Intro: In the “Women in Streaming” series of articles, we talk to incredible women who have contributed a lot to the growth of the video streaming industry and share their stories. In this installment of the series, we talk to Bleuenn Le Goffic, VP Strategy and Business Development at Accedo.
Bleuenn Le Goffic is VP Strategy and Business Development at Accedo, a role she started in April 2021, having previously been Head of Business Development & Innovation. She has worked for Accedo since 2012, initially in sales before heading up Partnerships, and deeply understands Accedo and the wider media industry.
Bleuenn has deep technical, and business skills and has worked within multiple fields of the complex OTT system.
Thank you, Bleuenn, for agreeing to sit down with us for this interview. It is a pleasure to talk to you and hear about your experiences. I am sure our readers with enjoy this piece.
Please tell our audience about your background, how you started in the media and technology industry, and your journey thus far.
Bleuenn: My background is in software engineering, but rapidly I realized that I could be of better use creating a bridge between the commercial and the development teams.
My first interaction with Media came actually 10 years ago when I joined Accedo as a presales engineer, and I have from that time constantly interacted with the market, first with customers and then with the larger vendor ecosystem.
The past 5 years, my main focus has been to create added value for our customers by nudging a partner ecosystem on identified use cases. And this has slowly evolved in driving larger growth initiatives for Accedo but also for the industry, as I am convinced that we can incentivise it to develop better & faster thanks to partnership.
Q) How has your software engineering experience influenced your sales and business development approach?
Bleuenn: As a vendor, you need to be convinced about the value you are creating for your customers.
I could really grasp the complexity of building a video service from a development standpoint, and this helped me build empathy for our customers’ challenges.
But also for our own teams, who had to constantly learn new vendor technologies, new platform features, etc. And, of course, you gain credibility when you have the ability to link the technical and business sides.
Q) Can you discuss the sustainability initiatives you’ve led at Accedo and the video industry and what motivated you to take action?
Bleuenn: In 2017, I went through a phase which I am sure many people will recognise having experienced – I had so far a successful career, plenty of promising development ahead of me at Accedo, I had just had my first son – so plenty to be happy about.
But I was not fully fulfilled, and it took me a while to put a finger on it.
I needed to relate my professional engagement to something personally meaningful, and this is when my interest in the environmental & social global transformation started. Very rapidly, it was clear to me and Accedo’s management that we were in the premises of significant changes, which always represent an opportunity for us to evolve.
This is when our journey began, starting with understanding what, as a community, we should become and then how as a business, we should contribute to the greater goal of building a sustainable society.
And, of course, once again, partnerships have been the foundation for that. We partnered with companies who could support us in our corporate transformation, assessing our carbon footprint and understanding how we could become more diverse. We also started to create a new partner ecosystem of vendors who could actually contribute to our customers’ sustainable journey.
This is how I would define our engagement today – we want to facilitate for the ecosystem to start on their sustainable journey, and we want to incentivize it to experiment & share at scale so we can accelerate this transformation.
Q) How do you gauge Accedo’s impact on carbon consumption and sustainability in streaming?
Bleuenn: From a pure supply chain perspective, the carbon contribution of our services & products is minimal to our customer’s platform, as we mainly drive the front-end experience. However, being a solution provider, we take the responsibility of building the best-of-breed ecosystem for our customers’ platform – which means that if, in our vendor selection criteria, we don’t include a need for optimized technology, then we would be massively accountable.
Q) Can you tell us more about the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) and how it’s helping drive climate action in the private sector?
Bleuenn: SBTi was cofounded by CDP, the UN, and WWF with the mission of aligning all organizations’ carbon reduction strategy with the actual expectations set by the Paris agreement AND make them accountable for their progress in the right direction.
Today, many leaders of the media & technology industry have joined that initiative, but we are still at the beginning of the industry’s commitment to change.
We now use this program as a must-have when engaging our ecosystem – suppliers & partners – which helps address the part of our carbon footprint we have less control over. It is also a comprehensive milestone for our stakeholders – employees & board – to understand and be proud of our engagement.
Q) Finally, we come to our rapid-fire section – a list of fun questions about you.
- Favorite way to relax: a glass of wine
- Favorite cuisine: anything with spices
- Favorite travel destination: anything close to the ocean
- Favorite movie or web series: definitely a big Die Hard fan
- Favorite sport: Rugby
- Favorite airport to transit: None 🙂
- Android or Apple: Apple
That brings us to the end of this interview.
Thank you, Bleuenn, for this wonderful chat – it was great learning from your experience and your work on sustainability. We wish you all the best in 2023 – thank you!