Kevin Mayer, a former Disney executive who now serves as a strategic advisor to Disney CEO Bob Iger, recently spoke about the state of the Walt Disney Company and some of their potential future avenues at the Yahoo! Finance Invest conference in New York, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
via CNBC
- When Bob Iger returned as Disney CEO last year, he brought Mayer, currently the CEO of Candle Media, back on as an advisor.
- Mayer opened up a bit about Iger’s decision to do that:
- “I can’t tell you what advice I’m giving to Bob and I suppose to the board, but, look, he needed some part of his team back. He came back to a company that had vastly changed. The previous leadership under Bob Chapek had been making some decisions that probably Bob Iger would not have taken if he was CEO … But when you come back into a situation where there’s a massive change from when you left and the team that you’ve had before, and relied on before, were gone. It left them in a position where he really wanted to have some people that he trusted, you know, tell him what they thought, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m not spending an enormous amount of time, but I was at the company for a long time.”
- As for the future of The Walt Disney Company, Mayer explains that Iger has a primary focus right now:
- “He’s definitely most focused on making sure that ESPN, a company that he really believes in strongly, is well positioned for the future.”
- There has also bee a lot of talk on what Disney will do with some of its linear television networks, like ABC, Disney Channel and Freeform. Mayer shared some thoughts on that as well:
- “Those may or may not be part of the company. Maybe they’re put in some sort of joint venture, you can imagine all sorts of different dispositions for those assets, but then you’re left with the core of the company, which I think is an amazing core.”
- As for that core, Mayer believes Disney can lean heavily on their bigger brands and a few other branches of the company:
- “You have Disney, Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar, the core brands … and you have the franchises that exist beneath those brands. They’re all there. And they’re hugely powerful business platforms. There’s streaming, which I think will be profitable very, very soon … their theme parks. People forget about consumer products, which is a massively profitable business for the Walt Disney Company.”
- There is also one are Mayer believes Disney can branch into to find even more success:
- “Games is the one place where I think Disney has not yet made a substantial investment. It’s also a place where people can interact with or spend a lot of time with their favorite characters in context … So gaming is the last big sort of business platform. You plug that into those core assets, and no matter what happens to those linear networks, you have a really great growth trajectory.”