As the grandchild of immigrants from Italy, Andrea Clarke-Hall said she had an “idyllic family life with a crazy extended Italian family.” She described it as true joy.
Her grandparents settled in New York and her parents worked in the restaurant industry, saving up to eventually own their own eatery. She learned about business and a strong work ethic. Growing up in this entrepreneurial household, she wanted to be a restaurant owner, or maybe a movie star, but her family had other ideas. “I became a lawyer because I listened,” she said with a laugh.
She graduated college and attended law school on a full academic scholarship. At 23, she worked in the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office while in law school and then became a criminal prosecutor. In the back of her mind, though, she felt something was lacking.
Clarke-Hall left government law and tried divorce law. This did not work either. Finally, she recognized it was time for a big change as her heart was telling her to work in the media.
Wonder Women Los Angeles: Shining Bright in the Hollywood Spotlight
Moving to Los Angeles, she secured another full academic scholarship, to the Anderson School of Management at UCLA, where she reinvented herself and found her calling.
While in school, Clarke-Hall began working with Fox Broadcasting in the intellectual property department, a natural fit considering her legal background. This led her to Sony’s Crackle, where she spent a year doing digital distribution in the very early days of streaming services, securing users, sealing deals and determining what did and did not work.
After a year, she left Crackle for something completely new. “There was this thing called Tubi, and after meeting an amazing team of talented people, I thought to myself, ‘They’re building something amazing,’ ” she said.
This was the year that really accelerated things. The eyeballs moved en masse to ad-supported streaming, and as the eyeballs moved, so did the ad dollars.”
Andrea Clarke-Hall
At the time, Tubi was a little-known streaming service with about 30 people, headquartered in San Francisco with a satellite office in New York, where she worked in a small cubicle office up until the pandemic in March of 2020.
Then Tubi took a major step forward, getting acquired by Fox at the start of the pandemic. “It was the year that you saw our first big brand campaigns, and if you watch the Fox broadcast network or the sports networks, you would see Tubi everywhere,” she said. “We were part of the World Series and there were Tubi ads in NFL games, which took us to a whole new level.”
Working through a merger amid a pandemic has meant spending a lot of time on Zoom meetings, meeting new people, experiencing massive growth both at Tubi and in the ad-supported streaming realm.
“This was the year that really accelerated things,” she said. “The eyeballs moved en masse to ad-supported streaming, and as the eyeballs moved, so did the ad dollars.”
Leads An All-Woman Team
Clarke-Hall, the dealmaker, leads an all-female negotiation team that also includes Danielle Brottman and Taylor Sibbern.
“We always say that we have the best business development team in the industry — and Andrea is our fearless leader at the helm,” chief creative officer Adam Lewinson said. “A core pillar of the Tubi team, Andrea has not only established strong relationships with our partners but also significantly expanded Tubi’s footprint, bringing free streaming to even greater audiences.”
As Clarke-Hall noted: “Anywhere you see an application on a phone, on a TV, wherever you stream, there’s a deal behind that. And a relationship behind that which has to be managed.”
Clarke-Hall’s team works with Google, Apple, Roku, Amazon and other platforms, continually adding more. “We also do a lot of our international expansion work as Tubi is in Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand,” she said.
Growth this year included building out live streaming news — News on Tubi — adding 20-plus national channels and 36 local channels around the country. She expects more than 80 local news channels by the end of the year.
