WOMEN ELITE 2008: RETAILERS--Bringing many backgrounds

After 15 years working for the largest movie rental chain, Joyce Woodward would argue that the big deal about high-ranking women in the home entertainment industry is that it’s not that big a deal.

“Our industry has always been somewhat gender agnostic,” says Woodward, senior VP of film at Blockbuster. “There are a lot of women in very powerful positions in the entertainment industry.”

Such a sentiment is about the only thing that this year’s Women Elite retailers all have in common. Although most of these women from leading home entertainment retailers cite few barriers to advancement within the industry, their industry experience ranges from almost two decades to less than a year. And with backgrounds in the food and beverage, consumer products, entertainment and other industries, no two of these women have taken a similar path to their positions.

Woodward, Blockbuster senior VP of corporate communications Karen Raskopf and Netflix chief marketing officer Leslie Kilgore are among executives who’ve been in the industry long enough to witness U.S. home entertainment grow from a $14 billion industry still dominated by videotapes at the beginning of the decade to a $23 billion business almost exclusively made up of DVD rentals and purchases.

“Retail has changed in terms of the types and variety of jobs women hold in big retail organizations beyond the buyer role,” says Jill Hamburger, a 21-year veteran of Best Buy who now holds the position of VP of games, movies and toys at the U.S. electronics retail leader.

Kilgore, who was brought on as Netflix’s marketing chief when the rental-by-mail leader had less than 100,000 subscribers, has seen the addition of several key women to the company. Since Kilgore joined in 2000, Netflix has brought in executives such as Cindy Holland, Erin Ruane and Lisa Nishimura, all of whom are VPs of content acquisition. This year, Netflix hired Anna Lee, a former executive with Bertelsmann AG disc replication unit Arvato Digital Services, to head its own replication and supply-chain development efforts.

“We have an organization that is blind to gender,” says Holland, who joined Netflix six years ago after stints with Spring Creek/Baltimore Productions and Mutual Film Co. The culture at Netflix, which has about 8.4 million subscribers, is “one focused on core individual values rather than stifling processes.”

With U.S. home entertainment sales doubling in the past decade, the industry has lured women from both within entertainment and from a myriad of other retail industries. While veteran Kilgore cut her teeth helping run Procter & Gamble’s shampoo brands during most of the ’90s, Raskopf used to run corporate communications at 7-Eleven before joining Blockbuster in 1997, and Ruane had a two-year stint with Walt Disney before joining Netflix five years ago. Most recently, Blockbuster hired Becky Johnson, chief marketing officer at restaurant operator Brinker International, to take the same position at the rental chain in July.

Such executives will need to cull from their wide range of retail experience to cope with an industry in which DVD sales levels fell for the first time in 2007, may decline further this year on consumer fears of a prolonged economic slump and are likely to be hindered in the future as more customers download or stream movie content. The requisite experience goes hand in hand with a passion for the industry, says Woodward, who worked for rental chain Erol’s before joining Blockbuster in 1993.

“I have always loved the idea that we bring movies into America’s homes,” adds Johnson. “Who doesn’t love movies?”