There’s been a change atop Fullscreen Media’s marketing department.
The digital media company has parted ways with CMO Jason Klarman and upped Alan Beard, co-founder of Fullscreen-owned creative studio McBeard, to the position.
Klarman, who previously had spent six years as the president of Oxygen, was hired by Fullscreen in November to become its first-ever CMO and oversee the company’s rebrand and April launch of its subscription video offering. He has transitioned into a consulting role with Fullscreen and its majority owner, Otter Media.
“I transitioned to a consulting role with Fullscreen Media and Otter Media so that I could move back to New York once the rebrand of the company and the launch of the SVOD service was complete,” Klarman says, with Fullscreen COO Andy Forssell adding that Klarman “was instrumental in the successful launch of our SVOD service.”
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In his place, Fullscreen has installed Beard, who sold his social media creative studio to Fullscreen last year. Beard co-founded McBeard in 2008 with Alec McNayr to create sharable social campaigns for brands including Warner Bros., Sony Pictures, Disney and Coke. Prior to launching McBeard, he spent five years at Jupiter Research and also founded a number of startups dedicated to marketing and sales. “Alan Beard innately understands social platforms and how to creatively and effectively reach an entire generation that has proven very hard to reach through traditional marketing,” says Forssell. “Having that DNA driving our central marketing efforts is already paying off in big ways for our consumer, brand and talent businesses.”
These experiences will be key to his new role at Fullscreen, where he will oversee marketing strategy and operations across the business. That includes working directly with Fullscreen creators like Andrea Russett and The Fine Bros., as well as handling marketing for the streaming service and live events. “I love McBeard, and it was a big decision to join Fullscreen,” Beard says. “The things I care about, I can do on an even bigger stage here.”
A big part of Beard’s job will be continuing to promote the four-month-old Fullscreen platform, which serves up original series and licensed shows and movies for $4.99 a month. This was Fullscreen’s first major effort to transform into a consumer-focused brand, one that meant entering a subscription video business already dominated my master marketers like Netflix. But where Netflix has operated more like a modern-day television network, Fullscreen — which hasn’t released early performance data — is operating more like a startup, programming on the fly as it sees what is resonating with its young audience.
Beard says he’s especially focused on figuring out how to tap into, and create, fandoms through the app. He points to Fullscreen-owned Rooster Teeth as an example of a company that has built a devoted audience. “I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how we create fandoms. This audience is changing fast. The technology changes fast,” he explains. “So in some ways we’re trying to take the best practices of traditional media companies and layer on top of that behavioral data and new technology approaches to having a different relationship, so that Fullscreen develops fandoms and not just fans.”
