Kathleen Barrett is CEO of Backlight, a global media technology company helping creative teams manage, create, distribute, and get more value from their content. She previously served as CEO of Mosaic Group and held senior leadership roles at Vimeo, where she helped scale the company’s OTT business from less than $1M to more than $70M in ARR and later led Vimeo’s enterprise and creator success organizations. Earlier in her career, she worked in investment banking at Goldman Sachs and joined VHX before its acquisition by Vimeo. Across her career, Kathleen has focused on building and scaling businesses at the intersection of technology, creativity, and media.
How many years have you been a judge?
This is my first year!
What are your responsibilities in your current role and what do you love most about your job?
As CEO of Backlight, my job is ultimately to create clarity: where we are going, why it matters, and what we need to do to get there. That spans strategy, product, customers, culture, and building a team that can execute at a very high level.
What I love most is the combination of people and possibility. Media is changing incredibly quickly, particularly with AI, and we have the opportunity to help creative teams spend less time fighting with technology and more time actually creating. I also love building teams and watching talented people take on bigger challenges than they thought they could.
What inspired you to pursue your career path?
My career path has been much less linear than it probably looks in retrospect. I started in finance because I loved learning how businesses worked, but I was always drawn to operators and builders — the people actually creating the thing.
That eventually pulled me into technology and then media. What has kept me here is the combination of creativity and complexity. Media companies create incredible work, but the systems behind that work can be incredibly complicated. I’ve always been energized by taking something complex, making it clearer, and building the teams and systems that allow people to do their best work.
What was your first job in the industry? What did it teach you?
My first real job in the media technology industry was at VHX, a video distribution platform that was later acquired by Vimeo.
It taught me one of the lessons I still come back to constantly: get close to the customer. When you are building something new, you rarely have all the answers sitting in a conference room. The people using the product will tell you where the friction is, what matters, and often where the opportunity is long before the market has fully articulated it.
It also taught me the value of being willing to figure things out before you feel completely ready — which has probably been a theme throughout my career.
What do you look for to determine excellence in video?
For me, great video makes you feel something before you start analyzing why it worked.
It can be beautifully produced or incredibly simple. What matters is whether there is a clear point of view, whether the storytelling feels intentional, and whether the creative choices serve the idea rather than distract from it.
I also pay attention to whether a piece understands its audience and the environment in which it will be experienced. Excellence today is not just cinematic craft. It is knowing how to tell the right story, in the right format, for the right audience — and making it feel effortless.
What initiatives or projects are you working on now that excite you?
I’m especially excited by the work we are doing with Iconik to connect the entire media lifecycle more intelligently — from managing and finding content to reviewing it, repurposing it, publishing it, and understanding how it can create more value over time.
AI is obviously a huge part of that conversation, but I’m most interested in AI when it solves a real workflow problem. Things like making massive content libraries searchable, automatically identifying the right moments within video, adapting content for different platforms, or eliminating repetitive work that slows creative teams down.
The opportunity is not simply to add AI features. It is to build the foundation that allows media organizations to experiment with AI safely, practically, and at scale.
Tell us about a moment of recognition that had an effect on you – whether personal or official? What does recognition mean to you and why is it important in our industry?
Some of the recognition that has meant the most to me has been surprisingly informal — someone telling me years later that I gave them an opportunity, advocated for them, or helped them believe they were capable of doing something bigger.
Those moments stay with you because recognition is really about being seen.
In creative industries especially, so much great work happens behind the scenes. There can be hundreds of decisions, experiments, failures, and people behind something that audiences experience in a matter of seconds. Recognition creates a moment to stop and acknowledge the craft, risk, and effort behind the final work.
And, importantly, it can open doors. Being recognized gives people visibility, confidence, credibility, and sometimes access to rooms they might not otherwise have entered. That matters.
Do you have any specific practices you lean on to spark creativity?
I consume things well outside my immediate industry.
I pay a lot of attention to brands, creators, products, architecture, design, and businesses that are doing something differently. Often the most interesting ideas come from seeing how someone in a completely different category solved a similar problem.
I also find that conversation is one of my biggest creative inputs. I like putting people with different perspectives in a room, asking a fairly simple question, and seeing where the discussion goes. Creativity tends to show up when people feel comfortable challenging the obvious answer.
In your experience, what is a significant change you are seeing happen in the video, television, and/or film industry, and what insight can you share about how to navigate it?
The biggest shift is that the amount of content being created — and the number of places it needs to go — continues to explode, while the resources available to manage all of that content are not growing at the same rate.
AI accelerates that even further. We are entering a world where creating another version, another clip, another format, or potentially entirely new content becomes dramatically easier.
That means the bottleneck increasingly moves away from creation itself and toward everything around it: finding the right assets, understanding rights, maintaining context, collaborating, approving, distributing, and knowing what you already have.
My advice is to invest in the foundation. The organizations that will benefit most from AI will not necessarily be the ones that chase every new tool. They will be the ones that have their media, metadata, rights, and workflows organized well enough to actually take advantage of what those tools can do.
What excites you about judging for the Telly Awards?
I spend so much of my day thinking about the technology and infrastructure behind media that I’m genuinely excited to spend time focused on the work itself.
I love seeing how creative teams interpret a brief, take risks, use emerging formats, and find new ways to make people feel something. The Telly Awards also recognize such a broad range of work, which makes the judging especially interesting — excellence can come from a massive production or a small team with a brilliant idea.
Mostly, I’m excited to learn from the work. Judging great creative is inevitably an exercise in sharpening your own perspective on what makes storytelling memorable.
