Engineers and entertainment “creatives” tend to baffle each other. Technologists create cool tools, but are often surprised at how artists use them. Creatives crave innovations, but typically don’t realize the difficulty of what they’re asking.
At Fandango, company president Paul Yanover bridges that gap.
Yanover is a creative and engineer at the same time. He has degrees in computer science and used them in executive posts at Walt Disney Animation Studios, Disney Parks & Resorts and Disney Online before coming to Fandango. “What I love about this job and the thing that attracted me the most (to Fandango), was the perfect melding of all these different things that I’d done,” Yanover told Variety. “It’s a technology company creating software, (and) the output of technology is being applied to entertainment.”
As an engineer, he is used to breaking down the tiny details of the user experience that separate a hit app from a dud. As a creative, he works on bringing storytelling and feelings to software.
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Yanover says Fandango has worked hard on answering some very basic questions about everything it does: “Is it useful? Does it create joy? How does it make me feel?” He points to the company’s new scannerless ticket app, now in beta. He tried it for a showing of “Vacation.”
“I was so excited, and my daughter was trying to figure out why,” he says. “But I got to walk from my car to the ticket taker and had a countdown (to showtime) and the art of ‘Vacation’ playing on my phone.
“That’s joy,” he says. “That’s joy and utility combined.”
Fandango by the Numbers
Millions of consumers now use its services and watch its video.
27k U.S. screens
42m Unique visitors per month (according to comScore)
49m Mobile app downloads
374m Average video views per month
51% Customer growth (year-on-year)
56% Ticketing growth (year-on-year)
