The Fierce Video editorial team is proud to present its third annual Emerging Leaders Awards, recognizing the brightest young professionals rising up the ranks of the streaming TV industry. Throughout the month of May we’ll be featuring these profiles with each of our finalists. We will announce the winners during our StreamTV Show with a live awards ceremony in Denver on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. MT. Not yet registered for the StreamTV Show, running June 6-8? Be sure to register now!
Mackenzie Hummel/Warner Bros. Discovery:
As account manager in the sales and distribution team, Hummel manages multibillion-dollar partnerships with top global distributors of the newly formed Warner Bros. Discovery portfolio. She is responsible for monetization and strategic growth across HBO Max and the company's suite of linear networks including TBS, TNT, truTV, Cartoon Network, Cinemax and others. Hummel's innovative approach to negotiating and quarterbacking partner initiatives has made her a key leader within the company's global platforms business. In 2021, she grew her accounts and outperformed the marketplace average by nearly 2x, including launching the top-performing HBO Max hardware bundle with Roku. As a collaborative manager with a passion for team building, Hummel has earned her reputation as a problem solver across the multiple roles she's served throughout her eight-year tenure with the company.
What her colleagues are saying:
"Warner Bros. Discovery's global platform distribution team strives to deliver best-in-class results, and Mackenzie Hummel is a standout contributor and clear example of our team's aspiration and performance. Her current work with Roku exemplifies our values: the tenacity and courage to challenge the status quo, a bias toward action and critical thinking skills to support her initiatives. I'm immensely proud of Mackenzie's recognition by Fierce Video as she is aptly identified as an emerging leader within media. I'm eager to witness her continued ascent in the years to come.“ - Mike Takac, EVP of sales and distribution at WBD
"Mackenzie is a standout member of the Warner Bros. Discovery distribution organization. She is entrepreneurial, curious and strategic. Her work ethic and drive are unmatched, yet she always finds time to help a fellow team member or take on management of a new project. Mackenzie has shown immense dedication to achieving our business goals and demonstrates the forethought to achieve long term success. I'm most impressed with her ability to balance a positive attitude with the capacity to navigate adversity and change. She embodies the term 'grace under fire' and this is one of the many reasons why internal and external stakeholders love working with her." - Kate Pluta, SVP of sales and distribution at WBD
Streaming Industry Q&A:
What streaming services do you subscribe to?
It's an ever-growing list! HBO Max (currently loving Barry), Netflix, Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, Hulu, Disney+.
Describe your biggest career highlight so far.
Launching HBO Max on our largest distributor during the height of the global pandemic was simultaneously one of the most challenging and rewarding experiences of my career to date. I had the opportunity to manage a core launch partner in 2020 and build our go-to-market plans from an early stage. With our team's unique position, we can leverage the strengths of our partners to excel growth in the market. This requires a collaborative approach that contemplates how our promotional and offer strategy fits within the media landscape at large. We see the competitive "streaming wars" play out on a daily basis on our partner platforms. Our team had to be agile launching a new product within this landscape, and we were able to achieve unprecedented work while dispersed nationwide. I deepened my expertise in the subsequent launch of the ad-supported tier and navigated the rollout of HBO Max in Latin America and select European territories. In expanding HBO Max's global scale, my scope of the business has widened. It is a great source of pride to see how our programming can create connections between cultures and viewers worldwide.
What has been your biggest career learning experience?
Through my experience working on building HBO Max, I've learned firsthand the importance of putting yourself in the customer's shoes with every decision. The audience perspective is an important lens to keep top of mind, especially in an industry that is as fast changing as ours. In the products or campaigns that may have failed in my career, I dig for learnings to apply to future successes. At the core of those learnings is how do we get to where our customers want us to be so we can continuously provide them the best service and entertainment.
What's next for you in terms of new challenges in streaming TV?
Personally, we're in an exciting new chapter of our company's history merging with Discovery to form Warner Bros. Discovery. Having been with the company through the prior AT&T acquisition as well, I embraced that with challenges come great opportunity. Change is becoming the new norm that we are learning to thrive in. This merger is representative of larger shifts in our streaming industry overall as customers are evaluating both their streaming wallets and their consumption habits. There is a growing expanse of entertainment options at a customer's fingertips today, and we are continuing to evolve our company, library and value offering to compete in that ecosystem. That aspect of streaming is a thrilling experience that forces me to think differently about our business every day.