Disney’s Rebecca Campbell Caps Remarkable Rise From Stations To Top Streaming Role

Rebecca Campbell, whose promotion to Disney’s Chairman of Direct-to-Consumer & International on Monday put her in charge of Disney+, Hulu, Hotstar and ESPN+, took a less-traveled road the to the C-suite.

During the bulk of her 23 years at the company, Campbell focused on local broadcasting, running individual stations and the ABC Owned Television Stations Group, which has stations in New York, LA and six other markets. After college, she worked production and programming jobs in Lancaster and Allentown, PA, roles with more than faint echoes of former Disney CEO Bob Iger’s early-career stints in Ithaca, NY and a studio supervisor for ABC.

Since 2017, Campbell made a name for herself at Disney’s highest corporate levels. She worked directly with CEO Bob Chapek, a theme-park vet, overseeing Disneyland Resort, whose theme parks include Disneyland and Disney California Adventure. In the two years prior to that, she supervised 5,000 employees in 25 countries as president of Disney’s Europe, Middle East and Africa operations.

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In her new position, Campbell is a distinct change from predecessor Kevin Mayer, a Harvard MBA who gained notice internally by crunching numbers for several of the company’s biggest M&A transactions. Mayer, who moved on to be CEO of TikTok, spent a good chunk of his Disney run in the strategy group as opposed to directly managing a P&L. While many industry observers were stunned when he was passed over in February in favor of Bob Chapek when Iger handed the baton to a new CEO, that background was sometimes cited by way of explanation.

In taking the reins from Mayer, she will steer the expansion of Disney+ in Japan in June, with other key European and Latin American territories to follow by year-end. The new subscription service has gotten off to a fast start with 54.5 million subscribers in its first six months. Despite its successful launch, the streaming service faces questions about its pipeline, some of which have been exacerbated by COVID-19 production limits. Hulu, too, is continuing to grow but the pandemic has put its global rollout plans on hold and it is continuing to integrate its programming operations with projects born at FX. Hulu also has added a live TV bundle to its on-demand offering, seeing some initial growth but an uncertain industry climate for internet-delivered TV packages.

Campbell has long analyzed streaming’s impact on the media landscape, though for a time it was from the local broadcasting point of view. For TV stations, the advent of streaming has been a complicated development, one with both promise and peril. Disney embraced the potential of digital delivery with initiatives like the Watch ABC app. But more broadly, it operated in a sector whose business models depended on linear advertising, with many decision-makers regarding streaming’s disruption with deep suspicion.

The executive’s first job at Disney was as VP of programming at WPVI in Philadelphia, keeping her in Pennsylvania, where she had graduated Bloomsburg University and got her first station experience. After becoming GM of WPVI, she moved to the same position in a larger market, running WABC in New York and overseeing shows like Live with Regis and Kelly.

Campbell went on to preside over the Disney portfolio of stations and also oversaw ABC’s national sales and ABC Daytime.

During her run leading the stations, Campbell didn’t hesitate to deploy bare-knuckled rhetoric when situations occasionally required. During one pitched carriage fight with Cablevision in 2010, she issued a statement, which read in part: “Over and over again, Cablevision picks fights with programmers, and it is Cablevision subscribers who suffer the loss. The inconvenient truth about Cablevision is that it pockets hundreds of millions of dollars in subscriber fees each year by carrying ABC7. Dropping our station would be the latest insult.”

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