Mary Pat Ryan at BIF-2

Listen closely and you might hear a musical revolution underway. It's not a new band, or a new style of play—instead it's coming to you over the airways. Radio—which has suffered mightily over the years through homogenization, over-formatting and politicized corporate directives—has been revitalized. As Executive Vice President of Subscriber Sales and Operations for Sirius Satellite Radio, Mary Pat Ryan has helped lead the charge.

Ryan, who joined Sirius in the summer of 2002, has spent her entire career on the cutting-edge of new media. Interestingly, it all began with a mistake when she applied to Holy Cross. Laughing, Ryan explains she was so swept up in the beauty of the campus that she neglected to notice that Holy Cross did not offer her intended major, marketing. Instead, she chose economics and then went on to become a top marketing executive in new media entertainment.

"Understanding consumer behavior is my passion," she observes. "Throughout my career, although the delivery channel has changed repeatedly, my focus has always been the management of content for consumers—giving them more choice and satisfaction." Ryan loves how marketing allows her to "use both parts of my brain because it combines financial discipline and creativity."

Today, she is responsible for maximizing the revenue from each Sirius subscriber across all channels of distribution, and for all customer service operations. Ryan has been doing her job well—during her tenure with Sirius, the company has grown from a virtual unknown to a major national brand with almost 5 million subscribers and 125 music, sports, news, and entertainment channels.

Throughout her 20-plus-year career, Ryan has focused on pushing business model innovation to the extreme. She's had a hand in 4 consecutive new media launches that transformed an industry. From her days of guiding HBO through the challenges of VCR penetration into the home, to the national launch of the Digital Satellite System (popularly known today as DirectTV), to the transformation of IMAX into a mainstream movie brand, she has demonstrated groundbreaking results for both consumer acceptance of new technologies and for maximum profitability from subscriber bases.

How did she manage such an exemplary track record? "When I think about it, I like people who I consider to be innovators," she says. "It's those people who come up with the big crazy ideas and then I have to figure out a way to compel other people to get it."

Ryan has an uncanny ability to market new innovations to an increasingly overwhelmed and skeptical consumer. From HBO, to DirecTV, to IMAX to now Sirius, Ryan has faced the challenging scenario of launching a new service in the midst of staunch competition, uninformed consumers, and a complex, but potentially valuable product.

Given her track record, you would think that Ryan is the ultimate early-adopter technophile. Far from it, she says. "Growing up, I loved music and books. I have my brother's hand-me-down stereo. I just happened to end up in a content industry by my natural passion for those things—but it's really comical how bad I am at technology."

According to Ryan, the average consumer doesn't want to get into the detail of how things get done. Instead, she places emphasis on the why. "I'm a practical person who says that would be really fun and cool, but how do you make it simple for everyone to understand who might be a customer or prospect?"

With every new business model introduction, overcoming customer inertia is an uphill battle. People are really busy and most either don't care or don't have the time to try something new—even if they intuitively may understand the ultimate value in it.

Which brings Ryan back to Sirius and why she joined the company. "I was in an IMAX movie theater," she says, "listening to a soundtrack of a major feature release. There was no film, no picture, just the power of IMAX sound. And I could see the whole movie even though it wasn't onscreen."

Ryan reflects on her moment of clarity. "I'm such an audiophile," she says. "Sound is such a powerful medium on its own. I began to wonder what happened to radio? Why don't I know anything about radio? Why don't I care about radio?"

"Moving to Sirius Radio was such a no-brainer," explains Ryan. "It's how I felt about IMAX, DirecTV, and HBO. It's the power of the emotion of the content. That's what I market. That's what I value. And with satellite radio, all you have to do is sit-back and listen."