VICTORIA BIELER
Head of Broadcast and Retrans Content Strategy and Partnerships Verizon Consumer Group

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Victoria Bieler is the principal negotiator for all partnerships with national broadcast/ cable portfolios and broadcast affiliates. She works with external and internal partners to establish new business opportunities across Verizon’s Consumer, Business and Media Groups. Earlier, she was on Viacom’s content distribution team and was an equity research analyst at Credit Suisse. She lives in New York with husband Sam.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “The variety. The Consumer Content and Partnerships team is charged with connecting customers with the choice of content and experiences they love on the best network. That means thinking about how our customers consume content and working cross-functionally to deliver those best-in-class outcomes.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Admittedly, working through the winter holidays and on New Year’s Eve. It’s part of the job, but I’m selfishly hopeful that one day, the holidays for my team and me will be for spending lots of time with family and friends, not negotiating. At least, not negotiating for work.”

RELATED: Wonder Women 2020: Here's to the Leaders

BIGGEST MENTORS: “I am very lucky to be in a group … with world-class leaders in my direct reporting chain. There is so much to learn from [Verizon Consumer Group EVP and CEO] Ronan Dunne and [Verizon Wireless SVP, consumer marketing and products] Frank Boulben. Most importantly, I have an opportunity to be mentored by my boss, [head of content strategy, acquisition and promotion] Erin McPherson, on a daily basis. She is a visionary in the content space and a dynamic leader.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Someone once told me ‘it’s all about the people’ in assessing a new job, hiring a new employee, or in your personal life. The people you spend your time with have the biggest impact on your satisfaction, be it job-related or personal.”

JOHNITA DUE
Senior VP and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer WarnerMedia News and Sports

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Based in CNN’s headquarters in Atlanta, Johnita Due reports to Jeff Zucker, chairman, WarnerMedia News and Sports and president, CNN Worldwide. Previously, she served as VP and assistant general counsel of CNN, joining in 2003. From 2005-2013, Due served as CNN’s chief diversity adviser and chaired its award-winning Diversity Council. Prior to joining CNN, Due was associate general counsel for The McGraw-Hill Cos. Due earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges, a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Sussex in England and her law degree from Cornell Law School.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I most enjoy that I have the opportunity to collaborate with teams and departments across the organization, from HR and recruiting to marketing and PR to research and sales to editorial and programming.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “I know that many of our efforts, which focus on diversity behind the scenes and creating a culture of internal mobility and advancement, will take time to be impactful and will not be immediately demonstrable or apparent to all employees. The challenge is to retain the confidence of staff that we all are doing what we can to make a difference in this area even if the results are not as immediately noticeable as our on air diversity efforts.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “My late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, was a huge influence on me. She led the first jail-in of the nation during the Civil Rights Movement as a 20-year old college student at FAMU in Tallahassee.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Something that I often tell employees that I was told once was that when you leave a job, make sure you are running toward something and not running away from something.”

LIBBY GEIST
VP & Executive Producer ESPN Films and Original Content

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Libby Geist oversees development, production, distribution, branding and strategy for all projects under the ESPN Films umbrella, as well as original series and studio shows on ESPN+, ESPN’s direct-to-consumer streaming service. Projects under Geist include the acclaimed 30 for 30 series, Detail and the 30 for 30 Podcasts. Geist, a three-time Peabody Award winner, has spent her entire career in documentary film, from production to development and now as an executive producer. She continues to push ESPN’s storytelling to new heights as one of the company’s leaders in long-form. Geist lives in New York with her husband and two little boys.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I know how lucky I am to love my job. I work with some of the best storytellers in the world, produce projects that get attention and accolades and I oversee a brand that I’m incredibly proud of.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Working at a big company can mean lots of meetings. It is easy to get stuck on that treadmill, so I make every effort to prioritize the work that my team is doing and to keep us focused on the creative side of things.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “I have worked under [ESPN executive VP, content] Connor Schell for more than 10 years and have learned so much from him every step of the way. I feel as though I’ve grown up at ESPN and he has played a major role in charting my path.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Leaders are thermostats, not thermometers! Creating a positive, creative environment fosters a happy team and better work. No matter what might go wrong, picking up and reminding the team that we can do anything together is the kind of leader I want to be.”

DIANA HOROWITZ
VP, U.S. Sales East Telestream

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Diana Horowitz leads the sales team and oversees all of Telestream’s business and customer relationships in the strategically important U.S. East region. She comes to the digital video system provider with an extensive media background. Previously, she was regional director for media and entertainment at Tavant; executive director of sales for IBM Watson Media; global client director and director of VOD sales at Comcast Technology Solutions; and led digital advertising sales in the Northeast at Scripps Networks Interactive (now Discovery) for Food Network and Cooking Channel. She started her career at The New York Times Co., holding ad-sales leadership roles in both New York and Paris. She originally hails from Manhattan, where she resides with her husband, Alain.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I love the media business, and this role allows me to stay connected with the people and companies driving the industry forward — and partnering together with them to find solutions for their challenges and innovate for the future.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “I am fortunate in loving all aspects of my role — leading a team, partnering with customers, working with cross-functional teams to develop strategy. If anything I would just add a few more hours to every day to get everything done!”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “I like to say that I ‘grew up’ at The New York Times, and I learned so much from the amazing leaders who I had the privilege to work with there. To this I would add the amazing ad sales leadership at Scripps Networks Interactive (now at Discovery), who taught me everything I know about television!”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “From my Dad: To treat everyone you interact with, regardless of their job title, with respect, courtesy and integrity, in business as in life.”

AUDREY LEE
Executive VP and General Counsel Starz

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Based in Santa Monica, California, Audrey Lee is responsible for developing the strategic direction of business and legal affairs for Starz, including distribution, content acquisition, production, litigation, employment matters and legal and regulatory compliance worldwide. She has more than 20 years of legal and business experience, with a background in M&A and corporate transactions, deep entertainment knowledge and a thorough understanding of international business issues. Lee most recently was executive VP and deputy general counsel for Lionsgate, where she supported senior management on M&A and film financing activities and overseeing legal affairs for Lionsgate’s subscription VOD channels, digital studios division, location-based entertainment, merchandising and gaming businesses. She was also senior VP, legal affairs at Sony Pictures Entertainment. She began her career at Latham & Watkins LLP, where she focused on mergers and acquisitions, securities and intellectual property licensing.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “The people at Starz and the variety of the work.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “When I can’t find a creative way to get to yes.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “My parents. They immigrated here from China before I was born, with no money, no job and without speaking the language. With a lot of hard work and determination, they made a life for their family, sent three kids to college and my dad became one of the most senior scientists at Boeing, leading the design of the electrical system for the space station before he retired.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Always keep learning new things and taking on new responsibilities and be nice to people while you’re doing it.”

DANIELLE MULLIN
Senior VP, Marketing Crown Media Family Networks

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Danielle Mullin leads all marketing campaigns and strategic brand development for Crown Media’s portfolio of businesses, including Hallmark Channel, Hallmark Movies & Mysteries and Hallmark Drama; subscription VOD service Hallmark Movies Now; Hallmark Publishing and the podcast Hallmark Channels Bubbly Sesh. Since joining the company in 2017, Mullin has delivered compelling, high-impact campaigns and was quickly elevated from VP, consumer marketing to senior VP, marketing. Mullin joined Crown Media from WGN America and was VP of marketing for Freeform. She earned a master's degree in creative writing from Emerson College and a bachelor of arts in English and psychology from Boston College.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I am a true fan of the Hallmark brand. It’s a pleasure to work on marketing content that makes people feel good, especially during times like these when there is a lot of divisiveness and negativity in the world.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “I’m constantly challenged to keep up with the evolving media landscape and advanced targeting capabilities, but I love the fact that there is something new to learn nearly every day.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “I’ve had a variety of mentors throughout my career both in the entertainment industry and in areas completely removed from television. I have always appreciated the advice and guidance I have received and try to pay it forward by mentoring those just entering the field.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “The best advice I’ve ever received came from my Dad — find something you love to do and find a way to make a difference in the world. If you can find a career that checks both boxes, you’ll be good!”

LAUREN PETTERSON
President Fox Business

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Lauren Petterson joined Fox News Channel in 2008 and since September 2019 has been president of Fox Business, in addition to overseeing talent development for both Fox News and Fox Business. Prior to her promotion, she was senior VP of morning programming and talent development for Fox News, where she oversaw the entire Fox & Friends weekday and weekend franchise. Fox & Friends has been the No. 1 morning program in cable news for more than 17 years. Petterson also has been an executive producer of news programming at WCBS New York and WPIX New York. She began her television career at WNYT Albany, New York, and later became an associate producer at News 12 Long Island and a production assistant/associate producer for WNBC’s signature afternoon program Live at Five. She is a magna cum laude graduate of SUNY Albany with a bachelor of arts degree in communications.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “The viewers. I consider it a privilege to communicate what we know. And I love that the viewers want to share that learning. It’s consequential and humbling at the same time.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Long meetings that can be replaced by a short phone call.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “My mother. She’s a single mom who raised four kids while working three jobs. She taught me to do the hard work. To say yes to the scary stuff. And to know your worth.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “When you’ve done well and moved on, do not shut the door behind you. Make sure you reach back to give others a chance to succeed.”

MARCELLA MILLIET SCIORRA
Partner, Strategic Marketing Sciorra Media Group

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: For more than 20 years, Marcella Milliet Sciorra has held leadership roles at media and advertising companies. Most recently, she was VP of ad sales and product marketing at Spectrum Reach, a division of Charter Communications. Previously, she was senior marketing director in the distribution group at NBCUniversal and group account director at Colangelo-SM. As principal of Sciorra Media Group, she is a strategic adviser to video entertainment and advanced advertising companies. Originally from Brazil, Sciorra holds a bachelor's from the University of Santa Ursula and from Hunter College in New York. She lives in Palisades, New York, with her husband Nick, son Oliver and daughter (and newly licensed driver) Julia.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I love how our industry is always changing — always evolving. I’ve had a chance to bring several complex and simple ideas to life, revolutionizing the way we do business, throughout my career. Specifically as a leader, what I like most about my job is building high-performance teams, nurturing and growing talent and building an inclusive culture.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “The least favorite part of my job in corporate America has been the fact that pace of change is not fast enough; it’s very difficult to be nimble.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “Margo Vallone was my boss in two different jobs at the beginning of my career: Alcone Marketing Group & GEM Group. She saw potential in me before I was even aware of it.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Invest in your team — talent is your most valuable resource. Build an inclusive culture, encourage diversity of thoughts, gender, ethnicity and beliefs. Foster learning opportunities for your team. Encourage them to take risks, celebrating failures and wins. Be generous with your time and knowledge. Provide timely, honest and actionable feedback.”

NANCY SMITH
President & CEO Analytic Partners

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: For nearly 20 years, Nancy Smith used customized analytics and data to build a stronger business case and drive increased return on investment (ROI). In 2000, she founded Analytic Partners to further the use of data to drive planning and business intelligence. Prior to starting AP, she worked at ASI (now Ipsos ASI) and Clairol (now Procter & Gamble), where she managed marketing insights projects, teams and vendors. She has an MBA from the University at Buffalo School of Management.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “I love working with highly motivated and dedicated people. The marketplace is so dynamic, fast-moving and diverse, and that makes business challenging and exciting. I find that the best qualities of people really shine through when dynamic business ecosystems create opportunities for individuals and teams to stretch and strengthen their capabilities.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Anything overly bureaucratic: Slowdowns for paperwork, office lease negotiations, flying to China to get my photo taken with a bank manager in order to open a business bank account. (Yes, that really happened!).”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “My most memorable mentor was my first boss in the field of analytics, George Williams. George was respectfully called ‘The Wizard’ by his colleagues for his mastery of numbers, his memory and his statistical prowess. In addition to sharing with me his accumulated wisdom from decades of business analytics experience, George taught me much about managing people.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Don’t focus on money, titles and promotions. Focus on doing satisfying work, and doing it better than everyone else. Money, titles and promotions will naturally flow from doing satisfying work really well.”

JULIE STERLING
Director of Media & Entertainment Partnerships, Google

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Julie Sterling is responsible for Google’s largest video and programmatic partnerships. She and her team work with top media companies to provide innovative solutions that deliver revenue growth using the Ad Manager suite. She also facilitates cross-functional partner alignment with other product areas including Google Play, Cloud, Android, YouTube and more. Previously, she managed Google’s Automotive and CPG team as well as strategic partnerships for Google Ad Manager across multiple verticals. Before that, Sterling worked for Kantar Media. She earned a bachelor’s degree in international business from Rochester Institute of Technology and lives in South Orange, New Jersey, with her wife and two sons.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “There’s a number of reasons I love my job, but it all comes down to the people I work with, the companies I partner with and the technology we create at Google. As a leader within Google, I feel honored to be given the opportunity to build teams, coach and mentor.”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Partners and their businesses are all changing very fast and I think most would agree it’s the most significant transformation that the media and entertainment industry has gone through in recent history. Many partners are using this change as an opportunity to grow and adapt their business with the future in mind, but seeing the human impact when there is so much uncertainty has been hard.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “Mentors in my life started with my family and I’m grateful for my parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and now my wife Beth who have all taught me the importance of hard work, treating people with respect, and having a strong sense of faith.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “ ‘Don’t just point out issues, make positive change from within.’ — my aunt, Sister Eileen Daly, SSJ.”

RANDI STIPES
Chief Marketing Officer IBM Watson Media and Weather

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: Randi Stipes oversees marketing activities across IBM Watson Media, Watson Advertising, and IBM’s solo consumer portfolio, The Weather Co. With two decades of experience, she translates IBM’s artificial intelligence expertise into a trusted voice that guides brands towards insights-driven, crossplatform strategies.

WHAT SHE’S DOING: Stipes empowers players across the media landscape to adopt emerging technology for more impactful, engaging and agile storytelling. Leveraging her marketing expertise, she has helped transition major media and entertainment companies into data-driven storytellers. From helping sports broadcasters increase fan engagement to maximizing advertising ROI, she sets an example for the next generation of media stakeholders to be tech-savvy marketers. For instance, IBM Watson Media has powered AI initiatives for tentpole sports events such as the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, the 2019 Masters golf tournament and the 2018 FIFA World Cup — streamlining production workflows, capturing fans’ attention with AI-generated highlights and solidifying the marriage of emerging tech and engaging sports broadcast experiences.

FUTURE GOALS: Her vision for The Weather Co. (specifically its flagship solution, Max Engage) opens the door to a new era of broadcasting that reimagines our expectations of how broadcasters and media companies can leverage weather and traffic data to enhance consumer experiences.

BACKGROUND: Prior to IBM, Stipes was managing editor for UPS.com, helping relaunch and scale its digital presence. She has held numerous other positions, all focused on helping traditional media and publishing companies lean into the digital era. She serves on IBM Watson Media and Weather’s Executive Leadership Team and received her bachelor’s degree from the University of California, Davis.

HOLLY TANG
Chief Financial Officer and Head of Production Operations, Lifestyle Networks, NBCUniversal

WHY WE’RE WATCHING: As chief financial officer and head of production operations, lifestyle networks, Holly Tang is responsible for financial oversight of Bravo, E!, Oxygen and Universal Kids. She identifies growth drivers and new revenue streams for the networks and plays a vital role in defining and building strategic initiatives. Tang also oversees all aspects of production operations and management for the four brands. Based in New York, she reports to Frances Berwick, president, lifestyle networks, NBCUniversal. Prior to joining NBCU, Tang was director of finance at Comedy Central. Previously, she held various positions at MTV Networks. Tang began her career at Morgan Stanley. She graduated magna cum laude from Smith College with a bachelor of arts degree in economics and mathematics and has an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.

LIKES MOST ABOUT JOB: “The people. I’m lucky that I work in an area of our business where women in leadership roles is the norm. I also work for a company that cares about diversity and equal opportunity. Representation does matter!”

LIKES LEAST ABOUT JOB: “Too many meetings! I actually consider myself an introvert but when I’m at work most of my days are spent talking to people. By the time I get home, I need to recharge, decompress … and not talk.”

BIGGEST MENTORS: “My boss, Frances Berwick. She is more than a mentor and boss, she’s been my advocate and supporter. There is so much about her that I admire, but I know she’d be embarrassed if I said any more. But for those who know her, you know what I’m talking about.”

BEST ADVICE EVER RECEIVED: “Don’t pay attention to the noise, just stay focused on your work and on doing a good job.”

For Rosalyn Durant, everything changed with a summer internship. Two, actually.

She went to the University of South Carolina with dreams of becoming on-air talent. “I wanted to do what Oprah Winfrey did,” recalled Durant, who was active on local and school radio and television from 1996 through 1998. She had internships and shadowing opportunities and was a broadcast major. Then, thanks to the T. Howard Foundation, she did a summer internship at Turner in marketing and business relations. “That changed everything,” she said.

Seeing a new world, Durant realized she would really enjoy the business side of media more. So she added a marketing minor and, thanks again to some help from the T. Howard Foundation, landed an internship with ESPN in affiliate sales and marketing in the summer of 1998. That went well, too. So well that ESPN offered her a job in Connecticut as a coordinator in that department after she graduated.

More Than a Sports Fan

“I’m a big sports fan,” said Durant. “But I didn’t come to ESPN because I’m a big sports fan. I liked the business and the culture and wanted to be around the people. Sports was an added bonus.”

One thing about the culture that particularly struck Durant during her internship when she met leaders throughout the company “was there were people who looked like me. There were women and people of color at all levels and that was a sign I could be successful here, too,” she said.

That proved an understatement. Durant’s rise at ESPN was rapid and continuous. Within a year, she was a regional account executive. Two years later she was a senior account executive. Two promotions later, in 2005, she was senior director, national accounts. Then it was time, she decided, to move on — not out of ESPN but into a new area. In 2006, she became a senior director of programming.

“I’ve often described my career as a collection of experiences,” she said. “I like new challenges and I loved understanding the different angles to ESPN because it allows me to better understand the industry.”

Durant played a significant role in the 2007 contract extension with the NBA (which included ESPN’s most-comprehensive digital rights sports league package at that time). She became VP of programming and acquisitions in that year. Later, she became VP of college sports programming and acquisitions, overseeing college sports plus high school sports and the management of college-sports-focused ESPNU.

“[Former ESPN president] George Bodenheimer talked about the importance of always being a student and that stuck with me,” said Durant, who describes herself as someone who won't be outworked. “I always want to know more, to roll up my sleeves and learn. And I don’t feel I have to have to have all the answers and I’m comfortable admitting what I don’t know.”

In 2015, she became senior VP, college networks. ESPNU and SEC Network have experienced dramatic increases, with both networks fully distributed with long-term carriage agreements at the top 10 distributors under her leadership. Last year, she oversaw the successful launch of ACC Network.

Her success doesn’t just stem from her desire to keep learning but also from her natural sense of leadership. “She provides guidance and direction but also gave me the space to grow,” said Stacie McCollum, recently named VP of programming and acquisitions, dealing with the ACC and Longhorn networks. “She is an energy giver. She exudes positivity, but in a way that’s organic and natural and it makes you want to follow her.

“She is a leader of people but also a tremendous business leader and that combination is not something you always see,” McCollum said.

Stephanie Druley, executive VP of event and studio production, agreed, saying Durant’s warm and welcoming personality “is one of her superpowers. She is able to make people feel comfortable and is great at motivating her team and pushing productions. But she is also very strategic and asks smart questions and is always thinking about what’s next.”

What's next for Durant is another move — this time out of ESPN. But while she is heading from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Orlando, Florida, for the new gig this month, she is staying within the corporate family. Her new role is senior VP of operations, Disney Springs, ESPN Wide World of Sports and Water Parks for the Walt Disney World Resort.

“I'm the first to preach the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone so I have to make sure I'm walking the walk,” she said.

Supporting T. Howard

Durant will continue giving back in ways no matter where she works. She is on the executive committee for the board of directors of the T. Howard Foundation, dedicated to increasing diversity in the multimedia and entertainment industry. “I’m a product of T. Howard through those internships and I believe in the mission, so I have a responsibility to pay it forward,” she said. She learned from many mentors at ESPN and is determined to do the same for the generations behind her.

“It’s important to me to share my learning, to make the people around me better. That’s part of leadership,” she said.

While there has been a lot of progress for women and people of color at ESPN and in the industry at large, there remains much work to be done, she said.

“It’s a journey. And I don’t know if you ever arrive,” Durant said.

Career Highlights: Rose up the ranks at ESPN for 20 years.

Played a significant role in the 2007 contract extension with the NBA.

Oversaw the 2019 launch of the ACC Network.

Quotable: “I'm the first to preach the importance of stepping outside your comfort zone so I have to make sure I'm walking the walk.”

Stephanie Plasse thought law school would be a good background for a career in journalism: She would focus on public policy, legal journalism and First Amendment issues. It made sense, since journalism was her first love. She was on the newspaper in both high school and college (which is something of an understatement, as she was the editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News).

Things didn’t go quite as planned. After graduating from Stanford Law School, Plasse began working in corporate law at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. And yet, she sees a direct link between journalism, law school, corporate law and her current job as senior VP and deputy general counsel, global revenue, partnerships and distribution, at A+E Networks.

“At law school, I became interested in telecommunications policy and shifted my focus to the media entertainment business,” Plasse recalled. “Then I went into corporate law because it’s a great training ground, you get a lot of resources and learn a lot. That corporate skill set was valuable later in drafting, negotiating and research.”

Plasse soon moved into entertainment law at Greenberg Traurig, but ultimately decided she wanted to be on the inside, making decisions. “At a law firm, it’s about offering alternatives and it’s more of an academic exercise,” she said. “I wanted to be part of the stakeholders.”

An Unemotional Negotiator

She jumped to HBO, where she became VP of networks business and legal affairs, learning crucial lessons from a mentor there, veteran counsel Tom Woodbury. “He impressed on me the importance in negotiation of the force of intellectual argument, of explaining what our needs are in a way that’s thoughtful, not confrontational,” Plasse said. Using the facts that way “builds integrity and takes emotions out of negotiations,” allowing for a stronger relationship with partners, which, “in a positive cycle, then makes it easier in the next negotiation to stay focused on the facts.”

RELATED: Wonder Women 2020: Here's to the Leaders

Those skills have served Plasse extremely well at A+E, where she oversees legal support of global distribution, digital, over-the-top, subscription and ad-supported video-on-demand, international, corporate, corporate development, technology, music and consumer products deals, as well as regulatory affairs.

“Negotiations can get heated, but she is phenomenal at communication and is very creative at finding ways to make things work,” A+E president of distribution David Zagin said. When Plasse handled her first large negotiation for the company, he said, she was so impressive that the celebratory dinner that night “became one person after another toasting her.”

“She has impressive command of a complex area, but one of her secret weapons is that she is humble, so people trust her and respond positively to her suggestions,” A+E chief legal officer Henry Hoberman said. “So when things get bogged down, she can find the path forward.”

Plasse jumped to A+E from HBO because she liked that it had great programs and content innovation but also offered the challenge of ad-supported networks and a wide portfolio of brands. She provides legal and strategic support for U.S., Canadian and Caribbean distribution of 10 networks, including A&E, History and Lifetime, and oversees legal aspects of partnerships and content licensing related to those networks on all global platforms.

“I also love the culture here,” she said. “I have a team of talented problem-solvers and I'm always learning from them.”

Learning is central to her success in a field that is constantly changing with new technologies, distribution avenues and business models. “I’m very interested in learning how things work and understanding the details,” Plasse said. “I’m pretty adaptable and open to trying things in new ways.”

Plasse describes herself as neither an early adopter of new technologies nor a Luddite, which makes her a “good proxy for our customers,” adding that having twin 8-year-old sons tends to keep her aware of major trends. “I found out about Fortnite a year before most people.”

Lawyers are trained to manage risk, Plasse said, and therefore sometimes get too comfortable with doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Keeps an Open Mind

“I keep an open mind so I don't get stuck in the ways of the past,” Plasse said. “Then, we work with stakeholders to collaborate and break new ground.”

Plasse went through the Women in Cable Telecommunications Betsy Magness Leadership Institute in 2012-2013 and has been an active leader at A+E. She serves as a mentor both within the legal and business affairs department and beyond, and was instrumental in forming a new internal mentoring program (Spark) to identify and retain high potential mid-management females by pairing them with senior executives who completed the Betsy Magness program. Her commitment led to Plasse being selected to join The Executive Women’s Forum at A+E Networks, a mentorship program comprised of senior executives under the oversight of Abbe Raven, chairman emeritus and former CEO of A+E Networks.

“I’ve been more of a recipient than a giver at this company when it comes to mentors,” Plasse said. “This company has great role models and leaders and a supportive environment for women. I participate to have the opportunity to pay that forward. I hope I’m having an impact.”

Career Highlights: Plasse helped lead the negotiations for the transition of the H2 linear network to Viceland with distributors in the U.S. and Caribbean.

She launched the A+E portfolio across vMVPDs including Sling, Hulu Live, Philo and Fubo.

Helped strike A+E portfolio library deals with streaming platforms such as Netflix and Peacock.

Led the launch new digital products H Vault, Lifetime Movie Club, Crime Central and Lively Place.

Quotable: “All experiences are personal but with mentoring people can realize that others are having variations of the same experience, facing similar dilemmas and challenges. Mentoring is a great opportunity to have a safe place to discuss issues like leadership and work-life integration and that elusive balance.”

Looking back, it probably isn’t much of a stretch to think that growing up near the beach in Santa Cruz, California, Lisa Bonnell would want to pursue a career in marine biology. Bonnell, who now leads the global audit functions for entertainment giant Comcast NBCUniversal, once saw herself sailing around the world seeking out new species of fish. But then she found out how much marine biologists make.

“I had this great beach life planned out for myself and then I realized they don’t make any money and most of them end up as SCUBA instructors, no joke,” Bonnell, who has a strong practical streak to go with a sharp sense of humor, said. “Having parts of my childhood when I was literally legit hungry for years, I decided that probably wasn’t the way I wanted to go. I figured it could be a second career and it may still be some day, you never know.”

Luckily, Bonnell had always had a knack for math and squeezed in several economics and statistics courses into her schedule, graduating from Santa Clara University in 1991 with a degree in economics.

After a short stint at Lockheed Martin, where she spent about a year doing statistical analysis of the company’s benefit plan, Bonnell moved to Ernst & Young (now EY), where she began to hit her stride. She joined the Big 8 (now Big 4) accounting firm around the same time as the business world was “freaking out,” she said, about Y2K, and had the opportunity to learn about different industries and processes and travel the globe. The experience led her to work with companies as diverse as The Walt Disney Co. and Coca-Cola.

Learning Lots at EY

“The great thing about EY was you’d get parachuted in to a project and you had three or four days to get it together, to understand what was going on in the project, who the stakeholders were, what the major issues were, before you were asked to stand up and present your area in front of the client folks,” Bonnell said. “It really forces you to get comfortable with learning on the fly, presenting in front of people on topics you know nothing about and then how to quickly gather and synthesize information. They really helped prep me for any job I had in the future.”

Bonnell was at EY for about five years, moving to computer maker Dell in 1998 to be closer to her parents in Austin, Texas. At the time, her father had been diagnosed with brain cancer and Bonnell moved down to help her mother care for him.

Bonnell took a job in finance at Dell, supporting its IT organization. About eight months in, an Oracle implementation the IT department was conducting went sideways.

“It was messy,” Bonnell said. “They knew from the consulting firms that they had had in helping them, that that was something EY would have dropped me in to do at another client. So I got yanked out of my job but good and [Dell] said ‘We heard you could fix this,’ and I did. That kind of set the stage for my career at Dell.”

Over the next five years at Dell, Bonnell moved throughout the company about every 18 months or so, putting out fires along the way. In 2007, when Dell decided it had to take $1 billion in costs out of the company, Bonnell was again pressed into service, helping it move away from in-house manufacturing and setting up supply chains between computer makers in China with retailers in the U.S.

Bonnell stayed at Dell for five years, leaving a few years after the company bought Perot Systems in 2009, when she decided she wasn’t quite cut out for the company’s new buttoned-down culture. At the same time, a former colleague had begun working for Comcast NBCUniversal, and encouraged Bonnell to come aboard.

Bonnell joined Comcast in 2011, initially to help with the integration of NBCU. She later moved over to Comcast Business, running operations for that business telecom unit for a few years and rejoining the audit division in 2016.

Comcast chief financial officer Mike Cavanagh, to whom Bonnell reports, said that her wide range of experience and ability to solve problems quickly has been a valuable asset as Comcast has grown.

“Lisa’s versatile experience, including overseeing the operations for Comcast Business, provides her with a unique ability to identify opportunities and mitigate risk across the entire company,” Cavanagh said. “She is a terrific and strategic leader who has developed a very strong team and is a great partner of mine.”

As the head of the audit division, Bonnell is in charge of making sure financial reporting across the entire company is accurate and compliant with regulations. But it isn’t all spreadsheets and computer models either.

Comcast has a crack team of finance professionals that keep a close eye on reporting requirements. Bonnell herself gets in the weeds too, conducting Sarbanes-Oxley tests and the like, but also takes time out to focus on risk management and cybersecurity.

‘Cool Stuff’ to Do

“I get to do cool stuff here that most other audit shops are not doing,” she said. “While I know people don’t describe internal audit as change agent, that’s what we’re doing.”

Bonnell added that she and her team go through every Comcast business in the company, from Fandango to Universal Theme Parks to regional sports networks and beyond, not just focusing on financials.

“The beauty of our team is we spend our time in the field, so when we audit stuff, we’re there,” Bonnell said, adding that that approach allows the team to train and educate workers on new processes.

“No one loves to get audited,” Bonnell said. “But when we leave, they feel that they’ve learned a ton. We get a lot more thank-yous than hate mail, and that’s great.”

Career Highlights: Bonnell earned a reputation as a “fixer” at Dell, where she led a transformation from in-house manufacturing and set up supply chains between computer makers in China and retailers in the U.S.

At Comcast, she has been a key figure in the integrations of major purchases like NBC Universal and Sky.

Quotable: “[At Dell] I could have told you exactly the size of the bolt that you need to close the door on a shipping container to put in 1,000 boxes that are packaged specifically for Walmart. Thankfully, I’ve lost that.”

In February, BET Networks rallied such prominent national organizations as the National Urban League, Color of Change and the Legal Defense Fund to coalesce around a new social change campaign, #ReclaimYourVote, in an effort to help increase African-American participation in the 2020 Census and election.

Leading the charge around the groundbreaking effort is BET Networks’s chief social impact and communications officer, Jeanine Liburd. Her impressive background as a public policy administrator and media communications executive has paid dividends for the programmer, in front of the camera and within its targeted African-American community.

“Jeanine’s unique background and experiences are a tremendous asset to our brand, and she serves as an inspiration to so many other women — and men — within our BET family,” BET Networks president Scott Mills said.

The Brooklyn, New York, native said that growing up she wanted to pursue a career in acting. She turned her sights to urban studies while earning a bachelor of arts degree in the discipline at Vassar College, with a stop at Atlanta’s Spelman College for her junior year.

Started in Politics

After college, Liburd took aim at developing a career in politics and public policy. “I wanted to be mayor of New York,” she said. “Coming out of college, I knew I wanted to work and further my education in public policy, so I earned my masters from the New School University for Social Research in their public policy program, where I worked for the City of New York.”

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In 1995, Liburd would take her leadership skills to Washington, D.C., where she worked for the Department of Health and Human Services. In 1996 she joined the White House as a policy analyst in the Clinton administration. During her time there, she began to work with the administration’s press team to get coverage of policy issues.

“I began to understand the power of news, TV and the power of partnerships with media entities,” she said.

Liburd moved back to New York in 1997 to hone her media skills working for strategic communications firm Robinson, Lerer & Montgomery. As part of her stint there, she would work closely with then-upstart women’s network Oxygen. Working with female executives such as Geraldine Laybourne, Liburd said she learned life lessons that would serve her well in her future endeavors.

“I learned that you don’t have to be mean or aggressive to be successful, effective or strong,” she said. “You can be a passionate leader and lead with compassion.”

In 2000, Liburd transitioned to MTV Networks as VP of corporate communications, handling public-relations duties for such emerging networks as Nickelodeon, VH1 and MTV. Unlike at Oxygen, where she worked more on the content side, Liburd said she learned the corporate component of the entertainment industry at MTV.

“On the corporate level, you have a chance to see things from a different perspective,” she said. “While you didn’t have the openness in the same way that you do when you’re deep into the brand, I did have the flexibility of digging into a brand when there was an issue.”

There were many issues to deal with during cable’s growing years, particularly on the distribution side. Liburd recalls one dustup in the mid-2000s with satellite service Dish Network, which eventually dropped the MTV Networks suite of services. “When [Dish chairman Charlie Ergen] pulled the plug, I learned so much in the process about the strategy around communications with the affiliates and the consumers,” she said. “I hadn’t had that experience, and I realized that there was still so much of the business that I had to learn. No day was like the previous day.”

As part of the Viacom corporate media team, one executive who Liburd would regularly come into contact with was Debra Lee, BET Networks CEO. Lee eventually approached Liburd about working for the African-American targeted network.

Initially, Liburd said, she was apprehensive about going back to working for a single brand after her years in corporate communications. But Lee presented a vision for the network — including an expansion into scripted content on-screen and more social outreach into the African-American community behind the scenes — that matched Liburd’s career aspirations, she said.

Under the leadership of Lee and Liburd, BET built upon what was already arguably the most popular African-American entertainment brand, transitioning what was a music video-dominated network into an outlet that presented successful scripted series such as The Game and Being Mary Jane, as well as news and entertainment content.

BET’s Mills said Liburd’s tenure is synonymous with the network’s overall success. “Jeanine’s leadership and drive have been a pillar of BET’s success over the past two decades of entertaining, engaging and empowering black communities,” he said.

Social Leadership

Liburd has been able to extend BET’s brand beyond TV into becoming a true social leader within the African-American community.

She cited a saying from former MTV Networks chairman and CEO Judy McGrath: How can we use our superpowers for good? “We have this great platform and we would be remiss if we’re not ramping up the work that we’ve always done, but to do it in a much more intentional and purposeful way,” Liburd said.

The married mother of two teenagers is enjoying the opportunity to make a difference with her talents through the BET brand.

“To take the first portion of my career in terms of the public policy piece, and to match it with the entertainment piece and the utilization of our big platform is really the perfect place for me to be,” she said.

Career Highlights: Liburd began her BET Networks career as chief marketing and communications officer before advancing to chief social impact and communications officer.

She also served as an executive with Viacom Corporate Communications and MTV Networks.

Prior to her entertainment career, Liburd worked on local and national urban and family policy at the local and national levels. She held positions in New York City’s Department of General Services under Mayor David Dinkins, and with the Department of Health and Human Services and the White House under President Bill Clinton.

Quotable: “Every relationship is an important one so treat it as such, and always take the time to think of the other person’s perspective. It’s not always about you.”

Survivor. Big Brother. The Amazing Race. 90-Day Fiancé. Dr. Pimple Popper. I Am Jazz. Sister Wives. Serengheti. Gold Rush. Naked and Afraid. These shows and many, many more have come to life under the purview of Nancy Daniels, chief brand officer of Discovery & Factual.

“She’s the person you want to be in a foxhole with,” Discovery president and CEO David Zaslav said. “She is fearless and formidable: You can’t knock her down. She’s been able to do something very few people have been able to do — build a top network for women with TLC and then turn around and build a top cable network for men.”

Said Daniels: “Moving from TLC to Discovery is a mind shift, but it was something familiar to me — the programming is familiar to me and the audience is familiar to me. I look at it as good storytelling and good content.”

While Daniels’s title of chief brand officer is a bit of a misnomer because she’s in fact in charge of three cable networks — Discovery Channel, Science Channel and Animal Planet — she’s very much aware of how significant a strong brand is in the era of streaming TV.

Knows Brands’ Value

“She starts with what the brand is when it’s at its best,” Zaslav said. “She’s very big on doing the deep audience dive: What do viewers like about the network right now, what do they love on the network, what do they love on TV in general and what would they like more of? Then she starts thinking about how to program and schedule that.”

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Even before that deep dive, Daniels knew well what she had with the gilded Discovery brand: “Any time someone says something like, ‘oh, it’s so hard to find shows and get a hit,’ or ‘we work in cable and it’s so hard’ — I say ‘we work on one of the most beloved and respected media brands there is; it is so meaningful to people.’ Do you know how hard that is to build? … Having something that already is so meaningful to people, we are so lucky.”

By leaning into the strength of that brand, Daniels has maintained Discovery’s standing as the top basic-cable network in primetime, excluding sports, among men 25-54. It also boasts the top unscripted cable series among men 25-54 on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and has more top-10 unscripted cable series than any other network in both 2018 and 2019 among both men 25-54 and men 18-49.

In her first full year at Science Channel, it tied its highest-rated year ever among people 25-54 in prime and total day. It also had its highest-rated year ever among women 25-54 in prime and total day, growing 7% and 11% from last year, respectively.

That performance is something she replicated at TLC. In Daniels’s first year overseeing the network, it jumped from seventh to sixth among women 25-54 and from ninth to sixth among women 18-49 among all basic cable networks. In her last two years at the helm, it improved 12% and 14%, respectively.

Daniels accomplished that growth with programs such as the popular 90-Day Fiancé franchise and exciting live events, such as Expedition Unknown: Egypt Live, which made headlines when explorers uncovered a 2,500-year-old mummy live on television.

“I’m really proud of the turnaround at TLC,” Daniels said. “I was there for four and a half years, which is a long time for a network president, and we had a couple of really low years. And then we turned it around and right now, TLC is killing it.”

Like most successful leaders, Daniels attributes much of the success to her team: “It takes a long time to find the right people you click with.”

Some of the people Daniels clicked with she met early on and still remains close to, such as Allison Grodner, founder of Fly on the Wall Productions, which still produces Big Brother for CBS and many other unscripted series. Daniels worked with Grodner early in her career, and when CBS came looking for a network executive, Grodner was quick to recommend Daniels, who was hired as VP of alternative series development.

“Nancy knew story, she was creative and she understood developing a show,” said Grodner, who still works on projects such as TLC’s This Is Life Live with Daniels . “I also knew she would be able to bridge that gap. She’s thoughtful and smart in her responses to things. She absolutely has the temperament to navigate the corporate world.”

Aced the Interview

When Jennifer Davidson and Tara Sandler of Pie Town Productions met Daniels in 1994, Sandler knew she wanted to hire her on the spot. After the interview, Sandler leaned out of her office window and called Daniels right back in to say “you’re hired!”

“Nancy did the cutest thing — she jumped up in the air and clicked her heels,” she said. “She started out as a second producer and ended up running a show or two. She was a baby genius.”

Pie Town was significant for Daniels in more ways than one: She met her husband, Mark, a director of photography, there, and the couple has two children: Sam, 17, and Leo, 12.

Looking ahead, Daniels conceded: “It’s a super-challenging time in media in general, let alone cable, as we’re trying to figure out the future. There’s an entire generation of people who didn’t interact with Discovery Channel as we did growing up. How do we make Discovery relevant to another generation so that will live far beyond [being] a cable channel?

“The future is barrelling at you — you can’t run from it,” she said. “You have to be ready for it and do everything you can to get these networks ready for it.”

Career Highlights: Building TLC into a top-10 cable network for women. In 2019, TLC was one of the few basic cable networks to show growth and in 2019, its popular franchise 90-Day Fiancé led the network to its best July performance ever among persons 25-54 and all key female demographics.

Quotable: “The future is barrelling at you. You can’t run from it; you have to be ready for it and do everything you can to get these networks ready for it.”

Sam Cooper has spent 22 years at Viacom, but her role is shifting as the industry redefines itself. Cooper oversees subscription video-on-demand licensing for the company, scoping out the over-the-top landscape as well-funded new players enter the market. Viacom and CBS closed on their pair-up in December, and the merger caused “a bit of a pivot” for Cooper, as she puts it.

“I kind of doubled down on the types of transactions I love,” she said. “I got a little further away from the pay TV transactions and deals I’ve been working on for 22 years to do something that’s a little more global.”

Cooper is focused on content licensing, seeing which series within CBS, Showtime, Nickelodeon and other ViacomCBS networks would do best on an external streaming service, or if they’d play better in-house. Late in 2019, she worked on a streaming rights deal that saw 23 seasons of Comedy Central’s South Park go to HBO Max, a pact valued at more than $500 million. She also worked out international deals for the animated series on Netflix and Amazon.

“Before, it was separate Paramount, separate CBS, separate Viacom, different people negotiating those,” Cooper said. “Now it’s all one front door.”

Power Portfolio

ViacomCBS includes MTV, CBS, BET, Nickelodeon, Paramount Network, Paramount’s film library and other entities. Cooper has held an array of posts within Viacom, including senior VP of content distribution and business development at Viacom Media Networks and BET Networks. Prior to coming on board at Viacom, she was in content distribution for Food Network, and ran communications for the Cable & Telecommunications Association for Marketing (CTAM).

The ViacomCBS marriage upended Cooper’s department, with many key figures moving on. “The final few months of the calendar year were stressful for a lot of people,” she said. “We managed the process to make it as humane and transparent as possible.”

The OTT arena is mostly undefined, and Cooper appreciates having a say in the corporate strategy. “How direct-to-consumer strategy evolves is a living, breathing organism at the moment,” she said. “The great thing about working for [president and CEO] Bob Bakish, he loves hearing different voices and different points of view. I believe that, wherever we land in terms of long-term strategy, it will be with a great deal of forethought and discussion.”

Cooper cited a handful of key Viacom figures from the past as mentors in her career, including Judy McGrath, Tom Freston and Nicole Browning. “They helped me understand what it means to love what you do and have a really good time doing it,” she said. “They taught me how to manage teams and inspire people.”

Cooper keeps an open door for younger colleagues with executive ambitions. “I’m so thankful for my mentors early on across in the business in helping me to forge my own path in the industry,” she said. “I am continuously looking to champion the next generation — my door is always open, and I’m a huge advocate in helping young professionals identify and follow their passions.”

There’s a lot to learn from the example Cooper sets, her colleagues say. “Sam brings a level of expertise to her role that is unmatched,” ViacomCBS executive VP, general counsel and secretary Christa D’Alimonte said. “She approaches every negotiation with a deep understanding of what we want to achieve, but also a recognition of what our partners want to achieve — and she appreciates how important it is to drive value for both sides. She’s played a pivotal role in so many of our distribution relationships and deals, including the broader partnership arrangements that Viacom negotiated over the past couple of years.”

The mother of two, Cooper studies her children’s viewing patterns for a glimpse at what the future of television might look like. “If my kids’ screen time is any indication, I think people are consuming orders of magnitude more than they were five years ago,” she said.

That includes individual screen time and co-viewing. Regarding the latter, Cooper mentioned watching documentaries, RuPaul’s Drag Race and The Bachelor with the kids. “I don’t love The Bachelor, my teenager does,” she said. “If she wants to spend time with me, I’ll sit there and watch The Bachelor.”

Vino and Victuals

Watching on her own, Cooper enjoys The Real Housewives, Schitt’s Creek and Fleabag.

She and the family enjoy skiing, and Cooper sees a lot of live music — the Lumineers, Hozier and Mumford & Sons of late — with a group of women who also work in television.

She also loves hosting dinner parties at her Westchester County (New York) home. “Good music, good wine, good lighting,” Cooper said. “Having my favorite people in my home, enjoying themselves, is my very favorite thing in the whole wide world.”

Cooper ventured to Amsterdam in late February to get to know the company’s international team. The number of SVOD clients is rapidly growing. Disney+ and Apple TV+ came to be in November, NBCU’s Peacock and HBO Max arrive this spring.

“There are a lot more relationships to build,” she said, “and a lot more content to talk about. We are hitting the ground running.”

Career Highlights: Launching Logo TV and achieving full distribution in record time (“I am an avid supporter of the LGBTQ+ community, so I loved being a part of the team that helped launch Logo back in 2005”).

Navigating carriage negotiations year-round. (“While I am always relieved when we reach an agreement, I am also proud of how I handled each of them.”)

Having a front row seat to countless cultural happenings, whether it was attending the Kids’ Choice Awards to see Katy Perry get slimed, watching Beyoncé announce her pregnancy at the VMAs or seeing a taping of The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Quotable: “What assets should we license to a third party and what assets should we keep in house? It’s all part of an evolving strategy and it’s really fun to be at the front line of it and have a voice at the table.” 

With degrees from Stanford, Oxford and Harvard, Tina Perry is one of those people who was already incredibly accomplished before she ever entered the workforce.

While she always knew she wanted to work in the entertainment industry, Perry took a practical approach to it. “I knew, long-term, the business of entertainment was where my passion was, but the law was a great path for me to learn about the business,” she said. “Before I went to law school, I was torn between going into law and business school. I met some people who worked in the entertainment industry and they gave me some great advice: the truth about the entertainment industry is that it’s one big negotiation.”

Perry took that advice to heart and got her JD from Harvard Law School. From there, she went straight to a law firm, New York-based Cravath, Swaine & Moore. While working there, she represented public companies in connection with public offerings, private placements and general corporate governance matters.

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“Choosing to practice corporate law paid off 100%,” Perry said. “I really started to understand big business and how to read balance sheets. The exposure to business helped me. It gave me a great foundation for how the whole ecosystem of how the entertainment industry works.”

It was after Cravath that she made her move into entertainment. She was hired to work in business and legal affairs for Viacom-owned MTV and VH1, and she relocated from New York to Los Angeles.

“It took four or five years for me to find my tribe in L.A.,” Perry said. “In the early years, instead of being lonely, I immersed myself in experiences and hobbies that have really paid off for me. I missed New York, but it has been great for my career to be in Los Angeles.”

In 2009, she joined Oprah Winfrey’s nascent basic cable network, OWN, as VP of business and legal affairs.

“I knew I wanted to be more entrepreneurial in my career, to be an integral part of a business that was growing and evolving,” Perry said. “The chance to work with Oprah and her brand was so enticing. I don’t think I ever thought I would have an opportunity to work with Oprah or her brand, just because it was such a rarified experience. There are not many people who have a brand like hers that’s so clean, so defined and that has touched so many. Working for and with Oprah has been bigger than a dream come true for me.”

Even then, though, Perry knew that she had bigger goals in mind than leading negotiations for OWN. “I knew that I wanted to be the general manager of some sort of entertainment business, to run a P&L and help a larger business generate revenue and be successful,” she recalled.

After about six years at OWN, Perry joined its board of directors, which allowed her to get even closer to the business of running the network. “The scope of my work running business and legal affairs broadened and I started overseeing standards and practices and risk assessment. I also started working with peers and partners on other parts of the business,” she said.

Connecting With the C-Suite

Making those connections and getting that exposure paid off and, in January 2019, Perry was named president of OWN. In the past year, OWN has had five series land in the top 10 among African-American viewers, had the top four original scripted cable series among African-American women aged 18 and over and had five of the top 30 original scripted series on ad-supported cable among women 25-54. Those include such shows as Greenleaf and Queen Sugar and, in the past year, the network has begun airing original holiday movies also targeting its core female African- American audience.

“OWN is core for us at Discovery,” said David Zaslav, CEO of Discovery Inc., which co-founded the network with Winfrey. “We’re about quality brands that tell great stories. Most of last year, we were the No. 1 media company in America for women with such networks as HGTV, ID, TLC, Food Network and OWN. A big piece of that was the success Oprah and Tina had at OWN. It’s a huge source of pride for us that we are creating content at OWN that is really having an impact in the African-American community.”

OWN specifically seeks out African-American creators such as Ava DuVernay (Cherish the Day), Tyler Perry (The Haves and the Have Nots) and Tarell Alvin McCraney (David Makes Man). “Working with Tina Perry is like working with a generous and beautiful mind,” McCraney said. “I can’t think of a better person who deserves this recognition.”

McCraney et al. are part of OWN’s overall vision for itself, which has evolved since the network first launched in 2011.

“Oprah absolutely loves working with storytellers who have a strong voice and a specific point of view,” Perry said. “We have had the ability to attract some of today’s best talent, people who are interested in telling stories to our audience in new and engaging manners. The chance to work with Oprah and collaborate with her on creating series that are going to reach large audiences is a huge attractive element of who we are. It’s becoming part of our ethos.

“Our brand promise is ‘see yourself’ and whether she’s watching scripted, unscripted or Super Soul, our viewer comes to watch our programming and to see herself, her life and her history reflected in our storytelling,” Perry said.

Looking ahead, OWN is working toward what’s next in terms of streaming: “We’re part of the Discovery family,” Perry said. “Discovery has really great plans to go over the top, and we’ll be part of those plans. We know from our numbers and our engagement metrics that viewers want to receive our content that way, and we want to reach younger viewers. We are looking forward to a day soon when we will be offered that way.”

Career Highlights: Joining OWN as one of its first employees in 2009 before the network even launched in 2011 and then rising to become president of the network in January 2019.

Quotable: “Working for and with Oprah has been bigger than a dream come true for me.”

Colleagues and clients say that Jennifer Koester, director of telco & video distribution partnerships at Google, gets things done.

Kristin Dolan, former chief operating officer of Cablevision Systems, recalled when Koester was an attorney at Cablevision, working on early advanced ad products, including addressable advertising.

“She’s super-smart and she’s very confident,” Dolan said. “She’s really good at getting people to understand what you’re trying to do and buy in.”

Before Koester joined the cable company, Cablevision had been a client of the law firm where Koester worked. She’d initially been interested in fashion and design, but what she called her “practical side” kicked in, and she went to law school. That and an inability to draw.

At the firm, she was at the intersection of technology and law, writing some of the first online privacy policies and the first advertising guidelines for Google.

She decided to move to Cablevision. At first, she focused on programming deals, but moved on to advertising. “I took a pivot in my career and left the legal side of things and went to the business side,” Koester said. “It was probably one of the best decisions I made in my career and it has paid off in spades.”

“Because of her understanding of the space and the products we were selling, she really helped move that business forward,” said Dolan, who said she’d like to lure Koester to her current business, the measurement and analytics company 605.

“I always thought, and I still do, she was a very effective and pragmatic, get-it-done lawyer,” said Spectrum Reach president David Kline, formerly president of Cablevision Media Sales.

When Kline moved on to VisibleWorld, he was one of Koester’s vendors. Now, at Spectrum Reach, he’s a client. “She comes back constantly with creative ideas and ways we can work together,” Kline said.

“She takes things as a challenge when she hears ‘no,’ ” said Kline. “Like any good sales person, when the customer says no, that’s when the real sales start. Right now, we’re working with her on a project that could bear fruit, and it’s because of her persistence over the years.”

Koester said she’s a believer in treating everyone with respect even during tough negotiations. That included when, while still at Cablevision, she was negotiating with Google for digital ad technology. “My negotiations with Google were really difficult because this was a first of a kind deal,” she recalled. “Those negotiations turned out essentially to be the first round of interviews, because not so long after that, they recruited me.”

Koester’s knowledge of the telecommunications industry made her attractive to Google, said Bonita Stewart, VP of global partnerships.

“Her experience from a legal and regulatory perspective made her appealing to us, combined with her customer relationship skills,” Stewart said. In terms of technology, “she’s been here only four years, but you wouldn’t know it in terms of her fluency with our products.”

Koester is in charge of Google’s cable and telecom vertical, working with clients including T-Mobile, Roku, Dish Network, Verizon Communications, AT&T and Comcast.

“She has such an intuitive view of the industry. I mean she is always several steps ahead,” Stewart said. “She’s a self-starter and a self-learner. But most importantly she has the ability to just get things done.”

Koester sees her role as helping the industry navigate a technological transition with products that enable addressable TV and other revenue generators. “One of the most exciting parts of my job is Google has made a decision to invest in the future of TV,” she said.

Koester has also taken a role in promoting and mentoring women at Google in the technology business. She serves on Google’s global hiring committee. “She is leading from the front in terms of now being firmly entrenched in a technology company and makes sure there are a number of women that are behind her and on her team doing different things,” said Stewart.

“She’s very focused on mentorship and bringing other women up along with her,” adds Dolan. “She always takes the opportunity to look for people to mentor. She really helps bring them along, male and female, but she definitely does a lot to help further the women in the industry particularly now that she’s an ad tech and tech overall.”

Koester said she’s been fortunate to have worked for some very powerful, influential and successful women during her career, including Dolan and Stewart.

“I have never seen anything as powerful as the network of women at Google,” she said, with initiatives and programs designed to invest in the company’s female talent and talent in all under-represented groups. She also formed a relationship between Google and Women in Cable & Telecommunications.

Mentorship a Priority

“As a leader, I think you have to be committed to lift your team and mentorship is clearly a part of that,” she said. “There’s a couple of women that aren’t on my team that come to me. I think receiving candid feedback helps people develop and in giving them stretch opportunities that provide that organizational impact and visibility.”

Outside of work, Koester said she focuses on her family, with her and her husband supporting their son, a freshman pitcher at George Washington, and their daughter, who plays volleyball. Sports helps the kids learn team dynamics, leadership and dealing with defeat, “all skills that will truly benefit them when they enter the workforce and life in general,” she said, adding that as a kid she was in the math league.

Current interests include gardening, cooking, skiing and decorating. “One of my little hobbies is putting some eclectic things together and kind of redecorating every couple of months,” she said.

Career Highlights: Joined Google in 2016 to lead the Telco and Video Distributor vertical for Google's Global Partnerships, working with clients including T-Mobile, Roku, Dish, Verizon, AT&T and Comcast.

Was recruited from Cablevision Systems after leading affiliate negotiations with Google.

Spent 11 years at Cablevision, developing linear TV, VOD, digital and data products to generate growth opportunities for the company’s advertising sales force.

Started at Cablevision as an attorney after working as an associate at three different law firms.

Quotable: “One of the most exciting parts of my job is Google has made a decision to invest in the future of TV.”

When Georgia Juvelis began working for AMC Networks in fall of 2007, Mad Men had just debuted on AMC, and she got a sneak peek at the first episode of Breaking Bad. She remembers thinking it was a “thrilling” time to join the company.

She could not guess how many more changes were in store both for her and for AMC, which went public in 2011 and expanded internationally in 2014. As executive VP and co-head of corporate communications, Juvelis has handled the financial reporting on a number of the company’s biggest changes. These include its 2018 acquisition of RLJ Entertainment, which added the streaming service Acorn TV to AMC’s portfolio, and the recent reorganization of the AMC Networks Entertainment Group under president Sarah Barnett.

Her colleagues praise not only her skill in distilling a clear message to shareholders, the business press and employees about the company’s decisions, but also her role as a sounding board when key decisions have been made.

“Georgia is a natural strategic thinker,” said AMC Networks CEO Josh Sapan, describing her approach to communications as “highly considered” rather than “reactive.”

“She thinks about the communications impact, but she also thinks about the business impact and the impact on all constituents of what’s going on in the company,” he said.

Ask Challenging Questions

To Juvelis, a corporate communications team’s most valuable function is to ask challenging questions. “Because we’re the proxies for the press in the company, you can’t be afraid to have a point of view and express it.” She said she’s fortunate to work with leaders who value input: “Otherwise you’re just an empty mouthpiece, I think.”

AMC Networks Entertainment president Barnett said Juvelis’s “straight-talking, very honest” perspective inspires loyalty from those around her. “She seems egoless,” Barnett explained. “It’s so clear her motivation is always about putting the company first.”

Juvelis’s career rise parallels what she sees as a growing recognition that corporate communication is “fundamental to business strategy.”

She started out at Discovery handling program publicity. She next launched her own company, working with such clients as Hearst Communications and PBS. As communications VP for Gemstar-TV Guide International, she oversaw media relations, talent relations and publicity, as well as corporate communications.

Juvelis began working as a consultant to AMC shortly after she and her husband had spent a year traveling the world. “We call it our mid-30s gap year,” she said.

After only a few months of consulting, AMC chief communications officer Ellen Kroner invited her to join the staff. Juvelis was excited, but explained to Kroner that she was pregnant, and would soon go on maternity leave.

Kroner “didn’t even blink,” Juvelis said. She was impressed by Kroner’s trust in a new hire, which she models in her own management style. “I like to hire people with similar values and standards of quality and then just let them go, because that’s how I like to work,” she said.

When Kroner retired in 2016, Juvelis and Jim Maiella were promoted to co-heads of communications. “Co-heads” can sometimes be rivals, but Juvelis said she and Maiella “value having a peer and close confidante who we can really trust and rely on.” Sapan observed that Maiella and Juvelis “share tasks and goals without selfishness.”

Their primary task, Juvelis said, is creating a cogent message about how seemingly disparate parts of the company support its strategic goals.

“I think I’m able to step back and establish that narrative thread,” Juvelis said. Telling a compelling story requires “an appreciation of what the world is talking about and what it cares about so you can understand: Where do we fit into it?” It also requires knowledge of an increasingly complex, global organization, she said.

Juvelis’s ability to inspire trust allows her to build relationships across varied departments. In the past year and a half, Juvelis has guided several internal communications initiatives, including a revamped employee intranet and “TALKS@AMC Networks” featuring department heads and industry leaders.

Approach to Mentoring

Juvelis has mentored women through the WICT New York Executive Mentoring Program and the Women’s ERG at AMC Networks and MentorUp programs, but added: “I also hope I’ve done a fair amount of informal mentoring.” Essential to that, she said, is helping people build a network of supporters. “You only do well if people around you want you to do well.”

Her mentoring is similar to her work in communications: People seek her out to get a clear-eyed perspective. “She’s the ideal person to stress test an idea with,” Barnett said. “She’s very good at bringing out the best in others.”

Stepping back to find the narrative thread of her 12 years with AMC Networks, Juvelis noted, “I think I can get bored easily, so I’ve been well suited to navigating a lot of change.”

For all the change she has been a part of, Juvelis said her most important accomplishment has been spotlighting the original programming and films that drew her to AMC in the first place.

“In a small way, the work we’ve done has launched conversations on important topics, driven the cultural conversation and shifted minds,” she said. “To be a part of that has been a huge highlight.”

Career Highlights: Overseeing internal and external communication and marketing efforts for the strategic acquisition of RLJ Entertainment and AMC’s direct-to-consumer strategy

Quotable: “Relationship building is as critically important as always. While it’s easier to have virtual relationships, taking time for face-to-face conversation is important.”

There is never a better time than now to celebrate the accomplishments of women in media. Television in particular has evolved to provide more leadership opportunities for women, especially in categories such as programming, legal affairs and communication, but also in companies’ corner offices.

Multichannel News has proudly highlighted high-achieving women executives for more than two decades, in print, online and at our annual New York City gala luncheon events, which also support the mission of Women in Cable Telecommunications (WICT)’s New York chapter.

The global outbreak of the novel coronavirus has disrupted our live-event scheduling, but our mission of celebration persists. We have moved the 22nd annual Wonder Women luncheon back, from March 26 to Sept. 30, at the Ziegfeld Ballroom.

While we all are adapting to the workplace, social, economic and health-and-safety challenges that have reshaped our shared reality, now is a good time to tell the stories of the 2020 Wonder Women and Women to Watch. We hope you enjoy these profiles and look forward to gathering with these accomplished women, and with you, to continue the celebration on Sept. 30.

The 2020 honorees are:
Friday Abernethy, Senior VP of Content Distribution, Univision Communications
Tricia Alcamo, Group VP, Human Resources, Spectrum Enterprise, Charter Communications
Lisa Bonnell, Senior VP, Global Audit and General Auditor, Comcast NBCUniversal
Samantha Cooper, Executive VP of Global Content Licensing, ViacomCBS
Nancy Daniels, Chief Brand Officer, Discovery Inc., Discovery & Factual
Rosalyn Durant, Senior VP, Operations, Disney Springs, ESPN Wide World of Sports and Water Parks for the Walt Disney World Resort
Mónica Gil, Chief Marketing Officer and Executive VP, NBCUniversal Telemundo Enterprises
Georgia Juvelis, Executive VP & Co-Head Corporate Communications, AMC Networks
Jennifer Koester, Director of Telco & Video Distribution Partnerships, Google
Jeanine Liburd, Chief Social Impact and Communications Officer, BET Networks
Tina Perry, President, OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network
Stephanie Plasse, SVP and Deputy General Counsel, Global Revenue, Partnerships and Distribution, A+E Networks

Women to Watch

Honor Roll

Mónica Gil has several important jobs at NBCUniversal’s Telemundo Enterprises. Not only is she chief marketing officer. She also oversees corporate affairs, social responsibility programs and government relations for the Spanish-language programmer.

Besides that, she is a key adviser to chairman Cesar Conde and was part of the management team that led the network’s move in 2018 into the new Telemundo Center in Miami, Florida, the state-of-the-art production center and headquarters called the “30 Rock of the South.”

She led branding and launch efforts for Telemundo programming that have made the network No. 1 in weekday primetime among U.S. Spanish-language networks for three consecutive seasons — a point of pride for the former Nielsen executive who joined Telemundo in 2017.

Added to all of that, the Southern California native oversees human resources for the 1,500-employee organization. It’s in that role that she made what she considers one of her most important contributions to Telemundo: the Mujeres Imparables (Unstoppable Women) program now celebrating a one-year anniversary. The company-wide initiative is “dedicated to celebrating the achievements of women in all aspects of life and championing their advancement at every level of business,” Telemundo noted.

Mentorship Moves

“When I stepped into the human resource role, I realized that a lot of women specifically were asking for ways to either [obtain] a mentorship from me or asking to set a conversation about my career, or they wanted to talk about how they can grow,” Gil said in a recent interview.

RELATED: MCN Wonder Women 2020: Here’s to the Leaders

“Many times they feel stuck in their job and they don’t know how to get out. So I like to tell them, ‘Let’s get you unstuck.’ And sometimes just because you're stuck now doesn't mean it's forever. Or sometimes maybe because you get told ‘no,’ it just means ‘not yet.’ ”

Conde pointed to Unstoppable Women as one of Gil’s signature accomplishments and said it epitomized her desire to empower the next generation of Latina women and to make Telemundo stronger.

She has “an incredible eye for talent,” Conde said. “She has mentored women and men throughout her career. And I think helping identify the high-potential next generation of talent and nurturing them has been one of the biggest unwritten or unspoken contributions that she has made.”

Conde said Gil brought a unique background of marketplace data and “where the future of the demographics of the industry was going,” so when Telemundo was looking to fill the newly created executive VP role three years ago, “in my mind there was no one who understood that dynamic better than Mónica.”

At Nielsen, Gil was senior VP and general manager of multicultural, growth and strategy, advising blue-chip clients (including packaged goods and media firms) and created, developed and authored such insight reports as Latina Power Shift, about the growing influence of Hispanic women in the U.S. marketplace.

“I'm very proud of the consumer reports that we did at Nielsen, because I think that those reports have truly helped shape and inform companies about markets that were sometimes an afterthought,” Gil said when asked to cite her top career accomplishments. (The others were Unstoppable Women and Telemundo’s successful, first-ever exclusive Spanish-language broadcast of the FIFA World Cup, in Russia in 2018.)

Susan Whiting, as vice chair of Nielsen until retiring from there in 2013, worked closely with Gil for nine years.

“When you meet Mónica, you are immediately impressed by her energy and her knowledge and her intelligence in approaching a situation,” Whiting said. “The more you get to know her, you learn about how she solves problems, how she connects people, how she works for improving an organization and its positioning. Also I think a big part of the work she’s done and her mission is to make sure that we see diversity and its opportunity in everything we do.

“She’s incredibly funny, she’s a great friend, she’s a very good mentor and she was really really good at her job at Nielsen,” Whiting said.

Gil was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. She is the youngest of 12 children in the family, and speaks with pride about her 29 nieces and nephews. “We grew up with a father who was a gardener, a mom who was a homemaker, who wanted us to work hard or work diligently and sign our name proudly. So that's always been my motto in life.”

Political Roots

Before joining Nielsen, Gil was in politics. She was deputy press secretary for California House speaker Antonio Villaraigosa and helped him win election as mayor of Los Angeles in 2005. Earlier, she had worked in public affairs for Telemundo stations in L.A. Those jobs taught her a lot about media, she said. “Politics gave me the opportunity to see how to shape a narrative of a story and how to pick the right stories to tell.”

Having been in positions to observe and nurture growing respect for Hispanics as consumers and as individuals, she says they are in a good place now.

“I like to say there’s no better time to be Hispanic than now,” she said. “And the reason I believe that is, with 60 million Latinos in this country, Latinos are now in a position where it's not only about the population size, but any company that wants to grow I think really has to put Latinos at the forefront of the dialogue. … I think it’s an amazing moment to be Latino in this country now.”

Career Highlights: Transformed Telemundo’s marketing organization and helped lead the rise to becoming the No. 1 U.S. Spanish-language programmer (weekday prime) for three consecutive seasons.

Helped accelerate growth opportunities for Nielsen clients as senior VP and general manager of multicultural growth and strategy, authoring studies including Latina Power Shift.

Was a senior member of Antonio Villaraigosa’s successful election campaign for mayor of Los Angeles in 2005.

Quotable: “I love being a CMO. I love the power of our audience, the beauty, the diversity of our audience. That is truly reflective of the American dream.”

When she’s not managing human resources at Spectrum Enterprise, Tricia Alcamo enjoys racing sailboats. Being on the boat offers fresh air, exercise and relaxation — and even a few business lessons to boot.

“You can only be good at a specific job on a big boat if you understand what all the other jobs are, too,” she said. “If you’re going to win in a sailboat race, you need 12 persons working together in perfect unison.”

Alcamo manages human resources for the 5,000 people within Spectrum Enterprise, and has worked hard to get them all moving together in perfect unison. Spectrum Enterprise is part of Charter Communications, the second-biggest U.S. cable company. It provides networking services and architecture to businesses across America, whether related to voice, video, data, managed service solutions or other products.

Alcamo came on board in 2016 after 14 years at American Express, arriving two months after the massive merger between Time Warner Cable, Bright House Networks and Charter Communications. “This role brought together the many different positions I had over the course of my career,” she said.

Having studied mergers up close when she was in the merger-integration business at Deloitte Consulting just after college, Alcamo passed along key lessons to staffers after the rollup went down. For starters, be comfortable with discomfort. “Accept the fact that integrations of that size are messy work,” she said. “There are operational elements, there are cultural elements, and you’re signing up for something that’s not the status quo.”

Alcamo also stressed that a merger allows forward-thinking employees to establish the kind of culture they truly want to work in. “Create the brand, create the business strategy,” she said. “Rarely in a steady-state situation do you get to do that.”

Her overarching strategy to get everyone on the same page was to always think about, and plan for, a better tomorrow. “Look at what the legacy companies bring to the table,” Alcamo said. “Put it all together and think about what works best for the company going forward.”

Making a Mark

Alcamo has made a significant mark on the joined company. She was behind Accelerate You, a program designed to grow and develop talent in the organization and grow employees’ leadership skills. “It was a way to bring together all of our different activities around investing in people and learning and development skills and capabilities,” she said. “It is designed to help people succeed in their roles now, but also in the future.”

Alcamo was also behind Spectrum Enterprise’s Women’s Leadership Mentoring program. Women in leadership roles sign up to be “mentees” and are paired up with another female executive a level or two above them on the org chart.

That nine-month program launched in January 2019. Alcamo and other Spectrum Enterprise leaders are contemplating what it will look like the next time around. “It provided us with a good framework to think about a broader mentorship program,” she said.

Her Spectrum Enterprise colleagues said the company culture is richer with Alcamo overseeing HR. “She really empowers and supports our organization,” Tammy Zimmerman, senior director of human resources at Spectrum Enterprise, said. “You want to follow someone who believes in your capabilities and the capabilities of the organization.”

Bill Archer, executive VP and president of Spectrum Enterprise, said Alcamo “combines business acumen and problem-solving skills with an ability to relate to people and communicate her ideas to create value for our team and organization. Under her leadership, we are transforming the way we attract, develop and advance the people who will drive our business to future success.”

A mom of two, Alcamo fought and beat breast cancer in 2014, and her tenacious work at American Express throughout her treatment earned her Working Mother of the Year honors from Working Mother Magazine in 2015. “I was very open at work about what I was going through,” she said. “Having that recognition at that time was just amazing.”

Alcamo enjoys sailing and skiing with her daughters, who are 13 and 11. They sail on the Long Island Sound. Alcamo is a “pit person” on the sailboat, situated near the bottom of the mast. “I am very quickly tailing lines, and making sure everything runs free when we have a sail change,” she said.

Thrills on the Hills

When winter rolls around, Alcamo and her daughters are up in the Catskills every weekend. Alcamo used to sit in the lodge as her kids would ski, but pushed herself to take lessons. “It was fun in the lodge, but it looked like fun out there, too,” she said.

Alcamo describes herself as a binge-watcher of television. “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel I love, Handmaid’s Tale scares the heck out of me and The Crown was really compelling,” she said of series she recently binged.

As always, Alcamo is focused on how Spectrum Enterprise can better serve its clients, today and tomorrow. “I think about HR strategy and the talent we are attracting, and the kind of learning and development we are doing, with client centricity in mind,” she said. “The talent we need at Spectrum Enterprise is out there understanding our clients’ businesses and our clients’ needs, and helping to think about what kind of large networking solutions would meet those needs.

Career Highlights: Led development of the HR strategy for Spectrum Enterprise following the merger of Charter, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks.

Launched the Spectrum Enterprise Women’s Leadership Initiative, the first development-focused effort of its kind at Spectrum Enterprise.

Made a significant industry change to join Charter in 2016 (“and being on stage in St. Louis — speaking in front of 300 employees — on my first day on the job!”).

Quotable: “Within Spectrum Enterprise, all of these initiatives are bearing fruit and we're seeing more diversity at senior leadership levels. We just know that more diversity in leadership drives better results.”

From an early age, Univision’s Friday Abernethy had aspirations about working in media, but her path into the field wasn’t a direct one. “When I was offered a position within the banking industry at JPMorgan Chase at the start of my career, I thought that was a really unbelievable opportunity to learn an industry and be trained from such an esteemed organization,” she recalled. “The people I met, the departments I interacted with, and everything in between was simply a great way to launch my work life.”

Segueing into GE Capital, Abernethy spent the first six years of her career in financial services. “I really appreciated the intellectual aspects of the jobs, but I was not really passionate in what I was doing,” she said. “Since this was in the infancy of the internet, I just thought it was a golden opportunity. I wanted to be part of it.”

Flash to Viacom Media Networks in 1998, specifically MTV Networks, and Abernethy was the company’s first internet hire. Following her most recent position at Pop TV, which she helped transition from the TV listings channel TVGN to a full-scale entertainment network, Abernethy is now senior VP, content distribution and business development at Univision Communications.

She manages the team responsible for negotiating sales and licensing efforts for both television and digital platforms under a variety of business models. This includes broadcast television, sports and Spanish-language programming, and with all major linear and online distributors of content (along with subscription video-on-demand, over the top and social distributors).

“The increasing opportunities in digital right now are the new normal,” Abernethy noted. “Nothing is really complete at present without some digital component.”

“We reach the Hispanic audience and it is really important that we are educating all of the partners and platforms out there about the Hispanic consumer and the growth that is available on all the platforms of Univision Communications,” she said, citing the nearly 60 million Hispanics in the United States. These platforms include Univision, UniMás, Galavisión, El Rey Network and Spanish-language sports network TUDN (formerly Univision Deportes Network).

Selling Content and Culture

“What is really great about Univision is how it provides content in culture and in language, which I think is really important as the third-generation Hispanics continue to embrace their heritage,” Abernethy said. “If you are an outsider looking in the media industry, you have no idea how important the licensing revenue is for any media company.

"These are leverage negotiations, so you can ultimately have very challenging conversations with clients, but you work with them in such intense and intimate moments you can also become very good friends with them after the deal is done.”

“We also work in a business right now so much more digitally focused,” she noted. “One of the first deals I did in partnership with other people within Univision was to figure out how we could get on the Sling platform, which was sort of our first foray into this new digital world. Since then, and as we continue to evolve as an organization, I still have my footing heavily within the MVPD world, but my team also oversees AVOD deals, third-party app deals and any new MVPD deals that are coming into fruition.”

Abernethy also cited wireless as a new arena that is now becoming more prevalent, as well as a space Univision wants to partner in.

“The field is now so much broader in how we can license our product, we must ensure that our audience has access to it,” she said. “It’s about making sure that our content is available across all platforms.”

“As tough as Friday can be, she is also very fair, very direct and always truthful,” said Henry Ahn, Univision’s president of content distribution and partnerships, who joined the company less than two years ago from Scripps Networks Interactive. “Your reputation does not happen overnight. It is built over many years in the course of a career. Even before I wasn’t working with her, I knew of Friday’s reputation as someone you could simply trust.

“Friday has a great attitude; not just at work but in life in general,” he added. “People like her, she likes to be around people, and in our business that goes a very long way.”

Cox Communications senior VP of content distribution Andy Albert called Abernethy a “great people leader.”

“Friday is an extremely well-respected, tough-but-fair negotiator with deep experience in content distribution,” Albert said. “Increasingly valued as the industry shifts, she is highly adaptable to changes, handles adversity well and is able to roll with the punches. She’s also well-liked and a great people leader, someone who many of her extensive contacts in the industry would jump to work with.”

What’s in a Name?

As for her unique first name, it’s nothing more than a nickname, Abernethy said. “My real first name is Kristen, but I have always been called Friday,” she said. “My parents are Midwest, wonderful and earnest people, and not necessarily cool and hip enough to name a child Friday. But I was born on a Friday and it just stuck as a nickname from an early age.

“And, let’s face it — it’s certainly better than being called Sunday or Monday!”

Career Highlights: Launching the Logo network at Viacom at a time when the LGBTQ community was not embraced; expanding into the digital space.

At Univision, launching sports network TUDN.

Quotable: “We are here working for big organizations at a time of great change. But when there is a mission behind what you are personally doing, it makes the work all that much more meaningful. It gives you a purpose, which really drives me.”