Shuffling through the door of a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles is a family of six—Mom and Dad, who happen to be power players in the entertainment industry, their two sons ages eight and six, and their 2-year-old twin girls. To say that the parents have their hands full is an understatement, and that may explain why the family’s entrance turns the heads of some restaurant patrons. The glances range from sympathetic to envious to ones with an unspoken message: This isn’t daycare; don’t let your children’s antics ruin our dinner!
Indeed, for Jessica Fang and Dean Okazaki who married in 2003—dining out with their children might be considered a ticking time bomb of anarchy. Oblivious to the stares, they adroitly strap the twins into highchairs and get the boys situated. Then, in what seems like a choreographed sequence of events, they place their orders, feed the twins, watch their boys eat, and somehow finish their own meals, all while keeping the table’s decibel level under control.
One of their secrets? iPads for the twins.
If you’re a parent of youngsters, you already know that tablet computers and smartphones have revolutionized downtime in parenting. The ability to watch anything on the go is incredibly effective crowd control for anyone who hasn’t yet been visited by the tooth fairy. Those long waits at the pediatrician’s office, traffic jams, and the time before a meal is served at a restaurant are no longer a parent’s worst nightmare. And now, with speedy Wi-Fi nearly everywhere, you don’t need to download favorite television shows before you usher the kids out the door.
The unbridled viewing breakthrough is appropriately called TV Everywhere, and it’s just one of several changes to the television industry Jessica Fang has kept up with in her more than decade-long career at Fox Networks. Recently promoted to senior vice president of distribution for national accounts, she’s in charge of negotiating distribution agreements for Fox’s programming services across all media platforms—services that reach more than 700 million subscribing television homes, according to Fox.
Negotiations used to be relatively straightforward. No more. Gone are the days when the television was the only place you could watch television. Nowadays, the Internet has taken TV out of the home, through an onslaught of technological offerings with funky names such as Roku, Xfinity, and Hopper.
Adapting to change has become second nature to Fang. After living on three continents by the time she was 18, becoming the mother of four, and keeping up with the innovations in television distribution, she’s mastered—by necessity—the ability to adapt at home and at work.
Raised in Hong Kong by American expatriates, she has always been smart beyond her years. At just nine months old, she earned the nickname Little Computer Brain after she learned how to work the family’s complicated stereo player—a machine that managed to confound some of the adults.
Fluent in both Cantonese and English by early grade school, she became the go-to tutor when her Hong Kong classmates needed help pronouncing difficult English words. But her smarts went beyond just acquiring information—she’s been able to read situations and adapt to them, too.
Her mother remembers eavesdropping on her daughter once when picking her up from elementary school. Fang was talking with her friends in English. Although she could speak the language with a perfect American accent, she spoke to her friends that afternoon in a thick Hong Kong accent. When her mother asked why, she replied: “Because that’s the way the teacher speaks English. If they want to do well in class, they have to learn to pronounce words the way the teacher says them.”
Like many of her American counterparts, Fang loved watching TV growing up. Every night, she plopped in front of the family’s television to catch her favorite American shows—Dynasty, Dallas, and Diff’rent Strokes. They were her favorites by default. In the 1980s, before robust international distribution or satellite television, Hong Kong only received four channels—two in English and two in Chinese. On top of that, American shows aired two to three years after their original airdate in the United States.
When Fang was halfway through middle school, her father, who worked in international business, learned he was being transferred to the United Arab Emirates. He insisted that Fang enroll in an English boarding school. By eighth grade, she was 6,000 miles from her Hong Kong friends—in Brighton, a small coastal town in England south of London. There, she honed her math skills and became fascinated with computers and robotics.
For as long as she can remember, she’d dreamt of college in the United States—a byproduct of both her parents earning degrees there. But pursuing a college education in the States wouldn’t come without sacrifices. Often, while her friends were having fun, she was studying for the SAT, alone in her dorm room, because applications to European universities don’t call for the test. Her diligence paid off; she scored well enough to gain acceptance to Carnegie Mellon in 1992, where she planned to study artificial intelligence and robotics.
Once she was on campus, however, a degree in robotics seemed more daunting than it did across the pond. “I thought I was a computer genius back in high school, but, I swear, my classmates must have come out of the womb knowing how to program in C++,” Fang recalls. She tried her hand at a few different majors before settling on psychology and industrial management.
During her college years, she stretched her class load to the limit and also joined the Asian Student Association (eventually becoming president). She took a job as a barista to help pay her room and board. “She always had a million and one things going on and somehow always pulled it off,” says friend and former classmate James Choi (DC’95). But even with a full plate, adds the financial executive, “she was never one to miss a good party.”
After earning her degree from Dietrich College in 1996, she moved to Los Angeles and decided to pursue an MBA at Pepperdine University. She waited tables at The Cheesecake Factory to help foot the bill and, when she graduated, spent a few months putting together a business plan to open a fast-casual restaurant with a friend. “Think Chipotle, but with a Chinese slant,” she says. The plans fell apart when they couldn’t find the right location. “It’s Los Angeles,” she says. “Location is everything.”
With entrepreneurial dreams on hold, she landed a temp job in 1999 working in Playboy’s home entertainment division. When they discovered Fang had a knack for numbers, she was given additional responsibility in financial planning. While at Playboy, she met her future husband, Dean Okazaki, who worked in Playboy’s business and legal affairs in the home entertainment division. Both soon left for other positions but wound up at Fox—Okazaki joined 20th Century Fox’s legal affairs team in the home entertainment division, and in 2002, Fang became an account manager in distribution at Fox Networks.
Fox Networks comprises much more than just the Fox broadcast channel you might have in mind; it’s the home of shows such as Glee, The Simpsons, and Cosmos. The vast constellation of programming encompasses more than 40 different cable channels, including MundoFox (Fox’s Spanish-language answer to channels Univision and Telemundo), FX (home to hits like Louie and Justified), the National Geographic Channel (Wicked Tuna), and more than two-dozen national and regional sports channels, including Fox Sports 1, Fox Sports West and the Big Ten Network.
All of that programming needs eyeballs, and that’s where Fang and her distribution team come in. It’s complicated, but in essence, networks make money in two ways: advertising and distribution fees, which is what networks charge cable and satellite companies to carry their channels. Broadcast networks also make money on affiliate programming fees, which the networks charge to local broadcast stations across the country to carry a network’s broadcast content.
Essentially, Fang and her team act as the intermediary between the shows (and sports) you love and the cable, telephone, and satellite companies, by negotiating with those distribution companies.
The negotiation is a careful dance for all parties: distributors need the network’s channels to sell to their subscribers; networks need distributors to get their content to their audiences so that they can sell advertising. Distributors and networks need each other. And that’s what can make negotiations sensitive
It’s actually common for negotiations to drag on well past midnight. For executives who are parents, that becomes a life-balance struggle. In Fang’s case, she is known around the office to take the late nights and sleep deprivation in stride because she’s used to it. “That’s just what life is like with little kids,” she says with a smile. “They wake you up in the middle of the night.”
Even with the heavy workload both at the office and at home, she finds the time to bake cookies and snacks for the bake sales at her boys’ school. She also sits in on their Mandarin classes so that she can go through their lessons with them again back at home.
It’s inevitable that the responsibilities of being a mother and being an executive at Fox sometimes conflict. Just months after her twins were born, one of her largest accounts (she’s not allowed to discuss names or numbers) decided to engage in negotiations for a groundbreaking TV Everywhere deal. Her team, including several of her bosses, was headed to the client’s headquarters to hammer out the details.
The problem? Fang was still on maternity leave. With twin girls nursing—and not sleeping through the night yet—and negotiations on the other side of the country that were likely to take “hours a day and days on end,” everyone expected Fang to sit this one out. Everyone, that is, except Fang. The deal was a seminal one for Fox Networks, one in which both sides were “headed into unchartered territory,” she says. Not only that, but it was her account. She had spent years nurturing relationships with the people who would be sitting across the negotiating table. She was confident her team would be able to pull it off, but she couldn’t get over the idea of being so far away when so much was on the line. She discussed it with her husband, made sure their mothers would be able to pick up the slack, packed her bags, and headed east.
Once she was situated, she says, it was difficult not to think of her daughters, even as she shuttled between the hotel to the conference rooms of her clients and her team. But she did what she had to do. “She dove in and went to extraordinary lengths to help close the deal,” remembers her boss, Michael Biard, president of distribution at Fox Networks. “We were holed up in a conference room for a week straight. But that’s just who she is.” When a colleague talked about how hard it was to stay sharp, even when negotiations went well into the night, Fang couldn’t help but tease, “Try getting four kids to bed every night, and it will come naturally to you.”
Biard, for one, is impressed: “Jessica really has forged a trail in balancing an extraordinarily demanding job with an even more demanding personal life. Her dedication to her work is exemplary, but it doesn’t come at the expense of her family. She’s become an inspiration to a lot of the women, and men, in our group.”
It’s not just Biard who is impressed. Fang was named to the 2014 Class of “40 Under 40” by Multichannel News, a trade magazine and website for cable television professionals. The 40 executives under the age of 40 were selected for “making their mark in leadership roles.” And another leading news sources for the cable industry, CableFAX, has named Fang one of the industry’s “Most Influential Minorities” for the third year in a row.
