Traditional to Digital Media Migration Expert
Fernando Samaniego is a forward-thinking, intrapreneurial new media strategist with 15 years of experience in building, restructuring and transforming media companies worldwide. He uses his ability for building high performance teams and his passion for media and trend watching to grow projects and organizational cultures driven by vision, innovation and a focus on the bottom line.
Fernando has transformed million dollar/euro media companies from market players into recognized market leaders. He is known for using the powerful combination of a future-oriented, creative vision and rigorous analysis to help companies struggling to adapt to challenging social and technological changes and redefining how they do business. He has leveraged Greenfield, M&A and organic growth strategies and quick to market execution to create explosive growth. He has turned around failing companies in the face of decreasing income, large debt and severe economic recession. Multicultural and multilingual, he’s worked with leading multimedia groups across the globe, including Vocento (Spain), Grupo Clarín and La Nación (Argentina), Segodnya Multimedia and SCM Holdings (Ukraine) and several companies in France.
It is his experience working with all kinds of media companies, from traditional to new, from small and large, that gives Fernando a seasoned, 360 degree perspective that few others in the industry can claim. In the world of traditional media he has gone from managing an individual newspaper to heading a group of them, from heading a small printing operation to a large multimillion euro plant network, and from managing a single TV station to a national network of local stations. He has also worked extensively with magazines and weeklies. In the new media arena, Fernando has worked on small internet operations as well as on the largest online media project in Spain. He has worked in national and regional news, thematic and video portals, classifieds sites and on transitioning from national to online television. He’s explored the new world of mobile as well as online community building projects. It is this breadth and depth of experience that uniquely equips him to help companies operating across numerous sectors to successfully bridge the gap between the old world of traditional media to the brave new world of new media.
Whether he was a young professor at a US Ivy League university, an MBA at IESE, an expatriate on assignment, an intrapreneur or consultant, Fernando has always been fascinated by the future and exploring uncharted territory. It is this pioneering nature that has helped him lead many media companies from antiquated business structures and practices into financial health and the 21st century. His groundbreaking work in developing new business models and strategies has garnered attention from the media and industry alike. His six year period in charge of a regional newspaper and subsequent profitable multimedia diversification was the object of a dissertation by the prestigious University of Navarra in Spain due to its innovative approach and resulting P&L. The greatest testament to Fernando’s pioneering work is the fact that his business models and strategies have been adopted by his company’s competitors and have now become common industry practices.
Fernando’s track record of extraordinary results speaks for itself. Under his leadership, a Spanish conglomerate of online companies’ Internet traffic expanded 4.9 times faster than the market and even faster than competitors. He co-led a team that reduced company debt from 145 million to 8 million US dollars in only five years during an economic recession in communications group in Argentina. He increased profits by 34% for five consecutive years in regional multimedia group in Spain. And due to his accomplishments in restructuring debt, cutting costs and increasing revenue, the communications group Cimeco was named the third most profitable company in Argentina. It is almost guaranteed that with Fernando at the helm a company’s revenues and ebitda will increase, their market share will expand and it will successfully expand into new markets - all while costs are being cut and business practices are being transformed.
Fernando attributes a great part of his success to the high performing teams he was able to put together and with whom he had the pleasure to work. He’s always keen on listening to members of business units, team leaders and internal managers before setting strategy. According to Fernando, “The winning formula for building internal consensus required for implementing significant organizational change is the combination of external experience and analysis with internal knowledge and perspective.”
Fernando’s work and articles have been featured in industry journals and publications, including Gazeta Wyborcza (Poland), iWorld (Spain), Les Clés de la Presse (France) and ABC (Spain). He also regularly presents at media conferences and events, including the Publishing Expo in Moscow, Russia, the Press Forum in Warsaw, Poland, Media Institute Conference in Paris, France, and the Mundo Internet 2.0 Congress in Málaga, Spain.
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