From media spend to product revenue.
Employer
MRC - The Hollywood Reporter
Year
2020
During awards season, studios invest heavily in For Your Consideration (FYC) campaigns—premium marketing and sponsorship programs designed to put films, television, and talent in front of awards voters.
As SVP of Product and Design, I saw an opportunity to extend that existing commercial relationship beyond advertising. I conceived and led the development of The Screening Room, a secure, on-demand viewing platform that gave eligible voters direct access to studio content while creating an entirely new revenue stream for The Hollywood Reporter.
I led the initiative from concept and business strategy through product definition, UX, design, development, and launch.
Scope of Work
Turning an existing commercial relationship into a new product.
The Hollywood Reporter already had deep relationships with studios investing significantly in FYC campaigns. But those investments were primarily focused on promotion and awareness.
I saw an opportunity to create something more valuable for both sides: a paid digital product that allowed studios to put the content itself directly in front of the audience they were trying to reach.
Rather than simply selling more media, we could create a new product—and a new reason for studios to invest with THR.
Removing friction between awards voters and the content they needed to see.
Awards voters were receiving physical screeners, attending screenings, and navigating a fragmented mix of ways to access eligible content. The experience created unnecessary friction around something fundamentally simple: discovering and watching the work under consideration.
The Screening Room created a single, authenticated destination where qualified users could browse eligible films and television, discover content by awards category, and watch on demand.
The value proposition was intentionally straightforward: make consideration easier by making access easier.
Innovation where it mattered. Familiarity where It didn’t.
The goal wasn’t to reinvent streaming. Platforms like Netflix and HBO had already spent years establishing interaction patterns audiences understood.
I made a deliberate product decision to leverage those familiar behaviors—content rails, categories, detail views, playback, and account management—while focusing our innovation on the business opportunity, access model, security, and awards-specific experience.
That familiarity also allowed us to move quickly. Users didn’t need to learn a new interface; they could immediately understand how to discover and watch content.
Creating an incremental revenue stream, not an added-value feature.
The Screening Room was not simply bundled into an existing FYC sponsorship.
It became a separate commercial product. Studios could pay to host and distribute their films, television programs, and supporting assets within a secure environment designed specifically for an authenticated awards audience.
That created an additional revenue opportunity for THR while extending studio relationships from media buyer to product partner.
Taking an idea from opportunity to market on an awards-season timeline.
Awards season created a fixed window. The product had to move from idea to launch quickly enough to be commercially relevant.
I led the initiative across product, UX, design, front-end, engineering, commercial stakeholders, and other partners—making deliberate decisions about where to innovate, where to use established patterns, and where to prioritize speed.
The result was a complete consumer streaming experience built and launched within the business window that created the opportunity in the first place.
From business insight to a new revenue-generating product.
The Screening Room launched as a new THR product and generated meaningful incremental revenue during its first awards season.
More importantly, it demonstrated a product approach I’ve carried throughout my career: identify an unmet need inside an existing business, determine where product can create new value, and build the simplest compelling solution that can reach the market quickly.
The program was later discontinued following COVID-era industry disruption and subsequent platform consolidation after the company’s merger.
