yea some more bullshit about how they will give U the FANS ... the INSIDE poop er scoop hehe http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/11/business/oliver-luckett-of-theaudience-building-online-fan-bases.html?pagewanted=2&smid=pl-share&pagewanted=
all
A-Listers, Meet Your Online Megaphone
Monica Almeida/The New York Times
Oliver Luckett, center, with
Jeff Pressman, left, and Kate McLean of theAudience. For its celebrity
clients, the company aims to build armies of fans across the likes of
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus.
By BROOKS BARNES
Published: November
EVEN in an industry accustomed to madcap characters, Oliver Luckett cuts a “Who was that?” swath across Hollywood.
Christopher Polk/Getty Images
The comedian Russell Brand says theAudience’s
services have helped him sell out shows “without any paid advertising.”
Joel Ryan/Associated Press; Tracey Nearmy/European Pressphoto Agency
Charlize Theron and Mark Wahlberg are said to be clients of theAudience.
Earlier in his career, Mr. Luckett helped Disney
manage its cartoon characters’ online presence. The Facebook page for
Dory the fish of “Finding Nemo 3D.”
Raised in Mississippi and with the accent to prove it, Mr. Luckett, 38,
is known for zooming around town in an Aston Martin — that is, when he’s
not jetting off to places like Iceland, where he was last December to
compete against Bjork in a gingerbread house-building contest. He lost,
despite help from a buddy in Disneyland’s research and design lab.
With his new company — a social media start-up called theAudience — Mr.
Luckett promises nothing short of rewiring celebrity economics, and he
abruptly dismisses skeptics. “Get on my train,” he likes to say, his
blue eyes blazing. “We’re leaving now.” Yet he can also be a big softy
known for his striped-sock collection. During a business meeting not so
long ago, he veered into an emotional story about coming out of the
closet and started to weep.
Just another showy show-business personality? Some people think so. But
many of the entertainment factory’s most powerful forces — William
Morris Endeavor, Lionsgate, Universal Pictures — and one tech superstar,
Sean Parker, are taking him very, very seriously.
About two years ago, Mr. Luckett left a senior position at Walt Disney,
where he managed the social media presence of Cinderella and her cartoon
friends, to do the same for actors and musicians. For each client,
theAudience works to build a network of fans across the likes of
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus and to keep those followers
engaged by posting a steady stream of catchy pictures, comments and
videos.
THEAUDIENCE, part of a stampede of start-ups aiming to exploit the
intersection of celebrity and social media, also sells its services
directly to movie marketers, record labels and concert promoters. It did
stealth work on behalf of the hit movie “Ted,” for instance, and the Coachella music festival.
Mr. Luckett refuses to identify his clients, but he says theAudience
publishes thousands of items a month on behalf of about 300 accounts,
reaching a total of 800 million fans.
Movie and music executives say theAudience’s clients include Mark
Wahlberg, Charlize Theron, Jack Black, Eddie Murphy, Hugh Jackman,
Usher, Pitbull and LMFAO.
Celebrities seizing opportunities to promote themselves? As Captain
Renault would say, “I’m shocked, shocked.” But theAudience illustrates
something important about where Hollywood is headed. After largely
ignoring social media — allowing fake Facebook pages to proliferate,
sticking with tried-and-true publicity stops like “Entertainment
Tonight” — stars and agents are realizing en masse that they need to get
on that train.
There is intense downward pressure on artist salaries in all corners of
entertainment. Movie attendance over the summer hit a 20-year low. The
Web has decimated the music industry. DVRs are roiling television. William Morris Endeavor,
a founding investor in theAudience, sees the assertive cultivation of
social media networks as one way to shift power back to stars.
To agents, the metrics of theAudience offer crucial leverage: If you
cast Ms. Theron in a movie, she comes with an ability to fill seats
through her social network, and we can prove it with data. Oh, and she
needs to be paid more because of that. The same leverage holds true for
sealing endorsement deals, which is where celebrities, and their agency
backers, increasingly make their real money.
“That is absolutely part of the conversation now,” says Ari Emanuel, the co-chief executive of William Morris Endeavor. “We all use all the tools we have.”
If you were wondering how Rihanna was cast in “Battleship,” it was lost on no one at Universal that she came with 26 million Twitter followers.
Ultimately, Mr. Emanuel and others look at social media networks as a
new type of cable channel, and theAudience is helping celebrities to
program theirs. Consider it as the Web equivalent of OWN, Oprah
Winfrey’s channel; she maintains control of what goes on it, but she
hires people to make it happen.
“The real value of these networks is in programming,” says Mr. Parker,
the Napster founder who also played a big role in Facebook’s world
domination. “If you can aggregate effectively, you can start to imagine
social media a little bit more like traditional media.”
Mr. Luckett has a long history with start-ups, including Revver, a video
sharing site that was precursor to YouTube. He says theAudience
recently obtained $20 million in an additional round of financing from Guggenheim Partners; Intertainment Media; Participant Media; the Founders Fund,
which is Mr. Parker’s investment company; and the Capricorn Investment
Group, the investment arm of Jeffrey Skoll, the first president of eBay.
“A lot of celebrities are overwhelmed with the demands of social media,
and theAudience, which has some extremely smart executives, is one of
the companies filling the void,” said Danielle De Palma, senior vice
president for digital marketing at Lionsgate, which hired Mr. Luckett to
work on “The Hunger Games.”
THEAUDIENCE is far from the only start-up trying to convince studios and
stars that they need its social media help. Some are founded by
entertainment veterans, but others are backed by tech types trying to
exploit a lack of understanding among senior studio executives about how
Facebook and Twitter work, according to Ms. DePalma. She says she gets
up to 10 pitches a day from companies trying to peddle social media
wares.
Moviepilot, a young company based
in Berlin, recently came to Hollywood, promising to use social media to
connect fans to the moviemaking process as a way to get them excited
about future releases. Fizziology monitors Facebook and Twitter on behalf of entertainment marketers to “spot trends, threats and opportunities.” Crowd Factory sells social media management, as does Digital Media Management. Thismoment focuses on managing “brand experiences” across social media platforms.
Zefr puts tens of thousands of film
clips onto YouTube, with a goal of encouraging consumers to download or
rent the whole movie. Zefr, which recently expanded into the TV, music
and sports realms after securing $18.5 million in additional financing,
also helps content owners identify and monetize clips posted on YouTube
without permission.
Mr. Luckett’s most direct competition is probably WhoSay, largely because it is backed partly by Creative Artists Agency,
the chief rival of William Morris Endeavor. WhoSay also allows clients —
like Tom Hanks, Shakira, Sofia Vergara and Ellen DeGeneres — to manage
their presence in the digital world.
TheAudience makes money by charging studios a fee for sponsored posts;
Universal paid it to publish “Ted” materials via Mr. Wahlberg’s network.
TheAudience also collects a portion of transactional revenue. When
celebrity clients use their networks to sell something — download this
app, buy this T-shirt — Mr. Luckett gets a cut. Celebrities are charged a
per-month fee for theAudience’s services, starting at about $5,000.
Aside from competition, theAudience faces many challenges. Some
traditional gatekeepers, like publicists, aren’t thrilled to cede
control. Some of William Morris Endeavor’s agency rivals are ardently
opposed to letting clients work with theAudience, worrying about giving
Mr. Emanuel a poaching opportunity.
And there is the question of authenticity. Mr. Luckett’s enterprise is
built on that precarious ledge: fans need to think they are getting
material directly from a celebrity — that’s the magic of social media —
and not a surrogate.
Mr. Luckett acknowledges all of those pesky matters, but says that none were particularly problematic.
He says theAudience isn’t looking for many more celebrity clients than
it already has. As for authenticity, he points to its system of
approvals; no item is published for a client without his or her
blessing. That can be cumbersome but is necessary, he says. Of several
A-list clients who were asked, none wanted to discuss their work with
the company.
Studios, meanwhile, trying to hold down costs, complain about being
strong-armed into hiring theAudience. “If we cast someone in a movie and
they are an Audience client, we now have to pay an extra fee to access
their fans?” says one studio marketer, speaking on the condition of
anonymity for fear of angering Mr. Emanuel. “That should be free and
many stars are happy to oblige,” the marketer says.
A lawyer at another studio says contracts are starting to be written so
that actors are required to make their “best effort” to use social media
to promote their work.
When told that some studios feel that they are being forced to hire
theAudience, Mr. Luckett responds, “And they benefit greatly by doing
so.”
He continues: “In no way are we trying to create a blockade. We’re
trying to prevent bad marketing from happening — making sure that our
artists don’t get hurt by studios force-feeding fans with marketing
messages.”
SOME of Mr. Luckett’s previous start-ups have soared only to sputter,
the biggest being Revver. (Its claim to fame was one of the first viral
videos, “Diet Coke + Mentos.”) Mr. Luckett left Revver after clashing
with investors over strategy.
More successful was Digisynd, a social media company of which he was a
co-founder. It was acquired by Disney in 2008 as a way to manage cartoon
characters online. Disney was shocked to learn that the No. 1 “liked”
character was not Buzz Lightyear or Mickey Mouse but Dory the fish from “Finding Nemo.”
“The rules had reversed: the audience was telling us what it wanted,”
Mr. Luckett says. (Disney is now deep in work on a “Finding Nemo”
sequel.) Today, Disney has a total of about 400 million Facebook
“likes,” up from about 400,000 in 2009.
It was Mr. Emanuel, whose assertiveness was parodied on “Entourage” on
HBO, who got theAudience ball rolling at the advice of Mr. Parker. “Sean
told us that all we should care about is social and for two years we
tried to find the right person but couldn’t,” Mr. Emanuel says. “So I
call up and scream at Sean, and he finally connects us to Oliver.”
At first, Mr. Luckett ignored Mr. Emanuel’s calls. “I was like, I’ve
seen ‘Entourage.’ I don’t need an agent in my life,” Mr. Luckett says.
The two finally got together, and Mr. Luckett was intrigued to discover
the degree to which celebrities were ceding control of their images on
Facebook. A search turned up thousands of fake pages created by Facebook
users for William Morris Endeavor clients alone, he says. (His opinion
of Mr. Emanuel now? “I adore Ari. He picks me up when I’m down.”)
The concept behind theAudience was relatively simple, but the execution,
at least the way Mr. Luckett and his partners wanted it done, was
complex. TheAudience built software that allows employees — now more
than 100 in London and Los Angeles — to track how posts are landing. How
many followers are paying attention to posts, and how does theAudience
use its software to learn what works and drive interest even higher?
Using the software, employees decide the optimum moment to post a
Twitter message or Facebook picture. TheAudience also pays attention to
things like decay, or how it takes for posts to lose their buoyancy.
“Amplification on these networks — slicing, dicing, cross-pollinating — takes a certain finesse,” Mr. Parker says.
Mr. Luckett contends that a celebrity’s number of fans is actually
meaningless. “If you blast your 10 million fans with boring marketing
messages, they turn on you very quickly,” he says. “The secret is giving
them great content, and that’s what we do.”
The goal, explains Jeff Pressman, the chief operating officer of
theAudience, is “to develop long-term emotional relationships.” He adds,
“So when it does come time to ask something of these highly engaged
fans — buy a ticket, click on a link — you have earned their trust and
attention and they are willing to do it.”
Managing “content programming and production” for theAudience is its
president, Kate McLean, formerly a top lieutenant to Robert A. Iger,
Disney’s chief executive. Ms. McLean may have an M.B.A. from Harvard,
but she also has a fascination with celebrity. Mr. Iger used to become
annoyed at her for reading US Weekly on the Disney corporate jet, she
says.
“We’re dealing with pop culture, and it should be fun,” she says. Mr.
Luckett, she adds, “has a tremendous love for art and artists — as we
all do here — and that really inspires and invigorates the whole team.”
The British comedian Russell Brand says theAudience has helped him sell
out shows “without any paid advertising”; the company also advises him
on where to route tours, based on the geography of his fan base. “It’s a
smart way to talk to my fans directly and in a bespoke manner,” Mr.
Brand says.
Is he concerned about handing over his social media presence to
outsiders? “Not at all,” he says, joking that he couldn’t do it himself
if he tried: “You have to remember that I have no actual skills.”
The electronic dance musician Steve Aoki
echoes Mr. Brand. “I need help making sure what I put out on Facebook
or Twitter isn’t all jumbled up, that it has meaning and value and is
viewed to the maximum,” he says. Mr. Aoki said he had 408,000 Facebook
“likes,” or fans, before he hired theAudience; he now has 1.2 million.
Mr. Aoki says he plans two weeks’ worth of posts with Ms. McLean and her
team in a sitting. “They also come to me with ideas, and I will adjust
the idea so it makes sense to me,” he says. “I control everything.”
MR. LUCKETT is having a ball in Hollywood partly because it’s a long way
from where he came from. Growing up gay in Mississippi wasn’t easy, and
one way he coped was via computers. As a teenager, he taught himself
how to write code and to plumb the depths of the Internet, recalling
that one month he ran up a $700 phone bill in dial-up Internet service.
“It gave me a way out of the cotton field,” he says.
Still, let’s not go too far. His family was wealthy and employed one of
Tina Turner’s cousins as its housekeeper. His father, Bill Luckett, who
made an unsuccessful bid for governor last year, is a lawyer who is a
co-owner of a restaurant and blues club in Clarksdale, Miss., with the
actor Morgan Freeman.
Oliver Luckett graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville in 1996
with a degree in French literature, and went to work at Qwest
Communications, where he helped build its fiber optic network as chief
I.P. services architect. Afterward, he took a two-and-a-half year
hiatus, living on Majorca part of that time and consulting for the
Declare Yourself voting campaign started by Norman Lear.
Despite his whirling dervishness, Mr. Luckett says he is tied to
theAudience for the long haul. “This is not another flip-and-burn
company,” he says. “TheAudience can have a lasting impact and change the
entertainment industry fundamentally.”
He paused for dramatic effect before adding one of his sig-nature lines: “Period. End of story.”
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