Meet The Disruptors: Fred Santarpia Of Endeavor Streaming On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up Your Industry
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
“Talk like a human being.” This was great advice I received early on in my career while trying to impress a room of senior executives. Since then, as a digital media and transformation executive that has worked in a lot of legacy industries, I’ve learned that it’s not realistic to expect your stakeholders to always learn what you want them to know. The onus is on you to make your strategy understandable, tangible and manageable for the individuals that you need to align your efforts with. To make meaningful connections, you need to talk like a human. If you need practice, try explaining your concept to a college friend or a spouse that’s not in your industry.
As a part of our series about business leaders who are shaking things up in their industry, I had the pleasure of interviewing Fred Santarpia.
Fred Santarpia is a digital media and business transformation expert. He currently serves as president of Endeavor Streaming, where he spearheads the company’s global expansion strategy. Before joining Endeavor Streaming, Fred was chief operating officer at Moda Operandi and, previously, chief digital officer at Condé Nast, where he founded and launched the digital arm of Condé Nast’s entertainment division. Fred was also a founding member of the leadership team at Vevo and served as EVP & general manager. Prior to Vevo, Fred worked at Universal Music Group in a variety of senior leadership roles. Fred is a graduate of Villanova University and holds an M.S. in finance from Boston University. He currently resides in New Jersey.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
My story began in the music industry at Universal Music. I joined Universal coming off the peak year of industry CD sales. As a young executive, I had a front row seat to music’s first wave of digital disruption: the unbundling of the album, the advent of peer-to-peer file sharing and the tremendous impact that had on the industry. That afforded me great learning opportunities in an industry that was going through tremendous contractions and convulsions as it grappled with change.
I got into the video and streaming space largely because Universal Music at the time, which was a business predicated on shipping product to wholesalers and consumers buying CDs in stores, became interested in pursuing alternate business models. One of which was thinking about how music and video content could be better leveraged on the internet. That gave me the chance to help think through the business model for what eventually became Vevo, which was incubated inside of Universal Music before it became a separate company.
I was able to look at our library of video assets, which were originally treated as a marketing expense to help sell physical albums, and ask “What if they were their own business? What would that look like?” We later struck a deal with YouTube to create an advertising business built on top of short form music video content. The challenge was to prove that we could monetize short form video content at scale in the same way traditional television was valued. We felt that because we had highly professional and produced premium content featuring the most socially relevant celebrities on the planet, we could turn that into a business. That turned out to be true.
In a way, my getting into the video streaming space was a stroke of good fortune. I just happened to be working in the music industry at a time when the industry was experiencing radical force change of consumer behavior. That gave me opportunity to think creatively about how an industry could evolve alongside change.
Can you tell our readers what it is about the work you’re doing that’s disruptive?
Endeavor Streaming operates at the very intersection of the real-time evolution of media creation and distribution. The “streaming evolution” is changing how people discover, consume and ultimately pay for content through subscriptions or advertising. What’s disruptive about this moment is the fact that it’s largely the very first time many media companies are building a direct relationship with the consumer around the delivery of their content rather than licensing to a third-party distributor who handles it for them.
When an organization decides to go direct-to-consumer, it impacts every element of operation. It’s introducing new, complex variables that it has never had to consider previously in running the business. At Endeavor Streaming, we’re helping companies navigate these challenges. We work with the top media companies in the world to build their direct-to-consumer strategies and drive return on their content and marketing investments. We bring technology, distribution and marketing expertise to help them deliver their new streaming services across every major consumer device while leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics to attract and retain their customers. It’s an incredibly exciting business to be in at a moment in time where more consumers are cutting the cord, if they ever had one to begin with.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
This isn’t necessarily funny, but it taught me an important lesson nonetheless. When I was in college and not paying attention to anything, my dad said I should major in accounting because I’d always have a job. So I did, and went right back to not caring about anything. My first job out of college was as a public accountant, and when I realized what that meant, I almost had a panic attack. I spent the next 10 years of my career trying to find my way out of the back office in the accounting profession and into an industry that was more in line with my natural tendencies and creative pursuits.
The lesson here is a simple one: you can’t outsource decisions about your career to somebody else. You have to care. If you don’t take agency, no one else is going to do it for you. If I learned anything from those years, it’s that if you aren’t paying attention, you could miss a key decision and alter the course of your career in very real ways that may not be apparent when you’re coasting.
We all need a little help along the journey. Who have been some of your mentors? Can you share a story about how they made an impact?
Truthfully, I haven’t had the benefit of many strong, long-term mentors in my own professional journey. As a result, I’ve made a lot of mistakes that someone with a bit more wisdom could probably have helped me navigate better. I think there is tremendous value in mentorship, however, so I’ve tried to act as a mentor to many friends and colleagues throughout my career. The most important thing you can do as a mentor is really listen and validate the challenge your mentee is experiencing as real. Bringing your own experiences to offer perspective and light a path for someone is always welcome, but definitely secondary. And third, which is often overlooked, is not making mentorship a one-time thing. There’s a tendency in mentorship relationships to only interact when your mentee is seeking one-off advice on a challenge, but what makes the relationship really valuable is your ongoing perspective.
In today’s parlance, being disruptive is usually a positive adjective. But is disrupting always good? When do we say the converse, that a system or structure has ‘withstood the test of time’? Can you articulate to our readers when disrupting an industry is positive, and when disrupting an industry is ‘not so positive’? Can you share some examples of what you mean?
I’ve worked in traditional media companies that were in desperate need of disruption because they had missed the boat in how the world around them was changing. The magazine industry comes to mind here. Originally, leadership tied the prestige and value or their core product (journalism and storytelling) to the physical print medium. Disruption in the magazine industry meant exploring how content originally created for physical magazine brands could make its way in other forms of distribution across the internet through search, social media, short form video, etc. For magazines, I believe that disruption, though still currently painful for their industry, will ultimately prove out to be a positive thing over a longer time horizon. The great magazine brands have upheld the integrity of their core product and maintained authority and authenticity with their customers in a very noisy and fragmented media landscape. I would argue that, from a popularity standpoint, some of those brands are more popular than ever thanks to technology’s disruption of their industry. Their bottom line will eventually feel the benefit of that.
An industry that I think disruption has been terrible for is local news. Local news has been absolutely decimated by internet economics. Because print infrastructure has basically collapsed and local news organizations are relatively small, they don’t have the capital to invest in digital. As a result, we’re seeing people without critical information about the communities they live in.
Can you share five of the best words of advice you’ve gotten along your journey? Please give a story or example.
“Talk like a human being.” This was great advice I received early on in my career while trying to impress a room of senior executives. Since then, as a digital media and transformation executive that has worked in a lot of legacy industries, I’ve learned that it’s not realistic to expect your stakeholders to always learn what you want them to know. The onus is on you to make your strategy understandable, tangible and manageable for the individuals that you need to align your efforts with. To make meaningful connections, you need to talk like a human. If you need practice, try explaining your concept to a college friend or a spouse that’s not in your industry.
We are sure you aren’t done. How are you going to shake things up next?
Vevo is now 12 years old and thriving. Conde Nast Entertainment, the digital video division that I helped launch during my tenure, is 10 years old and thriving. Right now, I’m totally focused on building Endeavor Streaming into a business that’s going to have that same long-term staying power. I’m assured in the things we’re doing to build the direct-to-consumer and streaming platform for the future of the industry. In 10 years, I’m confident Endeavor Streaming will be known as the gold standard in helping sports media and entertainment companies build their direct-to-consumer futures. Once we get to that point, I’ll start thinking about what’s next.
Do you have a book, podcast, or talk that’s had a deep impact on your thinking? Can you share a story with us? Can you explain why it was so resonant with you?
A book that really stands out to me is The Captain Class: The Hidden Force That Creates the World’s Greatest Teams by Sam Walker. The book examines 15 or so of the most dominant teams in sports history and looks for commonalities in what their leadership did to drive extended periods of success.
One chapter, titled “Carrying Water,” focuses on leading from the back. Walker finds that, on the greatest teams, the captain was rarely the star and never acted like one. More often, the captain shunned attention and gravitated toward whatever the team needed to be successful. When they had to, they carried the water. Instead of being the player to take a shot with the game on the line, the best captains put the best people in the position to succeed and ultimately drive the outcome.
This particular chapter resonated with me because, as the president of Endeavor Streaming, it’s really important that I set my team up for success. It’s not about taking victory laps and credits for wins, but putting the ball in the hands of the people most likely to drive the best outcome for the business. That’s the type of culture we’re building at Endeavor Streaming.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
I’m a really big fan of Seth Godin, and I read his blog every day. A quote that has stuck with me throughout my entire career as my north star is “Make big promises and keep them.” The quote comes from a 2010 blog titled, “Simple Five Step Plan for Just About Everyone and Everything” — and I actually think it lives up to its title.
What resonates with me is the idea that you never have to ask anyone for permission to go and make an impact. It is entirely up to you how high you want to set the bar — just make sure that it’s high enough to matter.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I wish everybody could be more thankful. We tend to be so consumed with the drama of our day-to-day lives that we forget what a great gift each day is. I lost a really good friend of mine during COVID, and it reminded me how short life can be. Be thankful for what you have, be kind and help others get through their struggles when you can. That’s my message of love.
How can our readers follow you online?
Readers can follow my personal LinkedIn account as well as Endeavor Streaming’s official LinkedIn page.
This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for joining us!
Meet The Disruptors: Fred Santarpia Of Endeavor Streaming On The Five Things You Need To Shake Up… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
