Aaron Weigum is the Executive Director of Global Paid Media at Disney Streaming. Weigum focuses on driving acquisition growth for Disney’s streaming services. Watch this video to find out more about his work and how he partners with VIZIO.
Who are you and what do you do?
Aaron Weigum. I'm our Executive Director of Global Paid Media at Disney Streaming.
I mostly oversee our non-biddable paid media teams, driving acquisition growth for our services globally. So, Disney+, the Disney Bundle, inclusive of Hulu and Espn+ – all the growth for those services via various media channels.
I think definitely when we first started, it was all about growth, in the sense that everyone was maniacally focused on it. From a Wall Street perspective, delivering sign-up, sign-up, sign-ups, growth, growth, growth. And now we're really entering that phase of maturity, where the subscriber base is maturing.
We're needing to attain that profitability. Retain, engage, and ensure we're generating revenue for the overall enterprise. So we've seen that shift from that hyper-growth mode, into that more nuanced and calibrated, sophisticated growth mode, I would call it.
How do you work with VIZIO?
We've definitely challenged you guys with a lot of asks, so thank you for always coming to the table with being an awesome partner and rising to the occasion. I think the two big ones that we're really working through with you all are, elevating our testing and experimentation capabilities.
We're really keen on proving out incrementality, proving out lift, proving out the efficacy of various tweaks and changes we're making to our creative, our audience targeting, and doing that in a scientifically sound way. So that's one aspect.
And then I think the other aspect is really improving our measurement feedback loops with you guys. So we've been hard at work implementing our mobile measurement platform, Kochava, with you all, to really obtain that real-time feedback loop so we can be optimizing to those direct response signals in a more real-time capacity.
How has VIZIO helped you overcome limits?
I think a limit that VIZIO's really helped us overcome is, especially with our internal stakeholders, education that we can kind of achieve several sets of KPIs simultaneously in investing in this space. I love CTV in streaming services because you guys are the nexus of content consumption. You're a point of sign-up for the services, and we can really look to you for driving everything across the funnel.
It can be awareness for the product itself or a new content release that's come out on the service, since CTV is the future of linear TV and kind of “mass eyeballs”. It can be, again, driving that sign-up growth and acquisition via signing up on VIZIO's sign-up flows with our services. And it can be all the way down to that retention and engagement aspect of driving incremental viewership with our existing subscribers.
And that can all happen with the exact same placement at the exact same time.
How do you lead your team to push through limits?
I like to lead with a lot of trust, empowerment, and transparency with my team. I think folks often don't know what they're capable of until they're sort of pushed into it. And folks often underestimate themselves.
I think when given the chance, when given the confidence and given the opportunity to kind of go out there on their own, folks can critically think through and rationalize things that, maybe they didn't think they were capable of. But they are, when given that right, supportive environment.
To view more partner interviews and learn more about VIZIO partnership opportunities, visit the LIMITLESS LEADERS video hub, or click the "Get in touch" button below to connect with a VIZIO representative.
