The 100th Episode 'Strictly Business' Retrospective

some of the most memorable moments on Strictly Business. If you're new to this podcast, we think you'll find it a great way to get to know us, and if you're a returning listener, you hope you'll enjoy this stroll down memory lane. Now here's Cynthia with her first highlight. Hello from Cynthia and thanks for listening to this special

episode of Strictly Business. One of the interviews I chased hard last year was the first sit down with Dana Walden after Disney completed its acquisition of Century Balks in March nineteen. I've known Dana a long time and I definitely leaned on that to persuade her to do her first major interview in front of a crowd at Variety's annual TV Summit in Los Angeles in June nineteen. Dana has long been one of the most powerful executives in television.

She had no shortage of opportunities when the surprise sale of Fox came down. I wanted to know why she chose such an extremely high profile and high pressure job of leading Disney's TV Studios and ABC. You know, when I looked around and thought about companies which are fundamentally the phone company, a cable company, a retail company, um, companies where the tech started the businesses and then the

creativity was acquired. Culturally, I think those companies are always going to be very different from a company that's been about storytelling for almost a hundred years and all started by a mouse. As often said, yeah, absolutely, let me ask you in the in the process of you know, making that decision, and and once you were you know, once once the industry was you know, was surprised to learn that the Murdocks were, uh, you know, considering open

to considering a sale. Did during that period, did did the changes in the industry Did they crystallize in your mind in a different way when you knew that you know, Fox, which was you know, I mean it was such a shock because it was such a robust business rouper. It was a buyer, not a seller. Was that did you? Did you? Was that process a learning process for what you just described, like where you see the company going, I'm sorry, the industry going, yeah, no question. And you know,

I think Rupert disrupted again. I mean, I think the narrative around is he a buyer or a seller? You know, he was a buyer at the time that people weren't acquiring you know, enormous station groups, or eyeing a studio, or launching a competitor to the broadcast networks, or acquiring the NFL on a pretty spectacular scale. That was disruptive at that time. I think what was disruptive, you know, in two thousand eighteen was him making an extraordinary deal

to sell his company. And I do I do feel like our company got the benefit of seeing what the shortcomings are of the various streaming competitors, you know, what we can do that might be better, and again doing it at a scale that's kind of undeniable. This is going or is now arguably the biggest content company in the business, with you know, the second largest streaming platform in the business, with an incredibly robust plan to launch

Disney Plus, which is you know you. I'm sure you're at investor Day and you just saw this incredible collection of beloved brands and content and original programming again situated really to win and having the ability to look at, you know, some of the missteps of our competitors. All of those things came together relatively quickly, but they all made great sense. If I had to pick one executive I find the most fascinating to talk to, it's got

to be former HBO CEO Richard Plepler. He's responsible for some of the greatest series in TV history, but that's not why I regard him as the consummate showman. This guy puts on a show every time he opens his mouth. When I sat down with him in the Streaming Wars had barely begun, so it was a treatback then to hear him survey competitive field just beginning to take shape.

And it's even more interest thing to look back on that conversation because now he's fighting for a different side in the streaming Wars, having launched a new production company with a first look deal at one of HBO's rivals Apple TV plus. I understand your bullishness, but let's take a step back and say the reality is the undeniable. The undeniable reality is is the competitive landscape you're facing

right now is like nothing you've ever seen. Netflix alone spending at probably you know, possibly double what you guys are doing on just original content, not talking about licensing. Amazon right behind them, Apple coming. Your incumbent competitors like Showtime and Stars aren't fading fast anytime soon. So how are you going to be able to compete, especially when you're being outspent by a lot of these new players, not a lot, you know, our brand um is a

magnet for talented people in the creative community. I feel like Ted Surrando says the same thing. Well he he, he does, and he's welcome to say it, and there's some truth to it. And they do very good work. And I've said publicly and I'm I've said it to them directly. Anybody who doesn't tip their hat to what those guys have accomplished in the last seven ten years, it just isn't being fair. They've done a terrific job.

This is not binary. Doesn't mean there isn't going to be a good show on Netflix or a good show on Amazon. None of that has interfered with our growth, And I think the proof is in the pudding. Um. Again, despite the intensity of this competition, we grew more last year than in any year in our history, and we're growing and on track for terrific double digit sub revenue growth this year as well. So wouldn't you say, our game well and curate quality, and we will continue to grow.

It's not a zero sum game. I was exactly That was the exact phrase I was gonna use. Don't you think even if you manage to do well while competitor B does very well, that competitor F, G and H may actually fall out. Aren't we in this consolidating world coming to a place where well, the lower brands are

not going to make it? Listen, I do think that. Um, if you just look at your own lives and you look at you know, you have only a certain amount of leisure time, a certain amount of time you can watch movies, watch television beyond the computer you make, you make, you make judgments, you make picks, and Um, the key for us is to keep the halo on our brand so that when people do have discretionary time, they are comfortable that we are fulfilling our promise to deliver excells

and they come. They might not love everything, but they certainly think that for fifteen dollars a month, three thousand hours of library, the wide range of programming which we make for Hollywood movie studios, people end up saying, you know what, that's a pretty good price value proposition. David Zaslov is one of the most accessible media CEOs and one of the most articulate about where he thinks the

content business is heading. David is competitive, but also thoughtful about the industry and how he sizes up the competitive landscape. He's learned a lot over the years from John Malone, the legendary media investor who has a big personal stake and discovery. When Zaslov used the M word early on in this interview at his New York office in November two thousand eighteen, my ears perked up. We were having quite a run as a traditional media company. When I say,

we were more cable and free to air around the world. Um, I've been here for twelve years, and for the first seven years we had a you know, an extraordinary run both in the market and growth growth around the world and here in the US. UM. But I remember a conversation I had with John Malone five years ago. Our channels were growing double digit around the world in terms

of viewership and uh, and our performance was strong. Our company had grown, stock had grown from about twelve dollars to eighty or eighty five dollars, so we really felt like we were in stride. And John and I talked about the future and uh. He turned to me and he said, Okay, we've grown all of our share. Um, how well would we do if people could watch anything? And I thought for a moment, and I said, uh, We've made a lot of progress in the last seven years.

We went from five percent of viewership in the US to thirteen And I said, I think we'd probably be back to five because a lot of our content, it's great quality content, but it's second choice a lot of it,

and our brands aren't strong enough. And so it was that day five years ago that we began the fight to change ourselves from a tradition media company to add a global I P company, And we started to change the kind of content that we bought produced, and we changed the way we looked at our brands and UH. That journey got us into sports in Europe, where we bought Eurosport two to three sports channels. It was one

of the reasons we bought the Olympics. In each case, the question was not how would this do at eight o'clock at night, but as this content that people would watch if they could watch anything. And in the last year or two it's gotten really a more a tougher question, which is will people pay for this content before they'll pay for dinner. That's why we bought the rights to

the PGA Tour everywhere in the world outside the US. UH, that's why we bought most of the cycling in Europe and most and all the majors in tennis, and that's why we're doubling down and continuing to invest aggressively with Oprah and candidly. That's why we bought Scripts and this has been a great growth here. But we were a misunderstood company because when we bought Scripts, people thought we bought Scripts to get more linear channels and to get synergy.

We saw Scripts as an I P company that hadn't been really UH, that hadn't been taken advantage of globally. So we saw it as food, home, cooking, travel and and uh and do it yourself. They owned all that content and hadn't been used globally. But but not just

as a linear play. But in the new world, when you look at food, when you look at home, aren't people gonna want to consume content around those genres everywhere in the world on all devices and so um, it's been five years and we got a long way to go and a lot to learn, but we are in We made a real I think, uh, we've had some some real acceleration in in changing the way our company is seen and saying and the way our content is

consumed here in the US and around the world. And that's why I think our Stakas has has really improved. We get a lot of executives and creatives on this podcast, but every once in a while we also make time for talent. Tyra Banks, Steve Harvey, and Gabrielle Union are just a few names you'll recognize. But true to the strictly business brand, we didn't talk to these people so they could promote their latest projects or tell us who

they're dating. Let's be honest, there's way too many media outlets covering that what we hear less about is the business side of celebrity, And what we learned in the occasional conversation with performers on this podcast is that many of them are every bit the entrepreneur that they are artists, and at a time when the paychecks aren't what they used to be for Hollywood talent, men of them have carved out lucrative side hustles inside and outside of entertainment.

It was something that began dawning on me in the very first episode of Strictly Business when I sat down with one of Hollywood's most bankable actors, Kevin Hart, who spoke pretty bluntly about his aspirations to not just act, but build out an empire. So it sounds like you're kind of in the middle of this journey in terms of the empire that you're building. I mean, where does it go next or there? Or what mountains are you looking to conquer? Areas of content you haven't even gone

to yet. Man, Well, I mean, look, I'm I'm The goal of being a mogul was a real one, you know. I want to be a mogul. I want to be a billionaire. I want to get to a point where you look back and you go, damn, this is a little dirty kid from Philadelphia that had no idea, uh you know, where his life was going to go. And once I got an anklet of what I could do, I made a decision to give it a hundred percent.

I got forty people on staff right now. You know when I look up and I'm responsible for people's lives and livelihoods, and that's a That's a big thing to me, the fact that I know that I'm in position to do that, and that these people believe in this vision. These people are giving me a hundred percent because they say we're gonna follow you, keV into the will's fall off, because the passion behind your drive and dream is real.

To me, that's the biggest thing in the world. So you know, when I when I have these meetings with my team, with my staff, I'm not just selling you on today's work. I'm selling you on the future of what we can be. Heartbeat Productions will be a big partner. Heartbeat Productions will do big studio work. Heartbeat Productions will be tomorrow's future company when it comes to development and and producing for for any type of film, from comedy to to you know your dramas. I want to do

it all. I can't sit back and watch other people be said cessful and give me a blueprint and not do it. I just can't. I have too many relationships where they let me know how they got there, from Oprah to Thailer, to jay Z to Ellen. I have too many people in front of me that are doing too many amazing things that say this is how I did it. For me not to do it. The media and entertainment marketplace has transformed into the land of the giants over the past twenty years, but every business has

to start small at some point. I'm always interested to hear from entrepreneurs and independent operators about how they're able to compete against giant conglomerates in a world whereas we know, size matters. Romancanna, CEO of Shaun Combs's Revolt Media company, was blunt about the uphill climb of running an independent,

single cable channel. Revolt TV was born as part of a wave of upstart Cape channels in two thousand thirteen, when Comcast had to give carriage deals to independent and minority owned channels on its cable systems as a condition of allowing Comcast to buy NBCUniversal. That sounds like a good way to nurture new and diverse owners in the

TV marketplace, but in reality, it's not that simple. As kind of explained in August two thousand nineteen, it all started with the right thinking, and you know, we're grateful for that. We wouldn't exist but for that. So so

absolutely is the answer. But you know, I think the challenges is that the idea of trying to embrace diversity and creating an equal opportunity playing field for voices to proliferate really runs into a problem when it's the first step of a hundred step race that is unlocked, but

the next steps still needs support. So we don't have full distribution on on most systems comp class Comcast included UM and we'd love to have that, but that you know, these companies are struggling with their own um you know, metrics as they measure their basic packages and their extended basic packages. And for us to then compete on an on an equal playing field with companies that have got better distribution, have been around longer, have have better leverage

in terms of the portfolios that they're part of. You know, that becomes a tough story. It's that, you know, if if we want to support diversity of voices in any way and in any platform, it can't always just be step one and then to be measured by the same measuring sticks of companies that have been around for longer, in better times and have made it past step one

into step seventy three. Um, Yet we will get the well, you know, your traffic compared to you know MTVS traffic, It's not it's not a fair comparison at this moment in time, and if you measure us by that stick, we will always fail for the next number of years. So if we really want diversity, what are the measuring tools we're using to allow these voices to grow and then truly compete um in a very difficult world of competition. I mean, it's it's tough out there, and we understand that.

We just we want a shot at it. Before we continue with this retrospective, I want to tell you about an upcoming variety event. Would you and your team like to be the first to learn emerging trends shaping the entertainment industry's largest marketing campaigns On March, Varieties Entertainment Marketing Summit is bringing together top cmos and digital leaders from brands like Disney, Hbo, Instagram and more to discuss how

their revolutionary ideas have changed the landscape of Hollywood. With panels that explore the future of omni channel marketing and modern formulas to connect with audiences, you will have a one of a kind opportunity to listen in on thought provoking discussions that are immediately affecting your industry. Visit Variety dot com Slash Marketing Summit to register you and your team today and see you on March. Now, let's get

back to the podcast. Strictly, business tries to stay on top of the latest developments in the industry, but sometimes the industry can move faster than we do. That's what happened in June when just twenty four hours before I was going to release an episode featuring an interview with Condon Nast Entertainment CEO Don Ostrov, she announced she had left Conde Nast for a big new job at Spotify.

We published the interview anyway, of course, and in truth the challenges she spoke of adapting to digital media after a long career in TV proved just as relevant to her now that she's in yet another very different world creating audio programming. Your career, you spend most of the time shepherding these traditional long form things, and now you're saying, you're programming to a platform where the old rules just don't apply. So how are you learn in the new rules?

It has been an m b A for me, I mean it, and it's so humbling because honestly, I came into this opportunity thinking I can do this because if you have success on traditional and you you know, gossip Girl at one point was the biggest show in the country, right, every young person talked about it, you know, read everything

that they could get their hands on about about our cast. Um. But it really was eye opening to understand that the way in which we make the content for the digital space has nothing to do with the way we would

create television ideas. Um. You know, it's it. There's there's a understanding of what the viewer expectation is when they're watching content on any one of those platforms, and you have to really adhere to be either a format that is the expectation, or a storytelling style or a way in which you shoot something that really does help determ and if something is going to be a success or not and qualities quality, So it has to be good

and has to be worthy of people's time. But it really is very very specific about how the storyteller and how the the director really does bring that story to life on those platforms. Christina Wayne is a well regarded TV producer who made her name in the creative community when she was the top development executive at a MC. When you green light the pilots for Madmen and Breaking Bad, you get a reputation as having an eye for quality.

I was pleasantly surprised in this interview from October when Christina opened up about how hard it is to sell shows despite the enormous increase in the overall demand for content. It takes an industry insider to get beyond the surface hype around peak TV. In our conversation, Christina touched on the real problems of working in a frenzied market with unsustainable levels of money and capital chasing talent and producers.

So all of a sudden, a bunch of new buyers came to the market and we would take stuff out and over the first two years of having my company, we sold pretty much everything we took to the market. There were about i'd say thirteen fourteen shows that we took out and they all went into development. Not all of them got made, but um, one or two of them got made, which is kind of the ratio. You have one out of ten usually is your ratio of what you're hoping for the last two years of being

a producer. Now, with all the platforms, there is such a huge demand for content that one would assume that being a producer would make my life much easier. It's actually made it more difficult. What has happened is that TV is such an incredible medium now. It is so high level the programming that's being made. You have every A list showrunner, actor, director coming with their passion project.

So I often find myself waiting to take out a show to the buyers and you have Germo del Toro sitting in the waiting room, you have George Clooney, you have every single top level person who's you know, Garmo had just won an Academy Award, and you're sitting there going, oh, yeah, my little great show, Um, what do we have. So it definitely has become more difficult. And I have noticed that unless you package your show to the nth degree,

it does not sell. You're talking about soup Ton's with writers, showrunner, star director, the whole. You don't necessarily need a line producer because they can always hire that, because that's not going to be You need somebody competent, but they're not going to look at that as the sort of bells and whistles of must make TV. And so right now the game is straight to series orders with a list talent.

And you know, you see that with Reese Witherspoon's company, you see that with all of these packages now that are going out. Um, and so I have now moved from being focused solely on develop Lipman to also being a packager, which really was never that was always an agent's job, and so it has really sort of taken over what I do, and UM, I do it, and thankfully I've been in the business long enough that it's not impossible, but it certainly is not what I came

to the business to do. So it's quite different than when I started. The fun thing about looking back at the past one episodes is that sometimes there are exchanges you have with an interview subject that seemed unremarkable in the moment but turned out to be pretty damn significant in retrospect. I didn't think much of the time about the answers given to the very last questions I asked Erica Nardini, CEO of one of the hottest sensations in

media right now, bar Stool Sports. When I interviewed her last October, considering barstool recently sold a minority stake of its company to a gambling operation, she was given me pretty latent clues about where her company's future lay, And at the time, those clues went right over my head. Is it possible that to get that big you need to be acquired by the Disney's or Viacoms of the world. Is that the endgame? I don't know, what you know, Dave and I always laugh about this, which is people say,

you know, what's your five year plan? What's the seven year plan? And we always say, we don't know. Um. And that's not to say we're not strategic, nor to say that we're not thoughtful about where we want to go or what we want to do. But what I think we are at our core is really passionate and opportunistic so you know, yes, would we like guns money and steal from a big media company to be in

and around our business. Definitely. The things we could do to drive linear the things we can do to grow personalities, the things we can do to create brands, I think is unparalleled. Um that said, you know, we're profitable company now, We're growing incredibly quickly. We are at the top of our game in the fields that we are in. I also see a path where we grow independently pretty successfully. So you know, I think it's a long way of saying we don't know what the future holds. We're incredibly

open to what that future looks like. Well that's the last question. Where else are you guys going to go that we need to pay attention to going into You need to pay attention to sports betting. So I think that we will be a force in sports betting, in the type of content we create, in the way we create it, in the level of passion and originality, and in what we do. So sports betting is a place you should definitely look out for us. Globalization is a

big buzzword in entertainment these days. Every CEO will tell you that future growth is largely coming from outside the US. But what does that mean on a granular level for content focused executives in the US entertainment industry. I had heard about an initial David End Them All Shine North America to incorporate Spanish language program development from Mexico and other non US markets into the same core team in

Hollywood that handles the company's English language offerings. I made a point of getting End Them All Shine North America's CEO, Chris Abrego down for the podcast so we could talk about his approach in detail. One thing we really did was to work much like we did with even our subsidiaries here in the US, we really kind of had to flow through um in terms of how we operated.

So with truly original or fifty one minds are authentic, you know, we brought them the formats that we had from us that if we weren't going to work on them, it didn't make sense for North America. We would then funnel them to these guys, especially if it made sense

in their specific relationships and buyers. We thought, if that strategy is working so well, and truly Originals have so much success, and trifly one minds having much success, why wouldn't we apply that just because it's another country doesn't mean with the treated different. And and it seems simple enough, but everyone you talk to they want to treat this minute you say in Mexico. They think different department, different group,

different part of the company. And it was hard to fight that and even internally, but we we worked hard to integrate it and make it just part of our business, so much that when we closed the deal with boom Dog, two things happened. We took the entire senior staff here to Mexico City for a week and integrated the companies. And so they met there. They're kind of their parents, and there are other people who shared similar responsibilities, and

we shared advance practices. And to the here at Animal Shine UH in North Hollywood, they start taking Spanish classes, so everyone so you can check. Now there's a lot of Spanish speakers in this company. Now, you know, think

about our in our business affairs. So we've brought in, you know, people who obviously are bilingual, and for both contracts and working with legal people in Mexico, we don't We obviously recognize that it's two different countries and there's certain laws and certain practices that we have to adhere to UH, in which we want to be aware of.

But when you get below that in terms of creative process, in terms of pitching characters, casting, finding the best producer that you know, because for us, the one thing that I think that we do really well in em Shine is we stay focused on We know that the most important things who's making the show. It's one thing that who's selling it, it's one thing who created it, but it really we focus on who's making it. Undoubtedly that comes from your background as a producer in the trenches

with you know, sleeves rolled up making the show. Yeah, it really it's like who's going to be on set and delivering this story and these characters and driving this narrative or this competition whatever the show might be about. And that's what we're focused on. And that's actually becoming our biggest challenge in these in these other territories, including Brazil, is UH finding more of those people who can do

that premium content. It's been a real honor to have some of the biggest names in the business on our podcast, but honestly, that's not what interests me most when I'm picking people to interview. Don't get me wrong. CEOs are nice to talk to, but we've also had c t o s to talk about technology, CFOs to talk finance. We've had several interviews with heads of marketing at companies

like Marvel, Viacom, and HBO. Maybe these role players aren't the most glamorous types to read about in the headlines, but Strictly Business is just as much about the role players, because it's through them we can drill down into all the many different pieces that make up the media machine. I'm also proud of the way Strictly Business often looks past the usual suspects in TV, film and tech to find interview subjects from industries you may not be exposed

to as much like radio, publishing, video games. I can honestly say doing this podcast is brought in my horizons, and I hope it's done the same for our listeners. For example, the last interview I want to highlight in this episode may have been the most obscure one I did in the entire run of Strictly busines this st X Entertainments Virtual Reality division, which was actually shut down not long after the interview aired. Listen to this and you won't be surprised why the VR division might be

in the basement or something. It's it's sort of like if it's even there, it's you know, it's an experimental part of the company where it's it's really about the marketing assets that they could create versus the original content opportunity. And also how can we actually build a business around this new medium and utilize all the best, you know, facets of of what we have to offer as a studio.

And so for us, that was a really strong proposition. Well, on the other hand, I can understand why other studios may treat this is am more let's call it marginal pursuit as I see it, and we could talk about it if you disagree. The market for VR entertainment is not quite there, even by the most i'd say charitable assessment. So any company like STX that put serious investment in this, there's risk that there's just not a market there for that content. Is that assessment off base? I think it's

a it's a fair assessment. But you know, the level of investment that we're making is actually very responsible. I think what we're not doing is going out on day one and just spending a ton of money and hoping we're going to get our money back. We spent a lot of time early on UM developing thoughtful strategies and a business plan around this. We knew that we in in in pursuing original content, original VR movies. It wasn't

going to be free content. We knew we had to monetize the content right, and so we had to really look at how how big is this market? How big is this market going to be? In twelve months twenty four months, Thanks for joining us to revisit some of the great interviews we've enjoyed doing on the Strictly Business podcast for the past two years. After all this time, I must admit I feel like I'm just getting started. But as for this episode, we're coming to a close.

I want to thank Cynthia for being a great podcast partner and thanks to you, our loyal listeners. We love to hear from you and hope you'll be sticking around for the next one episodes. H