Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news. This is Bloomberg Business Wait inside from the reporters and editors who bring you America's most trusted business magazine, plus global business, finance and tech news. The Bloomberg Business Week podcast with Carol Messer and Tim Stenebeck from Bloomberg Radio.
Many are live at boom Spree time.
We are here in Hollywood, and I gotta say, before the time of my Space and Facebook, there was.
A time before Land, before.
Time the Internet.
The Internet was full of message boards. There really was a time before with like minded communities. That's what it was all about. They would discuss their niche interest together from all corners of the world, bring together.
Like minded individual Honestly, I feel like that's actually coming back right now. Increasingly, affinity A based platforms have been making a comeback. They're often kinder and gentler places where enthusiastics can just go and engage over common interests. I got Strava, for example, said I've been like all over read it lately. I'm the oldest person.
It's the parent thing.
Yeah, I'm like forty years late on Reddit, but it's working out for me. And yourew letterbox though. It's a place for movie boffs and they can catalog the movies and discuss the ones that they've seen. We got with us jemmac grace, which she's the editor in chief of Letterbox. She's here with us at screen time.
Welcome.
Understand what things look like right now because a lot of these platforms saw a huge search during the pandemic. Well we were all at home. Now we're all back out doing stuff.
Yeah.
Are you still seeing growth on the platform?
Oh? Even more so.
I mean we had pretty insane growth during the pandemic. We went into it with one point eight million members. We came out, not that it's over, but you know, a couple of years later we had six million members and we're now at sixteen million, like close to sixteen million in.
The last couple of years.
So Yeah, people just keep coming to write their thoughts about movies.
That is because I get it. During the pandemic, Yeah, stuck.
At home, we were looking for communities and to feel connected.
Why do you think it continues to grow?
Yeah, and to feel connected and also to feel maybe a sense of achievement in our days when there was sort of no shape to those.
Long lockdown days.
I think it's continued to grow because something that happened during that time was a lot of people coming to write their thoughts about the Twilight series and then go, what else has Robert Pattinson done? He's oh good time, Oh the Lighthouse with Willem Dafoe.
This is interesting.
This is a cinema I've never seen before, and then started a cinephile journey that coming out of the pandemic has taken them into art house cinemas to see a lot of films that they never got to see on the big screen the first time around. And they're finding community literally in cinema. Four years now, we see a lot of under thirty five year old engagement in the cinema.
Is it actually a safe place that stays on top of it? Because you see on Twitter, you see on Instagram, you see on Facebook. Yeah, it just evolves right away. It gets political. Democrats control the weather comment such a close. Is letterbox free of that?
No?
You know, every part of the Internet has its can I say douchebags on Bloomberg.
Just tad, I'm so sorry about it.
Every part of the Internet has pilons. But I think the benefit and the beauty of a place like Letterbox and Strava is that the conversation happens specific to the film that a member is reviewing.
Or specific to a list that they put together of.
Movies they love or William Defoe movie is ranked. And so there's no kind of central town square on Letterbox for everybody to pile it on soon. And we also give our members tools like comment moderation, tools of their own so they can curate their own spaces. So the conversation happens around a movie or around a movie list, and that's generally what keeps it kind, but also it's in our community policy.
Two words be.
Cool Heimer, Barbie Heimer, Borbenheimer.
However you want to say Barbie and Appenheimer. Yeah, what did that do for your platform? Did he give it a musler? Did you see anything significant.
On for that?
We definitely saw a massive mon of growth around a lot of editorial we did with Greta Gerwig at Barbie Time and with Martin Scott Sez at Killers at the Flower Moontime like.
Where there are spikes there.
But more than that, it's not just about getting new members to letter Box. What I loved about Barbie was Greta's generosity and sharing all of the film references that she used to make that film, everything from Pee Wee's Big Adventure to Singing in the Rain. And then we see at the back end the watch list spikes of our members going, Greta loves that film.
I love Greta.
I'm gonna watch that film.
History in cinema, right, yeah, the Crow movie?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, And so for us, it's all about film discovery. That is that is purely what is about film discovery, enabling people to discover more films, whether they're in cinemas right now or whether they're coming out on a Criterion four K. And if someone like Greta Gerwig is saying, here are the thirty one movies that inspired Barbie, we see the activity among our members watching those movies.
Are you platform agnostic in the sense of who cares if the film comes out on happy ex suited theaters? At the same time, who cares if the film was only available in theaters before VCRs. Yeah, we're even a thing.
Yeah, we're shifted, absolutely, Like we want people to see films where they can see them, and I mean the state of theatrical right, is that not every film comes out in every cinema in every town around the world, and so we see a lot of members reviewing a film saying, I drove two hours to see this, and I'm so glad I did because I wanted to see
it in the seventy millimeter. But also other people who you know, watching it on their streaming services, and all of it is fine because they're all watching movies.
How do you just make money? How do we make money? Sorry and good quest.
Yeah, we have wages to pay.
The first way we did it in the early days was by inviting our members to pay an annual subscription fee to either be pro or patroon level, and for that they get yummy features like their annual stats around who you're most watched actors and a map of the world that changes color as you watch her film from each part of the world. And then we brought an advertising and if you don't want advertising with your letterbox experience, you can upgrade to prow a patron.
So that.
Advertise descriptions, advertising and campaigns, mainly campaigns with a.
Lot of studios and distributors.
So the thing we have at letterboxes people's emails and their taste in film and their film watching history. So someone might come to us with a film and we go, cool, these are ten other films that are like that film. We will find you the members and the part of the world that you want to focus on, and we will find the members who have watched and rated four stars or above these other films. So we based ou tastes rather than demographic and it's it's much more effective.
We have fifty eight percent open rate in general in terms of our campaigns.
That we do with studios.
Yeah, amazing, and they.
Go, are you getting it's interest from working with stars, working with actors and actresses who could come on and do sort of like a Reddit Asked Me Anything type thing, a live engagement to sort of see what their their fans are talking about and asking them.
We would love to.
Do that out the celebrities want to do that.
Are you waiting out there?
We've got a lot of people joining.
We just had Michael Mann join, We just had them, vendors joined, Mattin Still says, who became a member last year. We could certainly run a live Q and A if they wanted to.
We haven't done it so far, but we'd love to.
Well, so how do you get that involvement, because that to be would sound like that makes sense right in the environment we live in, especially since you have celebrities or movie makers or actors that are part of the platform. Yeah, have you reached out, like how do you make that next out?
I mean, what we've been focusing on is our four favorite Films series, actually, and so that's the great thing about that. I mean, absolutely we would love to do Live ama Q and as that will come in the future. But I think what's really taken off is the simple idea that on the app, the first thing we ask members to do is when they're setting up their account is say their four favorite films.
So there's four slots, right, and.
You can pick your full fair you can change them up whenever you like.
It's a feature of the app.
We started asking people on Red Carpet that question, and somehow it took off, and so that's I guess that's our quarterstone feature at the moment.
And the wonderful thing.
About it is, yeah, like fifty people have said the Godfather or the Godfather too, but then they say beautifully obscure films like just here today, here Snoop Dogg was like Superfly, the mac Dolomite and Scafface, which is so cool. So then we see when we post those four favorites, we see the watch list spikes, so members are like, interesting, I haven't seen that.
I'm putting it straight on my watch list.
Yeah.
So like AI can be a useful tool in all of this in a big way.
Maybe. Yeah. Jemma, thank you so much, really enjoyed this. Thanks for finding time Jemma Gracewood.
She's the editor in.
Chief of Letterbox. Right here at screen time, Gemma.
Thanks, you're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple car Play and then Broyt Auto with a Bloomberg Business app, or watch us live on YouTube.
So we want to get back to Bloomberg's screen time. As you can hear a lot going on around us. It's a little loud, but.
It is all about content creation, how we receive it, who's involved in it.
It's being disruptive. There's a lot of innovation, there's a lot of technology in it.
Our next guest has really first hand seen the impact that technology can have on creators and how we create this. She's former VP of Creative plat Experience and Engagement over at Adobe.
She was involved in the building of something we.
All have a lot about Photoshop and probably have used her background span such company as Flicker, Yahoo, Mail and We were Common. She's also the founder and former CEF Tom Collery, which was bought by Yahoo one decade ago. Let's bring in Kako Shrivastava. She's the CEO right now at the music creation platform.
It is called Splice. Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, Hello.
Thanks for having me.
Well, it's great to have you here when it comes to music.
You guys offer up tools when it comes to music creation to us, our audience may not so familiar what exactly you do.
So Splice is the world's largest marketplace for samples, which are the lego building blocks that are of sound that are used to build modern music. Right, so you hear all those beautiful layered sounds and pop music can even country music that's built using samples like the kind.
That we provide.
One of the things that we've been working on is because we have this incredibly rich library of sounds that we collect from all over the world. So even now, we have a team in South Pallo really going deep on the stream culture there, understanding music, how music is being made, and capturing those sounds for our libraries.
Because we have this library, we can build this next generation of AI based tools, because.
We have a very clean training set, which is essential for building AI sokay of the sample library that people can play around with. We have the sample library, but we also have creative tools that people can use that are AI powered to create their own music. So, for example,
you can start on splice. You can upload a musical idea that you have a guitar riff that you've been working on, or you know, the musical, a little bit of a song that you've written, and we will help you ussemble the track around that because we have the samples and we can use our AI technology to match to listen to what you've built and match the right complimentary sounds that go a lot with them.
Pretty cool, cool for us to hear. But if you're a musician, if you're a musician who yes, these her living, they're living creating music. Yeah, are you scared of tools such as these?
No?
No, no no, I think that's actually what makes us of a very different player in this space are target customers. The people who pay us money are musicians, and so resually focus on how do you take the toils out of their work?
And if you watch people create music, especially in samples based music, you see them click through and listen to forty different drum sounds to find the right one.
Because we can get you in the right ball car faster. You can just bring that into your whatever creative tool.
You use to sort of get to the next level.
CaCO, who owns it?
Though?
Like I'm thinking about all these sounds that you are pulling in from around the world, which sounds super cool.
Right, But who owns it?
That's a great question, that's a really and it's it's a question that people should be asking all the time, right, because creators should.
Own their music, or you should.
Do the right thing in compensating creators to use their music, whether it's for creating libraries or for other things.
Right.
So, our library entirely is built on having relationships with the artists directly. Who are the sample equators, the sound designers, the artist musicians all over the world to work with us to bring their sounds to our platform.
So are they are they initially compensated once or every time somebody uses it and uses it in their own composition, they get some kind of fit.
Yeah. So we work with the artists themselves on the to bring the sounds in and we have different kinds of deals. Some people are like, yeah're gonna just take a flat fee right now.
That's what's important to me.
Other people participate in our network in some way marketplace in some way. On the other side, the customers who subscribe to the sample library, just who subscribe to Splice.
The way that works is when we are loyal to free so that you know, regardless of how you use the sound, whether you use it for something for your own personal creation that never sees the light of day, or you end up having it show up in a hit track with Sabreta Carpenter or the Espresso song which happened recently with a Subsplice samples.
You know, it's it's.
Fine if you're totally free to do that and you use the sounds in your repreation.
It's sort of related about copyright safe.
Yeah.
If somebody wants to use the tools to develop something that would be used for commercial purposes, how do you ensure that the sound what it was trained on is copyright saved.
That's a great question.
I think that's a much.
More important question for people who are doing generative AIS right they're creating news sounds. All of the sounds on splice are human created, human curated, So we have those relationships with the artists directly.
When do you get to the point where you are doing jenai sound, You.
Know, we're looking at it really carefully.
Our belief, and we feel this pretty strongly, is that the way that generic AI should be used is not actually to create content, but rather to create tools to allow human beings to create content.
Okay, so explain the difference between those two things.
Sure.
So one is okay, I've typed in a bunch of words and proof a song comes out, and that's an interesting thing.
It's interesting to something that would be.
That's very a very first version Jenei experience that everyone
is like they're buzzing about right now. Another example is something we actually just launched yesterday, this new integrated experience that is right inside the main creative tool that people use for We've been a partnership with the company call Studio one, and there's a splice plug in that's integrated deep into the thing, and so user is creating something and we're able to listen to what the user is creating, or the user is able to say, you know, find
something that matches this sound, and by looking at what the user's sound is, we're able to assemble human created, human created sounds to help.
Them come completely. That is not jen AI.
But it's the kind of tool that builds on that kind of AI memor.
Cause we get into some of the business and getting ready, we have a bat a couple of minutes left here. How many users, what do they mostly use it for? What's the engagement? You know, I feel like I'm always stuck asking the question one of us is how do you guys make money? Like, how do you wear a subscription business? We have over half a million subscribers who pay.
Us every month.
Yeah, and they're sticky, they stay with you.
Yeah, kind they do well.
We still have people who've been started with Slice five years ago, six years ago, so definitely, and that comes from us focusing on people.
Who are serious music creators.
So we know people who are really investing in their their livelihood or their passion, their hobby, what's.
The growth in users?
Are you profitable?
Like, we are profitable.
We are profitable and we are growing. So the poor business is incredibly.
Powerful and incredibly strong.
Over one hundred thousand users come to our site every day.
Over a million sounds are downloaded every day, so we're operating.
At meaningful scale.
The creator tool, the AI stuff is new and we'll all see where that goes.
You're new to the business, relatively music business. I can say you are stage technology. You've just got about thirty forty seconds left here?
What are you learning?
Like?
What's kind of surprised you? And how difference this world is?
And so I've spent my entire career focused on creative people. You have to describe some of my background earlier. Musicians music creators are just like other there's like software developers,
they're like graphic designers. They want the time and space to focus on their craft and they want their tools to get out of the way right because they want that idea in their head to come out in terms of vibrations that will hit our ears right, and getting out of the way is our job that just want to do this to their craft.
Yes, couple, thank you so much.
For starting.
Thank you for having me. I really appreciate Kako Shrivastfa.
She is CEO at the music creation platforms WWICE, joining us right here at screen time.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday starting at two pm Eastern on Apple car Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station, Just say Alexa Play Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Well, our next guest is looking to revolutionize the film and television production post production using jen Ai. Kubrick is a platform, and what they aim to do is reduce the amount of time that it takes to build virtual worlds in film.
And You've been talking about this a lot.
Oh yeah, we're looking to reduce it by ninety percent. So traditionally what happens to, you know, a team of people who build these things like gaming worlds, It takes them weeks and it costs hundreds of thousand dollars. Now Kubrick says they can do that at a fraction of the costs and interfraction of the time.
I'm telling you that Tim has been talking about this a lot, because he is actually doing a panel on this later with our next guest.
He's like a little warm up here, okay, a little warm up for our panel. It really pleased to be joined by a fanar se Han Demer doc. She's the CEO of Cubrick. She joins us here at screen time in Los Angeles. I explain this, but it's the type of thing that I think people can't understand unless they actually see it happen. You're used to giving the elevator pitch. How do you describe this for people who can't see it?
Be does absolutely, this is a background and this is an actor.
In order for it be believable.
When the actor moves left, the back noun needs to in real time render left correct. So that is the reason why this cannot be a flat image. This needs to be a dimensionalized image, or this needs to be a game engine, so every time the actor is moving left, the game.
Is rendering left.
That is the reason why Hollywood and many other productions across the world are using game engines in every scene. So if you take into account that you need to make a game per scene, that means that your environment building costs per scene start in the low end of one hundred and.
Fifty thousand dollars per scene. Since there is thirty to.
Sixty environments per picture, that means that you can start saving in a high six figure or low seven figure per picture.
You're forty bucks a month.
When we take.
Forty bucks a month? How much one hundred?
We are business to consumer and business to business.
So the businesses to consumer is forty dollars exactly. Business to business? How much is that we.
Offer custom solutions?
Because businesses have a variety of different needs like on prem solutions, higher image generation, or ethical AI models, So it depends what they are looking for.
I would say that I love watching movies, streaming, whatever it is, but if it doesn't look realistic to me, it really takes right.
It makes me like I'm done.
I'm done, So tell us about how you make sure it sounds like your cost effective solution.
But it's gotta look good. How do you get there?
Absolutely? So what makes cubreck special.
Is that we can augment, elevate dimension jump a two dimensional flat image like images in your.
iPhone are flat, right right, they don't look.
Realistic if they are backgrounds, they're flat. So what we are capable of is to extract the depth out of a flat image and make it dimensionalized. So image generation by using generative AI is one of our functions. But if you prefer, you can upload your own map painting. You can high an artist to make a realistic environment and we turn it into a dimensionalized, believable scene.
Take us into the technology what you're training these models on for the gen AI in videos GPUs.
Yeah, Nvidia is one of our biggest champions. They also significantly contributed to our early days. And yes, our inferences are on n video picasto cloud.
Whose cloud are you paying for those?
So?
AWS is our bare bones and Nvidia is our organs.
So you're paying AWS to do the image generation, do the rend now that is n video? Should you pay in video directly or does AWS have the video technology?
So let's think about the chassis of a car and an engine and then seats and a wheel.
Our chassis is a WS.
We pay them separately, and then all of our functions, all of our AI functions. Every time a user pushes a button, it is done in the Nvidia cloud.
So we paid two different people.
So you don't have to buy the Nvidia GPUs yourself.
Yeah, Nvidia has given us a lot of reading room. We are very lucky.
We are.
So they started this program called Picasso. We were CUBRIC was one of the first six companies that they involved. They gave us so I don't know, you must now. Of course, it's called the startup killer. So if you're a bootstrapping startup, like at the early days of qubric, you need to If we were forced to reserve several different GPU clusters, we had.
To estimate how many users we would expect. If it were too high, we would go backrupt.
If it were too low.
We would miss an open.
What Nvidia gave us with their Nvidia Picasso platform is that we would pay as we go.
We pay for every push on the button.
So that's why we could financially model an estimation of how much our users would be pushing buttons. And the cool thing is that cubric is one of the only tools that let you work with AI unlimited.
We don't have token system. My background is an arts I'm a creative.
I hate the idea of being limited, So once you enter CUBRIC, everything is unlimited.
So if you look at the financial model, I'm trying to understand because it sounds like you're getting an a system Nvidia and they've been a big supporter.
You're using cloud.
We talk so much about anything with generative AI, large language models, and it sounds like you're involved in that to create incredible backgrounds that it's expensive.
It uses a lot of energy. I am curious about the financial model. Is a sustainable going.
Forward for a studio, for you guys.
For what you're doing, or for studios tapping into.
Yeah, absolutely, let's think about financial model of flying to Antarctica to.
Take a shoot, to make a shoot?
Yeah, how much would it cost your entire crew? How About you want to mimic Mars?
How about you need to stop the traffic in New York City? What would that cost? And you're a crew in China? You need to shoot in English? And like, let's talk about the mathematics all that.
Actually, one of our users, it's a you know, we went to market as a background acceleration tool for filmmakers, but our users surprised us from animation, gaming and fashion. Actually, there's a fashion company that did a shoot on cubric and they did like they're quite nerves about the carbon footprint calculations. They gave us a report without us asking about how much kubric could save them on their carbon footprint by not flying to Antarctica.
Interesting, Okay, that's I haven't thought about it looking at it. Yeah, that way, I'm wondering about the business and how you've been able to bootstrap this. I was pretty shocked to find that, you know, you're not a look, i mean, sixty billion dollar valuations, so, like you know you were talking, fundraising that you've done is pretty much zero at this point.
It's all bootstrapped more or less. Give us some insight into your financials and now you've been able to build this company on a shoestring.
Yeah.
The pre seed was given by personally financed by me and my late husband who was the co founder of Kubrick, and we have raised our modest seed round in order to make version one of cubric. Currently we're in version one. We are in BEDA and as you know, we're getting like, we're very grateful for all the attention and usership that we have been adoptability that we have been getting. That's why we are raising funds for our seed round in order to create the version two. Because we have listened
to filmmakers. You know how scrutinized their difficult their demands are and we have a roadmap that is exactly to satisfy the needs of filmmakers, and we are ready to execute our roadmap.
That's what I'm curious about our filmmakers.
The major studios were here in Hollywood, but there are content creators all around the world.
But I think, are they lining up to use your service? I'm just curious.
What's the communications you're having with them? Are they customers?
Absolutely? Yes.
One of the major studios is are the very first company that one of the major studios is the very first license holder of kubric And we're in talks with several they are it's okay, do you think I can, but I need to meet the finer.
I know how that works.
Do that before a panel, okay, because you know how it sometimes takes the established, additional part of that world to buy in.
So my background is not filmmaking. That was the background of my late husband, the co founder of Cubrian. So my background is in generative AI and creativity. I am learning.
The detail of filmmaking since two years, and what I've discovered is that most of the film studios don't make the movies. They hire the people that make the movies, production companies, digital effect studios, production designers, previous companies.
They need the tools.
So there are several ways to go about an adoption in the filmmaking world.
You either go top down.
You show it to the film studio executives and they understand, like they run the numbers they do ROI, and they tell them they advise the companies that they're hiring that it will be advisable to use that too.
Or you go a grassroot.
You identify like the previous artists, the production designer, the cinematographer, and you show the difference and user views and accessibility that your tool provides, and then they bring it to production.
Companies that they would like to instead use this tool.
The strike, I think is still fresh in the minds of a lot of people employment and who this type of thing displaces. If a film was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars and now needs to spend a fraction of the what people are affected by that?
Sure, thank you for this question.
I genuinely believe that me and all the other AI companies are we have a responsibility to public if you have a responsibility, like we are responsible of creating a major change in industry, and it is our duty to open conscious contemplations about what is happening and what will be happening.
So there are jobs like imagine the way you create. I mean, I'm a creator. I know how I create.
An idea comes and then it takes me time to execute. Some parts are very rewarding, like ideation vision having one hundred different options in front of me, or being stuck to one option and putting so much time with a tedious, treacherous work.
In executing that option.
A tool like Kubrick gives you the possibility of having one hundred different options, spending less time in executing one, and spending more time in having a more dialogue.
With your director.
So you know that there's a especially after COVID, there's an insane rise in extraordinary content. And you also know very well that the budgets are shrinking. So this really does like I always make the joke like, so who's gonna make that content? Will my lawyer stop being a lawyer and be a v infix artist? Like we need different solutions for the industry. There comes tools like Kubrick and others that are there to provide more automation in the industry.
You know, we just had a director on You're Gonna Remember the name, and I'm gonna involved in Ring of Power, uh and said her whole life, what she wanted to do is work on epic film production. Yes, loves this going in and when a lot of people at an incredible location sheet.
So I am curious, Charlotte.
Thank you.
So I'm curious because your background is creative, Like, are you getting the creative folks on board who say no? In order to really make it real, I've got to be on location with a million people, and that's what really makes it so wonderful.
Yes, absolutely, Just like anything like, there's no such a I don't believe that there's such a thing as AI.
There's technology, and there's advancemental humanity.
Yeah.
One can debate the fact that is social media good for humanity or bad. You can have half of the population say that it affected greatly the self confidence of their daughters, and the other one can say that they can sell x amount of goods by using social media stores.
So just like, if you look at it.
In a conscious contemplation manner, it can truly accelerate and make you marvels that you could never afford before. But if ever you approach it as like a competition or it's going to replace you, it's gonna kill you, it's gonna take it over from you, that will be the reality you will be manifesting because you will lack curiosity and wonder that that will let you approach it and make it useful for you.
Canard, do you think we get to the point where it's kind of a novelty and it's special, Yeah, exact Well, directors to use film, right, Yeah, it's next. So a movie comes out and it's like, oh wow, this is the whole thing we shot up film. It shows the commitment of the producers and the director because it's more expensive. So we get to the point in a few years where a movie makes a point of saying there was no generated AI used in use.
Yeah.
Sure, going all.
To school here absolutely, Like I know of fact, twenty twenty two, out of the thousand pictures that make it in the big screen, nineteen ninety six of them were.
Shot on digital. Four of them were shot on film.
And you know, last year the film that was shot on film won the Academy Award for Best Picture. So yes, but like AI is going to be like it's like saying like in two years, if ever you say that your platform ATA, it will be like my device has Internet and now we gotta go.
Canarsa Han Damer Dog, CEO of Kubrick here live at screen Time.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Can't you just live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern Listen on Apple car Play and then brought auto with a Bloomberg Business act or what's just live on YouTube?
All right, we've got a great person from screen Time. Today we're gonna talk about City Football Group. They have set a new benchmark when it comes to the global sports industry, building a soccer machine that runs from England to the United States and more so here that talk about what they're up to.
Is that Nuria Tare.
She's chief Marketing and Fan Experience Officer and City Football Group joining us.
Nuria, it is so great, Maria Greata have you here with us?
Tell us about what you are doing as you expand the imprint of can I say soccer versus football?
You can't say soccer as you build it out.
In the United States and what's the expectations in terms of what you can do here.
Well, in case anyone missed it, soccer is actually growing very fast in the US. It's outfacing the growth of any other sport at the moment. And the good news for US is why is that. Well, there's probably plenty of things. It's been growing for a while, but there's clearly an acceleration over the last two years. Some may say, you know, it's a messy effect, but it's just really the next generation. It's really appealing to younger audiences. Participation
in the sport is growing as well. And what's great for US as well is one in three soccer fun has still to choose their favorite club. So that's where we come in because in the US we have actually two big properties. One is a New York City Football club based in New York is part of the MLS, but of course Manchester City part of City.
Football Brook parts our big you've.
Heard of them.
Hopefully it's our most global property in our portfolio and of course has huge ambitions of growing in the US market as well.
All right, let's start with NYCFC growth plans within New York City. What's the plan? What are you doing?
Well, fantastic plans.
I mean, as you know, we've been in the market for ten years now. We've been looking for a permanent home and we almost got it in Queens. So we've announced actually plans for new stadium. As you know, we are hoping to break grounds very soon. Can't say much more about that. We're hugely excited. We're planning to be in Queens, great sports area in the city. So we want to have a home in the Five Boroughs and I think we've found abot place.
How do you engage with fans who are like you know, there's just so many different things that can do different kinds of sports, you know, hearing, viewing things and streaming or traditional media.
How do you can beat with us eyeballs? What do you have to do to get us there?
Yeah, so it's really interesting. Take Manchester City for instance.
Right, So one thing is winning, and of course we've been winning a lot, yes, and.
You know we like it or not.
Winning gets people's attention, right and we get the share of mind if you want. But on the other side of the pitch as well, we see ourselves as a sports entertainment brand, so we invest very much in media, in content production, and I think i'd like to say we've been pushing the boundaries in the way soccer clubs would be acting normally.
Just to give you a few examples.
For instance, six years ago, which is like long time now, but just yesterday, we were the first soccer brand to do all or nothing on Apple, so we really open the doors show how it wants to operate a soccer club, how it is to win. Since then afterwards, we've been on Tatlasso as well several you know.
What is that for you?
Something like that?
I mean, I feel like we all see.
You had that question we were.
Talking to us.
I did.
Obviously we got in season one.
We didn't even know whether it was gonna walk right, but we could see the story was interesting.
It was very much focused for the US market.
Of course, it's a global part of really appealing to the US market.
And it's been great because we were big.
Aspiration was doing against Manchester City and playing Manchester City, so it's been great for our brand.
What's what's the media story here in terms of being able to watch games. I think it's so tough for customers in the United States to understand where they need to go to watch different teams, whether it's a local blackout as a result of just some old media rights issue where there are blackouts because two companies don't get along. In the US, you can't watch your favorite sport, your favorite team. How are you navigating that?
Well?
You rather as a challenge.
But on one side, the MLS is doing a fantastic job now on Apple as well.
You know, subscribers keep for following. The quality of the.
Product and the production is improving, so definitely getting a growing audience. And when it comes to the Premier League, I mean the audience has been phenomenal in in the last couple of years.
NBC is doing a brilliant job in the mornings.
Ever, Wordmili money, would it ever be worth going direct consumer and bypassing Apple, bypassing.
Well, I'm trying.
We're gonna try not to get into that because I'm gonna be in trouble with our broadcast to friends and try to be friends with them.
We collaborate a lot.
But I think in the US market, still having you know, reach an audience and being able to to have innoll visibility is still important.
You guys do some really novel things like pop up stores, and I just do think about how how you think about expanding the brand and again engaging with you know, viewers, people who come in matches.
What else are you guys thinking about doing.
So, As I was saying, we see yourselves as a sports entertainment brand, so we try to look at it not only from the game, like from soccer, but also there's there's a soccer culture if.
You want that we're trying to be part of.
So we invest in merchandising, retail, popup stores. As you say, we had a pretty successful pop up store in near Rockefeller Center actually New York, and now we're looking for a permanent location because it was so great that we want to stay in New York.
We're probably going to be looking at LA.
And other places around around the US, and also looking at relevant collaborations with content creators, collaborations in retail. As we are merchandising to be appealing to the US market if you want in a relevant way.
I am curious just twenty seconds left your fan base is it young, is it old?
Is it What can you tell.
Us we are the fastest growing soccer brand in the US.
It's very young. It's too young. People choose the club seventeen year old just to say so, excuse young. And we have the youngest fani base actually, and.
Those young fan bases and parents which we spend a lot of money, which.
Is interesting to advertise.
You said, I know that, Lauria.
Thank you so much. Naria TOA.
She's a chief marketing at fan Experience officer at City Football Group.
Sounds like she has some fun in her job.
You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Listen live each weekday. He's starting at two pm Eastern on Apple car Play and Android Auto with the Bloomberg Business App. You can also listen live on Amazon Alexa from our flagship New York station just say Alexa playing Bloomberg eleven thirty.
Hey.
One thing here at Bloomberg BusinessWeek that we like to do is really help understand who and what should be on your radar. Who should be on your radar The people who are blowing up TikTok, those who are drawing massive crowds and music festivals. They're creating genre bending art and even expanding their culinary empires. They are the ones to watch.
They are, indeed, and Carlo Eduardo Espina is certainly in that category.
He's got more.
Than check this out, ten million followers on TikTok.
He's become one of the leading names when it comes to Hispanic political voices in the United States.
The New York Times calls him a one.
Man Tolman Day.
His videos, almost all of which are in Spanish and which routinely get hundreds of thousands of views, favor by commentary on policy and politics. They've even got the attention to White House. He spoke at the DNC, and he can made videos with President Biden. Carlos, Welcome to Bloomberg Business Week. Congratulations on being named one to Watch. Thank
for your Business Week. Your pretty recent law school graduate. Yeah, I think a lot of your classmates are probably out like sitting at desks right now.
Yeah.
Yeah, you're trying to find jobs with big mom. Maybe how would you find yourself making TikTok videos and bringing in a couple million bucks a year.
Well, it was kind of something that started out as a hobby. Like many content creators. I graduated college in May of twenty twenty, and my goal was to work for a nonprofit organization doing immigrant rights work advocacy, but because of the pandemic, that fell through. So while I was at home figuring out what to do with my life,
I started making content on social media. I started doing citizenship classes one hundred questions when you want to naturalize, and that started blowing up really fast, to the point that by the end of twenty twenty I had over half a million followers, and I was like, hey, you know, I can start doing this more consistently, and it became my job and I love it.
We'll get to more of the TikTok and the contentation first before, but first I want to talk a little bit more about your story because you mentioned citizenship, I mean something that you're intimately familiar with, having come to the United States when you were five years old.
Yeah, so it's a little my My personal story is pretty long. My parents were already living in the US before I was born, but my mom got deported in nineteen ninety seven, so she had to go back to Mexico. Then my dad would go visit her. She got pregnant with me. I was born in Uruguay and then we were able to come back. But my mom became a citizen in twenty fourteen, so I remember helping her study for the citizenship exam, and in high school I volunteered
for a nonprofit teaching citizenship. So that's why when I was like figuring out what to do with my life, I was like, well, I can always do what I like doing, just you know, helping people out. Started making content around it, and it worked out pretty well.
Carlos, what do you think is a smart conversation to be had around immigration?
Right now?
It's such a big part of the upcoming US election where just you know, a.
Few weeks away, it's pretty amazing.
But anytime I bring up immigration with someone, they have very strong feelings one way or another. What do you think, having seen it firsthand, gone through it with your family, what do you think is a smart conversation that we should be having around that?
Well?
I think the best thing to do is really, you know, challenge the narratives and the perceptions that people have already made up, because a lot of times people have this, you know, either hate towards immigrants or negative sentiment, but they because you know, someone else has told them to feel that way, whether they've seen it on the news or whether you know they've read some conspiracy or whatever
it may be. But when you really got down to the human level and start meeting people around you, you realize that immigrants are all around you and in many ways they make your life better. And I think once you start, you know, having that personal connection, meeting one on one and realizing that the issue is much more
complex than what it's made out to be. And yes, I mean there's real issues that need to be addressed, but the reality there's millions of people in this country who don't have an immigration status, who have been working here for ten, fifteen, twenty years, paying taxes, contributing, and it's just illogical, you know, to try and apport all these people now, So why don't we find some more humane solutions and you know, really get to the human side of the issue.
You said, The New York Times called you a one man Telemundo really interesting profile there. We have a great profile of you in BusinessWeek. You're doing this by reaching people on TikTok and other social platforms. I'm wondering what you think the mainstream media gets wrong about the things that you cover on your social channels.
Well, I think, you know, there's pretty good coverage in Spanish, I think just because of like the general context, something that's talked about more often. But when it comes to English media, a lot of times, you know, we talked about immigration or Latino issues in general, it's very oversimplified or it just focuses on one aspect and the reality is that it's very, very complex when you talk about immigration. You know, right now everyone's talking about the border, the border,
but it's much bigger than the border. It's about people in their home countries. It's about those who are already here. So I guess really understanding the issue beyond the headlines, and you know, looking beyond, I guess what the current
narrative is. Because you have these trends in immigration, it becomes a hot topic, then people forget about it, then it comes back and you know, I'm someone who lives in every single day, so I have no choice right to just pay attention when I want to, And I think that's really important having journalists, having people who are paying attention to the issue day in and day out.
So important to what you do is your ability to reach people on TikTok. You could certainly school Tim and me and how to get something internship reach.
You should be tiktoking us right now. Yeah, just drown it out there man.
Having said that, part of the narrative to is a potential ban on TikTok.
If that happens, what does that mean for you and what you do?
Yeah?
So obviously, like I said, it started as a hobby, but now TikTok, social media in general is my business. It's my job in many ways, and obviously there would be if TikTok were to get banned, which I don't necessarily thing will happen. I think that they'll sell it
or whatever. But even if that were to happen, you know, there's no guarantee that the platform will stay the same, and I think it will hurt a lot of people, not just myself, but mostly the people who consume the information on these platforms because people have become so dependent on social media platforms like TikTok to be educated, to be informed, and right there's this perception that TikTok is just a bunch of you know, crazy dangerous trends and
nothing useful. But that's completely, very far removed from reality, at least how I see it. So I think it would be a big damage not only to content creators, but those you know who use TikTok for positive things, to learn, to be educated, to engage with other stuff they otherwise wouldn't really know about.
Hey, I kind of very delete a little bit at the top, sayd that you make a couple million dollars a year. Yeah, tract, we got to get the details on this and and help people understand we're Bloomberg. We love talking numbers, the y y Yeah, help people understand how you're making that money.
Yeah.
So as a content creator, you know, for me, it was like a very big learning curve because like at the beginning, I was just making videos for fun, and then I started realizing, yeah, you can monetize off of social media, and so there's really the main way, the most common way is just off to video views. So each platform, for example TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, have some sort of rate they pay you for every amount of
views that you get. It really depends, you know, on who's watching your videos, the kind of content you make. But beyond that, there's also paid collaborations. For example, in my case, I've done a lot of work with like immigration attorneys or that kind of stuff. You know, it really depends on your audience. If you a makeup creator, obviously you work with makeup brands that kind of stuff. And then there's also you know, what has been the
most successful for me is making your own brand. So, like I mentioned, I've been teaching citizenship classes for a long time, and I took a class in life copyright and I learned that everything the government puts out is in the public domain. So I was like, hey, you know, these citizenship questions are like, why can't I just make
my own citizenship questions so people can study? And I started making them and selling them for ten dollars each and I've sold over like one hundred thousand sets, like the flash gars. So now people run into me in person and like, oh, I have your flashcars as a study for the naturalization exam. So I sell them cheaper than anywhere else, and then at the same time people
are able to benefit. I go on live stream and I'm like studying with them, and I'm like, hey, if you want to buy them, you can just go right here in this link.
And yeah, then we should know you're also using your money to work on profits. And get back to the community before we get to that. When I hear you talk about the way that creators are paid, I also wonder about misaligned incentives. You think of a platform like
X for example under Elon Musk. It's been well documented what has proliminated there and what you're able to do is actually make money by people seeing your posts on X exactly does that provide an incentive for people to come out with false and misleading info because it inflames emotions, People share it, people interact with it, more people see it, and then it creates a cycle where you're getting paid more because you know what resonates with people, whether that's.
True or not.
Yeah, well the next TI I'm not too familiar. I'm on the platform, but I don't use it to great content. I just use it to like look at news and that kind of stuff. But it definitely is like a real feed YouTube TikTok people. I see it a lot where like you know, obviously, once you get to a certain amount of followers, people are watching the content that you make. So if you make consistently like fake content,
you know you'll get flagged, you'll get banned eventually. But there is you know, an incentive to perhaps you know, put out information that's not true that you know will catch people's attention. Like for example, right now, I could go outside and say, hey, I just got assaulted in LA and there's no truth to it, like, but people won't believe it because I'm saying it. Obviously I don't do that because I have some sort of like ethical code, you know, But there's.
Other people the narratives, yeah right now about California exactly.
Yeah, or so like people can go to the border and be like, oh, I just saw a criminal come by. I mean, I don't, like, there's no proof, but if I were to go say that, it would go viral because, like you're saying, it feeds into people's negative perceptions and you do see a lot of that. And I think I say this as a content creator, I do think there needs to be more regulation all these platforms as far as I you know, what is allowed to be
put on there. Like obviously I believe in free speech, but when you're going into the terrain of just making a fake news or stuff that just isn't real, I think that's really dangerous and harmful to society.
Well, certainly real I want to bring it back to the election just as we get ready to wrap up. I mean, Latinos, how do you think that they will? And I hate to kind of love everybody in a.
Group because we're just that's.
Not who we are. We are multi dimensional. But how do you think the Latino citizens will impact elections potentially this November?
Yeah? Well, I think Latinos are the ultimate swing voters in the sense that you know, Latinos as opposed to like other you know, communities, we don't have a set party identity. I mean Latinos in general. I voted Democrat over the past few decades, but that's not necessarily like set in Stone in a sense, like I've met other people from other communities, like, hey, I vote Democrat because my parents voted Democrat and my grandparents voted Democrat, and
we have this long legacy of voting Democratic. Republicans use Latinos since we're relatively new and many sense, at least the majority of us as country, we don't have those same attachments to one party or another, which makes us swing. But I do think ultimately the majority will go demograph But I do also see those trends that there are a big number shifting Republican in twenty seconds?
Where do you want to in I don't know five years. Where do you want to be? Twenty seconds?
But quickly?
Well, as you mentioned, so when I do on social media as I make money and then I use it to help others. So I want to run my own nonprofit organization, do a lot of community work, do soccer stuff, hey, do citizenship, do English classes, all that kind of stuff, and continue giving back.
Carlos, thank you so thanks for giving us some time.
This is Bloomberg. You're listening to the Bloomberg Business Week podcast. Catch us live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern. Listen on Apple car Play and then brout auto with a Bloomberg Business app, or wan't just live on YouTube.
I want to say that Mike Marheim, there's a thing or two about gaming. It would be a real understatement. He's co founder and former CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, the company behind games such as Warcraft, Yablo overwatching war Now. He's back at it with dream Haven. It's a video game developer and publisher. He started back in twenty twenty. Mike, Welcome to Bloomberg Business Week. Welcome to screen time.
Thank you for how are you. I'm doing great.
Good, It's really good to see you. Look, you've been doing this for more than three decades at this point, the vast majority spent it play.
I think you took a deep and side there. Yeah, it sounds like it's a long time.
Yeah, you could have just been done. Yeah, you could have retired, spend as much time gaming as you wanted to, But instead you come back with Dreamhaven. What are you trying to do there that's not being done elsewhere?
Well, I mean, we really believe in the power of games to bring people together in positive ways, and so and I think also we're we're trying to create an environment for game makers to be able to do their work and be able to focus on the player experience and the quality of these games without some of the corporate pressures that you may find at other companies.
And so I think.
I think that's really what motivates us, is kind of trying to show that there's a better way of.
Making games and if you.
Put the player experience first and the quality of the games foremost in the process, that that is a path to success. And I hope it.
Still is I love your altrumistic mission here, but when you say some of the corporate pressures to me, it says one of those corporate pressures.
Is probability, right and having a sustainable business. So can you do what you're trying to do and be a sustainable business?
Finance, we need to be a sustainable business, otherwise we won't have a business. So, I mean, that's very real what I'm talking about corporate pressures. I'm talking about the short term pressures that prevent you from making the right long term value creating decisions.
What are the term pressures that you saw in the past.
Well, I think most public companies are under tremendous short term financial pressures to deliver quarterly growth, really, you know, and that doesn't always facilitate the best environment for game creators to make the right decisions for the games that could end up being a bigger value creating decisions in the long run.
Before we talk about your process, then, so does that mean long term you will not seek to go profit public?
Is that not? Part of It's unlikely we would go public because there's.
So much you can do when you're a private company.
I think that definitely there's a lot more freedom and ability to navigate some of the difficulties as a private company. I mean, I think that when we were so I sold when I was at Blizzard, we sold three years in, so very very early, and we were a small part of large public companies for a very long time. And actually that was a very comfortable place to be.
You stayed with it for years for years, yeah, and which very rare for a years.
So when we sold the company, we sold to Davidson and Associates, which was really controlled by Boba Jan Davidson, although they were public, but the agreement was that basically they would give us full creative autonomy and ability to continue running the company just like we were, which I guess a lot of companies when they acquire companies maybe they say that we were very naive. So we didn't know that. It's that was kind of what I signed
up for. And the first year after the acquisition, we came out with Warcraft Orcs and humans and then Warcraft two, you know, and then.
You're still innovating a lot.
We were, and we.
Were doing it very successfully, and I think that gained us a lot of credibility with our parent companies. So when they ended up selling their company to another company, and so we had all these different corporate owners. They'd look at us, and we were consist distantly innovating and doing well, and even when our games slipped, we might miss a year, we might miss a quarter, they ended.
Up doing even better than expectations.
After that, they were like, oh, Okay, these guys know what they're doing, and they led us one to continue doing that. I think the challenge was when we became a very large part of a medium sized public company, then those pressures became a lot more disruptive to our process.
I see, there's a really interesting anecdote about you early maybe childhood, just with an early platform that doesn't exist anymore, your sort of introduction to gaming. And I was thinking about that because here we are in twenty twenty four and I'm trying to understand so many people here at Screen Gammer, trying to understand what is the next platform. You had Mark Zuckerberg make that big investment in the so called metaverse ar VR, Apple's going in with a headset.
We saw new stuff from Oculus recently, what a how are you designing for platforms of the future, Like who's gonna win. What's gonna be the platform where you go.
So the approach that we take is really agnostic to that question. We're very small, so we're developing on platforms that already have a very large installed base. So that's to us, that's mostly PC and console. The game that we just announced today is called sunder Folk. It's a love letter to tabletop gaming, and it's basically trying to make some like the magic of tabletop gaming and make that accessible to like a wider audience.
There are a lot of people who self screaming for people listening.
So we're talking about sitting around playing board games or or things like Dungeons and Dragons or like gloom Haven.
So these are physical games.
Some of them are super deep and super complicated, where you know you might it might take you a couple of hours just to understand the rules before you even start playing. And we think once you get past the rules and you're into playing these games, there's so much togetherness that is created with your friends.
Stuff we did before we had kids. I did kids, I don't know if you were.
Clue was a big thing in my family and my my daughter obsessed and.
Like, is there a clue?
Version because it's just kind of sweet and fun and it's not Monopoly where you have to like give in.
A million cal not talking clear, and I've just been reduced.
So these are a little bit a little bit deeper of gaming experiences in deep, not at all, I'm.
Just kidding at all.
No, but I see, like, wait, like.
It'll be fun to do, right.
I think that.
So what we want to do is make it so that you get to the fun right away, and so that fans of some of these what they're we're calling them like tactical role playing adventure games can have a tool to bring in their friends. And the way we do it is we use your big screen, your shared screen kind of to do all the stuff you would normally do on the table with the board, and then use your phone as your interface to the game.
So that's how you're trying to bring people closer together using gaming.
Yeah, but use existing tools, right, It's all there, so easy.
But what I'm not hearing from you is building for Apple's headset or building for some immersive world. You said PC and console and PC and console are old school.
Yeah, so I mean this is where we're starting. I'm absolutely not opposed to looking at VR ORAR if those are the right platforms for future game ideas.
You must have been hearing about VR for thirty years.
Truly, Yeah, And I mean as a gamer, I love it and I think the stuff that Meta is doing is fantastic. And the way that they're incorporating their investments in AI into their mixed reality, you know, the new glasses that they just announced the Ryan, I think it's I mean, there's definitely something there.
So when they talk about the Metaverse for to be fair, for a while, everybody was very skeptical.
I mean there's still a lot of skeptics.
I'm writing, people crushed the renaming of the company, like is this never going to amount to anything? But you kind of get you can start connecting the dots in terms.
Of the gaming world or more broadly, well.
So the Quest already is really there is It is a great gaming platform and there are some great gaming experiences on Quest, you know, and I think that more investment will go into doing that. I'm not sure you really have the killer app yet that is gonna, you know, make everybody go out and buy one. But the price points are coming down and uh and you know, they're doing interesting things with lip syncing and Ava avatars, three D avatars so that you can communicate with friends far away.
It's very interesting and there are applications to games in you know, in that regard as well.
Are you having help help us understand how much fun you're having at this company versus where you were earlier in your career.
So I guess the biggest difference is maybe the level of stress is taken down a big notch.
That's important.
So you know, we're we're a team of a.
Little bit over one hundred people right now, and we're at the stage right now, we're just getting to start talking about what we've been working on, and we're playing our games, and that's a very exciting time, all right.
So I'm gonna amp up the stress because we only had about a minute left.
You know, I've got to ask you that why is so much gaming out there so graphic and violent? It can't be good for society, research and study, And folks would say it's not.
Why does it have to be that way?
I mean, we don't think it has to be that way, And so our games don't use realistic, rappable violence. And if we do if we do have shooting, it's animated shooting. It's it's fantasy, it's not sort of reality sim related violence, and we're going to try to stay away from that.
Why it's a conscious decision.
It is a conscious dess because I just don't think it's necessary for the fun.
On a lighter note, sorry, it's just something that like, yeah, we'll talk about it a lot with kids.
Ai is a huge theme here. We have thirty seconds left. How are you using jen ai right now?
Yeah, so we're experimenting with jen Ai. It's not something we're really actively using in the games or the game development at this point. Although I think jen Ai is going to have a huge impact on all of our lives, including games and including game development, but we really still have to work out some of the ethical issues, copyright issues, you know, some of the legal issues of who owns what, and I'm sure that that will get worked.
Out over it.
But it's not going to replace us, right I can't see how it replaced us.
I could maybe thank you so much for going all around the universe when.
It comes to gaming.
Thank you very much for having me Mike.
Mike Morheim, co founder and former CEO of Blizzard Entertainment, Warcroft, Diablo, over Watch Anymore.
This is the Bloomberg Business Week podcast, available on Apple, Spotify, and anywhere else you get your podcasts. Listen live weekday afternoons from two to five pm Eastern on Bloomberg dot Com, the iHeartRadio app, tune In, and the Bloomberg Business App. You can also watch us live every weekday on YouTube and always on the Bloomberg Journyale