Technology/social Media/games
Prem Akkaraju CEO Weta Digital
Phrases that describe Akkaraju include technology maven sitting atop a leading visual-effects house; inventor on 26 patents for secure-content delivery; and multi-hyphenate. The L.A. exec joined Weta over a year ago, bringing with him a high-level finance background and executive producer credit on Netflix Oscar nominee “The White Tiger.” He has the creative chops to expand Peter Jackson’s effects/ animation company from its effects-contractor roots to producing original animation. Akkaraju also guided visual effects contract work on Disney’s “Avatar 2” and new shots for the director’s cut of “Justice League” on HBO Max. Akkaraju says Hollywood’s production boom is “pushing up against the limits of the VFX and animation artists’ population.” Weta Digital is hiring and training to grow the talent pool so “we’re answering that bell.” Earlier, Akkaraju founded cinema/home theater services SR Labs with Sean Parker of Facebook and file-sharing Napster fame. Parker is vice chair of Weta Digital.
Angie Barrick
Head of Industry, Media & Entertainment Google
Barrick oversees global entertainment partnerships for Google and Youtube, using their insights on audience behavior to optimize marketing campaigns for studios, streamers and gaming publishers. Her skills were in especially high demand during the pandemic shutdown, as companies were forced to radically overhaul their release strategies. Barrick’s resume also includes stints at Microsoft and Bravo TV and an ongoing gig at USC Annenberg, teaching a class on digital entertainment in the communication management graduate program. She credits much of her success to a fiveyear break she took from the biz living on a lavender farm on the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington state with her husband and then-young children. Returning to the rat race, “I started at half the pay and knowing nothing and feeling stupid most of the time,” she says, but “it was the best thing that ever happened to me, because it just let a creative side of me come out.”
Leslie Berland
Chief Marketing Officer Twitter
Berland embraces her work at one of the hubs of today’s noisy public soul searching about the direction of technology. She says a brand refresh jettisoned an overall clean look that is today’s industry fashion for the familiar Twitter graphic in environments that are “raw, scrappy, messy and beautiful at the same time.” To amplify Black lives social discussions, a marketing initiative placed tweets on outdoor billboards, igniting a wave of social media sharing. “This is us elevating the voices that mattered and the voices that we wanted to be heard,” says Berland. She joined in 2016 from American Express, where she worked advertising, marketing and digital partnerships. With the public debate running hot, Berland says consumers expect authentic, transparent and honest communications from companies and their executives. “That makes our work much more challenging, more interesting and creative, and more high-impact,” she says.
Sarah Bond
Corporate VP, Head of Game Creator Experience and Ecosystem Microsoft
Bond oversees the rollout of the Gaming Ecosystem Organization initiative to galvanize the video-game creator community. The initiative offers tools for game creation such as Visual Studio, wider consumer distribution, technology that includes mass scaling via xcloud and monetization via means such as the Game Pass subscription service. One goal: grow gaming beyond the console to other devices, and through tools and services of Xbox’s parent. The Redmond, Wash.-based Bond is also executive sponsor of the employee resource group Blacks at Microsoft. She joined 2017, and previously worked at T-mobile and Mckinsey & Co. She’s a board member of Nyse-listed direct-to-student learning platform Chegg and subscription-management platform Zuora. Business used to focus on one-off consumer transactions, but Bond says that now ongoing connections are valued, evidenced by the monthly subscription model. “The world has flipped,” she says. “Now, the true unlock is driving consumer engagement over time through creativity.”
Blake Chandlee
President, Global Business Solutions Tiktok
In June, Chandlee and his team unveiled the Tiktok for business marketing hub with a simple call to action: “Don’t Make Ads, Make Tiktoks.” It worked, helping the youth-leaning, short-form video sharing platform grow its ad business more than 500% over the past year. “When I joined back in early 2019, most brands had never heard of Tiktok” he says, “or if they did, they had a hard time relating the platform to their brand because the content was so different from what the ad industry was used to. We had to be scrappy and have thick skin.” That thick skin came in handy last year when President Trump attempted to ban the app in the U.S. (a move that was eventually blocked by U.S. courts) due to concerns that the Chinese-owned company would share user data. “User safety is our North Star, and we aim to convey this transparently with regulators and brands in the U.S. and globally,” Chandlee says.
Tedd Cittadine Louqman Parampath
VP, Content Partnerships
VP, Product Management Roku
Cittadine manages distribution deals for video channels, channels accounts management and related support engineering. He worked distribution deals for Disney Plus, Peacock, HBO Max and Paramount Plus. The L.a.-based Cittadine joined in 2017 from digital distribution at 20th Century Fox, and earlier was an M&A financial analyst. Silicon Valley-based Parampath took a lead role in acquiring and absorbing Nielsen’s Advanced Video Advertising business in March. It will accelerate Roku’s launch of a dynamic-ad-insertion system for TV programmers and marketers. Parampath, who joined in 2015, also works automating and scaling Roku’s inventory sourcing and tools for Roku Media and Oneview advertising sales products. Cittadine says big media companies now realize they must be all in if they want to succeed in video streaming. That means offering their top programming priced as low as possible. “You can’t hold back your best content,” he says, citing tne fact that Disney Plus carries its parent’s crown jewel, full-length animated features.
Jennifer Cotter
Chief Content Officer Peloton
When the pandemic shut down her production studios in New York and London, Cotter shifted to instructors’ homes, which she calls “both stressful and quite an accomplishment.” The pandemic also shut down gyms, which redounded to Peloton’s advantage as it marketed content-supported fitness directly into consumers’ homes. Cotter supervises 300 staff that make 300 fitness shows a week in English, German and Spanish for the exercise equipment giant. New are Spanish-language shows on yoga and meditation. The company’s Artists Series of interactive videos showcases background music from select performers; multi-hyphenate Usher appeared on camera. The New York-based Cotter joined two years ago, previously working at HSN and Oxygen Media; she earlier won Emmys working in creative teams. Per Cotter, sticking to basic fitness shows keeps auds engaged while also opening doors: “That gives us permission to experiment and push our members farther … experiencing new content like new classes, infusion of celebrities and new kinds of music.”
Jeremi Gorman
Chief Business Officer Snap
Since joining Snap from Facebook in 2018, Gorman has scaled and reorganized the sales team with key hires (Peter Naylor from Hulu, Dave Roter from Twitter) and promotions, enabling it to service more advertisers with vertical-specific insights. She’s also worked closely with brands, including Universal and the CW, on augmented reality campaigns utilizing Snapchat filters. Her efforts helped the social media company grow its revenue 66% year over year in the first quarter 2021 to $770 million. Some would say it’s a job Gorman was born to do. “My parents tell stories about how I memorized all of the commercials on TV when I was a kid,” she says. “To this day, I can recite every word to the My Buddy doll jingle and I plastered all of the Got Milk ads up on my bedroom wall, but I never realized it could be a profession.” In Q1 this year, Snap added 15 million users.
Sang Kim
Senior VP, Product & Marketing Samsung Electronics
When Kim was growing up, he took toys apart to better understand how they worked, and he says he takes a similar approach to developing innovative ways for consumers to find and watch content on Samsung’s smart TVS and handheld devices. Since joining Samsung in 2018, he’s led the launch of all product initiatives for its Tizen TV platform, including Universal Guide and the streaming apps Samsung TV Plus and Samsung Health. His responsibilities recently expanded to include mobile services for Galaxy devices, including Samsung Pay, Samsung Free, Samsung Rewards and the Galaxy Store. He keeps ahead of emerging tech. “We stopped making Blu-ray players because we can deliver just as good quality over streaming,” he says. Now, “we’re trying to shoot 8K, so how do we bring that to the market? We’re having these dialogues early.”
Marne Levine
Head of Global Partnerships, Business & Corporate Development
In 2019, Levine became head of partnerships across Facebook, having previously served as COO of Facebook-owned Instagram, expanding the initial role to also overseeing corporate development and mergers & acquisitions. She oversees tieins with outside partners and programing at the social media giant, including the We the Culture content initiative providing $100 million to Black creators and businesses. We the Culture seeds the Facebook Watch on-demand platform with shows including cooking/topical conversation “Chop It Up” from actress Storm Reid. During the pandemic, the Menlo Park Calif.-based Levine oversaw efforts to delete harmful information and provide health help. When students found their graduation commencements cancelled, “we decided to give them the graduation of a lifetime,” she notes, with livestreamed multi-hour celebration that included Oprah Winfrey, Miley Cyrus and Matthew Mcconaughey. Levine joined in 2010, and previously worked at the Obama and Clinton administrations. In hard times, Levine says, “be empathetic. It sets the tone, builds community, lifts others and creates the conditions for you to make a difference.”
Iván Markman
Chief Business Officer Verizon Media
A unit of Verizon Communications, Verizon Media generated $7 billion in 2020 revenue. That apparently wasn’t enough to prevent the pending sale of the company’s crown jewels — AOL and Yahoo — as well as its search, ad tech and media platform businesses, to private equity firm Apollo Global Management in a deal reportedly worth $5 billion. The announcement came after two consecutive quarters of growth at Verizon Media, where Markman sought to simplify complexity with one-stop data and analytics, and also explored the future use of technologies such as augmented reality. “Apollo is the right partner to take Yahoo to the next level,” says Markman. “We’ll be able to move faster with more impact, rapidly scale and innovate across different sectors.” The new company will be known as Yahoo at the close of the transaction, which is expected later this year, and continue to be led by Verizon Media CEO Guru Gowrappan.
Jen Wong
COO Reddit
Wong is tasked with overseeing Reddit’s overall business strategy. In recent months, she led two wildly divergent initiatives at the company: the implementation of its hate speech ban and the December acquisition of Tiktok competitor Dubsmash. A short-video platform focused on lighthearted lip sync clips might seem a strange addition to an online ecosystem dedicated to in-depth discussions, but “over the last couple of years, we’ve seen our users increasingly start those conversations with video,” she says. Mixing the lighthearted and the serious comes naturally to the pop culture-obsessed Long Island native, who earned an MBA from Harvard and an M.S. in engineering economic systems and operations research from Stanford before embarking on a career that saw her building digital media platforms at AOL, Popsugar and Time Inc. and then landing at Reddit in 2018. “I brought together what I really, really love and had built up intuition about with a skill set that I also had to discover, which is building teams, leading people and thinking about strategy,” she says.