XLIVE is proud to present its second annual list of Emerging Leaders. Our group of 2022 winners includes young event professionals — across both B2B and Fan Experience — whose innovation, creativity, and drive are pushing the industry forward. We will be featuring all of the winners on XLIVE over the coming weeks, so be sure to check back!
Ever since she was little, Jacquelle Amankonah Horton has been a self-described superfan and has wanted to work with and empower creators. She eventually pursued a B.S. in Entertainment Business with a minor in Music Industry and went on to get an M.A. in Law in order to take Music Law classes. Following her studies, she worked on fan engagement apps at BET networks, a subsidiary of Viacom, and then on YouTube Creator projects at Google.
“I saw very clearly that there is a lack of understanding and ability to empower the audience that's falling in love with these creators on the screen,” she says. Through her previous experience, she was inspired by the way technology could be used to further engage and excite fans, and she set out to find a way to leverage tech to impact as many people as possible at scale — all of which led her to found Fave, a platform that builds fan communities and rewards fans for their fandom based on activities such as attending a concert or streaming their favorite artist’s music.
When the pandemic hit, Amankonah Horton had started fleshing out the idea for Fave, and the state of the world in early 2020 fueled her to push ahead with the project. “People craved community more than ever, and they wanted a symbol of belonging that they may not have been getting or feeling elsewhere,” she says. “That made the timing even more powerful because we wanted to allow people who couldn’t go to a concert or buy expensive merchandise to find those moments that they were missing, and be able to meet other people from across the globe even more powerfully than they would otherwise.”
Amankonah Horton shares that her favorite part of building and running Fave is getting to talk to fans, understand their motivations and frustrations, and find ways to enhance their experiences. “I am obsessed with the ability to serve my users,” she says. “I think fans and superfans are the coolest people in the world. I always say they are my boss — I am building for them.”
One of the biggest fan frustrations that Fave has identified and is currently working to solve is unfair access to tickets, which is an issue that has continued to garner a lot of attention recently as fans are unable to score tickets to shows because of bots and high prices on the secondary market.
“If we can tackle this head on, which is what we're doing, we can answer the prayers of a lot of fans,” notes Amankonah Horton. “Making sure that we can develop tech that allows for deserving fans to access tickets is what we're focused on very squarely. We’re in late stage talks with some of the biggest ticketing platforms to be able to execute this, and it's something that we're thrilled with and cannot wait to activate and bring out to market.”
In the longer term, Amankonah Horton plans to continue taking a fan-centric approach and diving deep into understanding what fans want. She hopes to enable people to connect with each other in ways that they wouldn’t otherwise, and to also empower fans to participate in the creator economy. Fave is currently in the midst of another fundraising round to further support these goals.
In addition, while Fave started largely for music fans, Amankonah Horton sees it growing to include all different types of fandom, whether in television, movies, sports, gaming, etc. Fans can now also suggest any fandom they’d like to have a dedicated community for on the platform — the team at Fave is already working on unlocking almost 2,000 fandoms that were recently requested.
“There are many different things that people do online,” she says, “and we're very much looking forward to expanding Fave, not just across other verticals, but other calibers of artists and creators. We are ready to finally improve the system for fans.”
When she’s not working on empowering fans and building her company, Amankonah Horton prioritizes spending time with her 11-month-old and four-year-old children, with whom she loves watching music videos and dancing.