Kendrick Lamar’s 2025 Super Bowl halftime show reported a staggering 133.5 million viewers, but few of were watching as closely as David Yovanno, Chief Executive Officer and Board Director at impact.com.
In a recent blog post, Yovanno analyzed Lamar’s landmark performance, describing it as the final salvo in a high-stakes rap battle that propelled Lamar’s star while leaving rival Drake behind. He drew parallels between Lamar’s meteoric rise and Zoom’s unexpected disruption of Cisco Webex’s once-unassailable dominance in the online meeting space.
“The biggest mistake legacy companies make is believing that their dominance is permanent,” he wrote. This lesson is just one example of the many insights Yovanno applies in his leadership at impact.com, a partner management platform that has business relationships with Ticketmaster, Samsung, Fanatics, and Canva, among many others. He’s not shy about sharing these lessons, writing extensively on LinkedIn about everything from the lasting legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the importance of business-to-business relationships, about which he wrote “The Partnership Economy,” published in 2022. That same year, he interviewed Trevor Noah at a conference, getting the (then) host of The Daily Show to discuss about shopping habits, accountability, and “keeping it real,” values that they both believe are paramount to business success.
Yovanno joined impact.com in 2017 after serving as CEO at Marin Software for over two years—and before that, he was President of Technology Solutions at Conversantt. His distinguished career also includes roles on the board of the Interactive Advertising Bureau and service as a lieutenant and CIO in the United States Navy.
Now eight years into his tenure at impact.com, it’s clear that while the world changes around us (and him), his finger remains squarely on the pulse of what makes modern business partnerships work–and the missteps that make them crumble. His advice is simple: Stay humble.
“Kendrick Lamar didn’t get to the Super Bowl stage by accident,” he wrote. “He got there because he stayed true to his message, evolved with the culture, and never stopped proving himself. Can your company say the same?”
