advertisement

Meet the guy who gets you excited for all the new Disney, Marvel, and ‘Star Wars’

Asad Ayaz is a jedi-level marketer for The Walt Disney Company.

Meet the guy who gets you excited for all the new Disney, Marvel, and ‘Star Wars’
Asad Ayaz.

This story is part of Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business 2022. Explore the full list of innovators who broke through this year—and had an impact on the world around us.

When Asad Ayaz started at Disney in 2005, the company had made exactly zero Marvel movies and zero Star Wars streaming series. Now Ayaz, who runs marketing across the company’s original productions, has a challenge worthy of a cape or a lightsaber. He not only has to manage an unprecedented number of original series and films as the company spends $33 billion on content in its 2022 fiscal year, but for each, he has to create campaigns and custom content that explain each property’s place in these expanded universes while simultaneously giving each story its own spotlight. All while getting people excited. Ayaz was responsible for the releases of two new series in the Star Wars galaxy in the last year (The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi), and six in the Marvel universe (Loki, Falcon & Winter Soldier, WandaVision, Moon Knight, She-Hulk, and Ms. Marvel), plus four Marvel theatrical releases: Black Widow, Shang-Chi, Thor: Love & Thunder, and the Dr. Strange sequel.