Caroline Frost talks to Kevin Mayer, the Disney veteran who oversaw the launch of Disney+ and who aims to turn DAZN into the Netflix of sport
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t the beginning of August, Reese Witherspoon sold her company, Hello Sunshine. Even in a world where film-stars-turnedbrands have become 10 a penny, the Oscar winner made international headlines thanks to the jaw-dropping sale price – reportedly $900m. Witherspoon said she was “thrilled to be working with Blackstone, Kevin, and Tom to grow a next-generation media company”. That Kevin was Kevin Mayer and, if this latest venture brought him more
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attention than he has had throughout his 25-year career, including his roles at Disney, TikTok and now DAZN, it is also the natural evolution for a man who has made magic out of identifying the next sweet spot where technology and entertainment meet. This prophetic skill was first in evidence way back in the early 1990s, when Mayer took his first job at Disney. He recalls realising the potential for the online delivery of entertainment: “We were a bit ahead of our time. We traded a venture with some telephone companies. We were going
Disney
A man ahead of the curve
to deliver this on-demand streaming content over the internet in the late 1990s – but the internet wasn’t ready for it, it wasn’t capable.” By the time Mayer returned to Disney, in 2005, this time as executive vice-president for corporate strategy and development, technology was catching up with his vision. Disney boss Bob Iger commissioned him to position the company so that it could deliver content to people’s devices. Most eye-catchingly in the decade that followed, that meant embarking on an unprecedented spending spree. Mayer explains why acquisitions were always going to be as important as any technological innovation: “We wanted to future-proof the company. We could see that technology was going to enable consumers to have more and more control over what they consumed and where. We didn’t know what that meant for our business models and how we got revenues and profits. “We wanted to make sure we had the right assets in place [and] we had the right content and brands that mattered most to consumers – so that, no matter what happened to technology, no matter how it impacted the delivery of content, our content would be needed. “Buy the brands because, in a world of infinite choice, brands really matter, and high-quality content would be better in the long run. We thought that doing fewer things better would be super important in the future, and that led to our acquisitions. “We couldn’t do all of that on our own. Sometimes, you have to go buy some things – and, in hindsight, we made some very judicious acquisitions. “It’s hard to imagine Disney without Pixar, Marvel, Star Wars, Hulu. What would Disney be without those? A much, much smaller company, probably part of another company. We’d have been bought by now.” Mayer’s achievements during his 15-year tenure no doubt helped the meteoric rise of Disney’s share price during the period. Appropriately for a man who studied electrical engineering at college and wanted to be a naval aviator when he was in high school, it is a technological disruption that is Mayer’s own proudest memory: “I loved the acquisitions, seeing them flower and bloom, but my own personal favourite is launching Disney+ and ESPN+. I took them from the
