being another distribution screen for entertainment. Boyden: Fandango mobile sales were up 171 percent last year and the app is now hitting north of 31 million downloads. Where s the future nexus of technology and entertainment? Yanover: We are focused on the moviegoer and their relationship with intellectual property. That s a relationship we love. Moviegoers have this cycle of eventizing their experience of going to the movies. We ve done a really good job focusing on getting people guaranteed seats and activating the whole
p. 3 movie delivery process from wanting to go to a movie, to walking in the theater and getting a seat. We want to expand the movie experience. We think we have a ton to offer all the way up the funnel, from the time moviegoers decide they want to see a movie, to them sharing a meal before or after the movie. There are also many things we can do in the theater as it relates to content, gaming and other interactive experiences. Our model is somewhat analogous to the travel business and vacation cycle, except our cycle is shorter and it occurs much more frequently. Boyden: How does the NBCUniversal family tie in? Yanover: I ll start by way of an example. We hired a gentleman named Dave Karger to be our Chief Correspondent at the time I came on board. Dave was a seasoned journalist and on-air reporter for Entertainment Weekly. His appointment was a big change for Fandango. Up until then, we had been very focused on the functional utility ticketing side of our business, but now we are expanding around the content side of our business. We really want to focus on helping people make movie decisions, learn about movies and dive deeply into movies. We launched our first original web series called The Frontrunners in December. Using Dave s talents, we ve been integrating into NBCU platforms -- he s been a regular guest on Access Hollywood, The Today Show and E! This year, we also partnered with E! for the Oscars, so there s a huge connection for us on the media side where we have this giant platform, as well as a major distribution opportunity within the rest of the NBC family. Boyden: How did you delineate the two worlds, Fandango and NBCUniversal? Yanover: I sort of live in two worlds and they are both interesting to me. I negotiate the world of being a President of an independent company, and I m also an executive in a significant, large media company, which is a world I am pretty familiar with. So, I m maximizing the best of both. Connecting them is particularly exciting. Boyden: How do you envision the landscape of the digital entertainment industry evolving in the next ten years? Yanover: It s so tough. I always joke, wow, think about the last time this was considered, at a time when there was no ipad. You could never have really predicted it. It s not only the ipad; it s more than that. It s an entire screen revolution. Tablets are not just encroaching on or replacing laptops; they re literally changing what people do. These tablets have become less laptop-like and more media streamlike. I don t know how anyone could have predicted that. The best predictors I use in the world are kids and teens, and I look to my kids for inspiration. I think the most interesting thing about their behavior is their unbelievable adaptability. They consume information and entertainment on three-inch screens, seven-inch screens, ten-inch screens and sixty-inch screens. They are completely indiscriminant to the screen and the distribution channel. They are watching everything from digital downloads to Netflix subscriptions and broadcast television and cable.
p. 4 To us, those are all different things, but to them, it s all just one big thing and all this terminology we use has no meaning to them. In my opinion, the other thing that keeps happening is the world keeps moving between all this choice, everyone loving all the choice, and everyone needing aggregators to negotiate all these points of access. Young people can negotiate so many different points of access now I go to itunes, now I go to Netflix, now I turn on the TV and the DVR, then I go to Tumblr and Facebook, and on and on. In the end, someone jumps in and becomes a super-aggregator and curates it. People look to trusted brands to assist them in navigating all the avenues. Boyden: What key business and/or leadership lessons did you take away from your time at Disney? Yanover: Disney was an incredible culture. There are core lessons I got out of my time in the multiple divisions where I worked. I think that Disney, particularly in the studio, really emphasized the power of creative individuals. The movie business is the ultimate example of a single person s vision, and if you can get behind that person and give them the right resources and the right organization, they can create something amazing. A big part of what I bring from my Disney experience is understanding the power of people, giving them a goal and getting out of their way. While working at Disney, I learned that everything matters. I worked in Parks & Resorts, and when you walk through Disney World and look around, you realize how meticulously they have cared about all the details, from the molding on the building to the paint color, the horticulture, and the uniforms and costumes. Disney s meticulous desire to create a complete user experience from every possible vantage point is very important. Another lesson I took away is being really clear about what s in it for your customer. With Fandango, my focus is on being really clear about what people want to get out of the movies when they get in their car and head out on Friday night, and to stay relentlessly clear on what s in it for them when we are part of the equation. Boyden: How distinct have your leadership experiences been co-founding Ceiva Logic versus leading a conglomerate like Disney? Yanover: Disney was a great place in terms of teaching me the consumer skills and understanding of how to think through what s in a product from a consumer point of view, how you communicate that to people, what it s going to look and feel like, and how it actually makes sense both to the company and to the consumer. This is a total disciplined approach of pulling these views all together in a manner where you ve really looked at all the dimensions of a product together. A startup is a completely different thing because it has the other aspect of trying to go as fast as you can while being constrained by resources. You have to believe some things that might be unbelievable, or you can t get it done. You learn the skill of being scrappy and the skill of being way more efficient with time and resources.
p. 5 You also learn amazing salesmanship skills because you ve got to convince people of your vision. Boyden: Having served as interim- CEO of Examiner.com as well, you have perspective on dealings with the media on multiple dimensions. How important is being media savvy and are there any pointers you can share? Yanover: Examiner.com is really interesting because it s another example of a disruptive company. Examiner.com is essentially a new form of creation and distribution of news information. It s not crowd sourced, but in a way it is almost controlled crowd-sourced. When I was a kid, content came from professional sources and there weren t that many of them. Brands associated themselves with these credible voices. Now, I think authority can emerge from many sources. Authority can be someone I ve never met who posts something on someone s Facebook page. It s a hobbyist mountain biker writing stories on Examiner.com. It s YouTube. It s all changing now in a really interesting way. It s all about power to the people. This authority change is happening in video, too. Netflix has just produced its first show, House of Cards. It s not a TV show. It s on Netflix. That s a new position which wouldn t have easily happened 10 years ago. There is a fast changing sense of credibility and authority now. Boyden: What role does mentorship play in accelerating progression in one s career? Who is your mentor? Yanover: Disney s President of Feature Animation was a big mentor early in my career. He was a great example of a person who really understood this concept of the power of people. He was the kind of guy who imbued in me a certain kind of innate confidence. What I loved about him is he thought I could do a lot more than I thought I could do. He s also the guy who really understood storytelling, and creative and consumer response to things at an emotional level all important skills I was able to observe and learn. Boyden: What are your priorities in hiring and nurturing talent? Yanover: I look for energy, aptitude and for people who are really excited about what they are going to do. I m totally willing to trade that with someone who has an advanced degree or extensive domain experience. All of this is like casting a team. Every new person I hire is in the context of who is already here. I like to bring people together who don t sound and look the same. I can t know exactly what that looks like without having the context of who is here. For example, in one case I literally changed the job description. I fine-tuned the job itself because I found someone who was really interesting.
p. 6 In the end, you want to get all these people together to feel like they are on a crazy mission to succeed and they are going to be rowing together every day. Boyden: You ve successfully leveraged your education in computer science and economics into a career in interactive media. Is it generally more advantageous to pick a broader field of study or a more narrowly defined one that s closely aligned with a specific field? Yanover: I ended up doing what I did because it interested me. I m a big believer that everyone should do what interests and inspires them rather than trying to figure out in advance the right succession of components that are going to look right later. People should just go with what gets them excited. It will be far more effective than trying in advance to figure out the system. Boyden: What career advice would you offer to an up-and-coming executive in the entertainment and digital interactive industry? many ways, you have to move around and reinvent your skill set many times over. I don t think you necessarily have to leave your company to do that. You have to really challenge yourself to want to do something different. That s a big part of career advancement. It forces you into this uncomfortable place of having to learn new skills and push yourself. We would like to thank Dan Grassi of Boyden Atlanta for making this edition of Boyden s Leadership Series possible. The views and opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent the views of Boyden; only those of Mr. Yanover. For Mr. Grassi s insight into the current executive markets in entertainment/ media sectors, please continue to the Boyden View section. Yanover: Do lots of different things. Looking at myself, I spent a lot of time at Disney, one company, which is true, but if you dig a little deeper, in my time there I worked at a movie studio, a theme park and a travel company. I also worked at an interactive gaming company and online media company. I moved around a lot at Disney in totally different businesses. That s part of what allowed me to feel confident staying in one company for a long time. I ve seen many people who literally stay where they are for a very long time and then wonder why their career is stagnant. In
p. 7 The Boyden View: Smart Risk Is Rewarded in Entertainment/Media Daniel Grassi Daniel Grassi is the Managing Director of Boyden Atlanta What stands out in the war for talent in the entertainment/media sector? Finding talent that has both general management capabilities as well as in-depth digital media experience is difficult. If you can find someone who understands how to drive a P&L with proven digital experience you have a star candidate. Have Hollywood and the traditional entertainment companies generally changed what they re looking for in talent with convergence in the digital era? Yes. What s changed today is entertainment companies are looking to hire outside of their comfort zone. They will continue to look at their direct competition, but more often they are thinking outside the box and recruiting talent from related companies that have true digital domain expertise. The nature of entertainment/media often means taking creative risks and working off instinct. What are deal makers and breakers for an executive getting another or multiple chances to be hired for the next opportunity despite past failures? C-suite executives are looking for candidates that take initiative and chances. It s okay to fail as long as you win more than you lose. To always play it safe will surely limit your upward mobility. Beyond a resume and official track record, what are the unusual attributes companies sometimes look for in executives in entertainment/media? Companies in the sector want candidates who are creative, nimble and can excel in ambiguity. Those traits are always in high demand.