Jeremy Zimmer: "I grew up loving stories."

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I was out of college. I was working in a parking lot. I was living in the Howard Johnson's in Kenmore Square. And most of the things I owned were in my car. And I got stabbed and I went to the hospital and I needed to recover. Here I am, I'm 19 years old. I flunked out of college. I've been stabbed. I have no vision, notion, or anything of a future. You know, this is not the script for a nice Jewish boy from a good family. My grandfather called me and he said, well, you've really done a fine job of screwing up your life. I'd like to help you. Are you ready to get serious?

I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome to Math and Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing, where we explore stories about the analytics and the creative and how they come together to create marketing and business legends. Today we're chatting with a man who's been at the center of the major entertainment industry transformations of the last 35 years. He grew up actually at the intersections of math and magic. Stockbroker father, writer mother, and a grandfather who sat astride the business and creative as a famous writer, producer, and president of MGM. And his grandmother was even a visual artist.

Whew.

He's one of the co-founders and now CEO of United Talent Agency, UTA, one of the bedrock Hollywood agencies. Welcome, Jeremy Zimmer.

Thanks so much.

Lots to talk about, but first, let's break the ice with You in 60 Seconds. Do you prefer New York City or Los Angeles?

Los Angeles.

Instagram or Twitter?

Neither.

Early riser or night owl?

Very early riser.

The Beatles or the Stones?

The Stones.

Jay-Z or Beyoncé?

Jay-Z.

Coachella or Lollapalooza?

Coachella.

Golf or tennis?

Golf.

It's about to get harder. Smartest person you know?

Irving Azoff.

Childhood hero?

Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

First job?

Working at a gas station.

First job you liked?

Working in a gas station.

Hardest working artist?

Kevin Hart.

Last vacation?

4th of July in Israel.

Secret talent?

I don't keep any of my talents a secret.

First piece of art you bought?

Photograph by Sally Mann.

First concert?

Jethro Tull, Aqualung.

Ooh, great, great tour. Proudest career achievement?

UTA.

Proudest personal achievement?

Raising 4 daughters thus far successfully.

Who would play you in a movie?

Either James Gandolfini or Brad Pitt. Depends on the day and the way I feel about myself.

Movie you think should be required viewing?

Dead Poets Society.

If you could have a superpower, what would it be?

Time travel.

Okay, let's go back in time. Speaking of time travel, think of the first time we met. I was running MTV, you were at William Morris in New York. This is the early 1980s, a time when most agents thought there were only 3 networks: ABC, NBC, CBS. Yet here you are delving into new cable networks. I think you were the only agent that ever paid any attention to MTV and came by. What led you to be there so far ahead of others in your business?

At that time, first of all, I was a movie agent in New York City, which was, you know, like being a down parka agent in the Sahara. No one cared what I was doing. So anybody who had, you know, a checkbook with $500 in it, I was gonna go visit and see what business we could possibly do. And I've always been curious, and I thought what you guys were doing at MTV seemed so smart and so ahead of its time and so interesting that I was excited to hear more about it.

What did you think of the future of the networks at that time? I mean, was this about the future of networks or was it just plain curiosity?

I think it was plain curiosity, but, you know, I'd love to tell you, oh, I was thinking and examining the future of networks and wondering about— but I wasn't. I was really thinking like, you know, I was making $125 a week. How can I make $150 a week and how can I get into Studio 54 and how can I pay for a drink on my salary? Those were basically the things I was really Consumed with at the time.

So let me give you a contrast. Now over 30 years later, you showed up at podcast early. Is this luck or is this a unique skill you have?

I think the skill I've had is create an environment where I have these great young people and I kind of say, hey, you want to build something? You want to start something? Go figure out a new area and see what's happening. And if there's enough happening there, we'll put some resources behind it. So we had this great guy, Oren Rosenbaum, who started talking about podcasting and I thought, oh, come on. Who's gonna sit there and listen? No, no, no, it's really big. I said, okay, go figure it out. And so I'd love to take credit for figuring out that podcasts was a big business. I didn't, but I took credit for thinking Oren Rosenbaum's a really smart guy and I'm gonna give him a little bit of runway to figure it out.

How early did Oren start talking about it?

5 years ago, 6 years ago.

So he was very early.

Very early. And he had a lot of support from my co-founder Peter Benedict, who, you know, every day would walk in and say, I just listened to this great podcast. And all I was thinking was, How do you have enough time to do that? But he really fell in love with podcasting and was very supportive of Oren during this process.

When you were looking at it early, what did you think the opportunity might be?

Well, I just thought, okay, here's a new form of storytelling. And, you know, if at a certain point, if you don't want to listen to music, you want to have something a little more immersive, you're going for a long walk, you're going for a long drive, you don't want to just listen to music, you want to have immersive storytelling. Audiobooks were certainly a big thing, but the immediacy of a podcast, the ability to delve into a new story in a new way, seemed like it could be something really compelling.

So here are podcasts that surpassed, I guess, a year or so ago, satellite radio in terms of reach. Now they're as big as the big streaming music services. Where do you think all that's going?

You know, I wish I knew where it's all going. I just think we have a universe of people who just want to consume ideas endlessly, consume content endlessly. I don't think it's all going one place. I think it's going in multiple areas. It seems to be an infinite capacity for storytelling.

And this storytelling is your ears, not your eyes.

Right.

And you guys have done a great job of taking them and saying, okay, we'll put them for the eyes too.

Yeah.

How do you think about that opportunity?

Many of our artists, writers, directors, actors are looking for compelling IP, and I think we're constantly looking for new places to mine great IP. And if you have IP that also has a built-in audience where people have already heard it and gone, wow, that's a great story. If you can then translate that into the video medium and do it successfully, you'll have a built-in audience.

So this is a podcast about marketing and ideas. What advice do you have for other leaders about seeing the future?

Hire good, strong people and then listen to them about what they are excited about. We haven't allowed an aggressive group of young men and women to go out and find great stories for us.

So, let's explore where your insight comes from. You have all the evidence of both nurture and nature. You have the genetics and you clearly had the environment. Can you spend a little time talking about your childhood and the family and what you took from all that?

My mom is a writer. She's written 8 or 9 novels, a published author. She's written, you know, hundreds of magazine articles and she lives in the world of story and the power of story. And my grandfather was an author, a writer, a producer, and a studio head, and that was very rare at the time. It's still rare to this day. Storytelling and the love of storytelling, the love of reading, was always really important in our house. I still love fiction, and I read a lot of fiction. I think reading fiction is critical both in my business and in my life. I'm a big believer that you read fiction because it helps you develop the skill of empathy, or the feeling of empathy, But I didn't grow up in Hollywood at all. Dennis Hopper was a family friend. I knew him, but really, my mom was a very erratic human being as a mom. My parents were divorced early, and my grandfather, the year I was born, moved to New York, so he wasn't as available to me. You know, I really grew up with this weird combination of loving stories and ideas and hating school and any sort of organized program. So I learned a lot just living by my wits as well. This environment of being able to be thoughtful and somewhat freewheeling and innovative against the backdrop of loving storytelling and art makes a lot of sense for me.

So let me take you on a little tangent here. If the stories are true, you worked at the gas station at 14?

Started working at a gas station in Malibu at 14 on Pacific Coast Highway in Coral Canyon. It's still there. I loved working at the gas station because I love the interaction of people and the ability to sort of manage the busyness and the people in and out and take care of things and learn things on the job. And how do you change a tire, patch a tire, change the oil? All these things were things I actually learned how to do. It was pretty interesting. I was halfway through my senior year in Santa Monica and moved to Westport, Connecticut, where I ended up being halfway through my junior year. I got a job working in a gas station there, and I ended up managing that and closing the gas station. You know, I would go to school and then go to the gas station, close the gas station.

This had to be a tough time to move. Senior year, going back to junior year.

I mean, I was a straight F student in my senior year at Santa Monica High School. So it's not like, oh my God, you're ripping me away from My valedictorian candidacy. I mean, it was like, you gotta get out of here, you're a disaster. And they were right. You know, I have the great luxury of having these 4 daughters who, you know, I mean, the most rebellious thing they've ever done was my oldest daughter went and got a tattoo on the back of her neck underneath her hair, which we didn't even discover for like 2 years. So I'm lucky. But if I'd had a kid like me, I don't know what I would have done.

Lots of folks who've been on Math and Magic are college dropouts. So are you, and I have to disclose, so am I. Why'd you drop out of college?

I ended up graduating high school miraculously, and I had very high test scores, and I got into Boston University. I only chose Boston University because my girlfriend at the time was going to Tufts, so I sort of looked at schools proximate to Tufts that I could get into, and BU was one of them. I really didn't like school. I'm sure today I would be diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or something like that, Although I loved reading and I could do that, the basic day-to-day of showing up, remembering what I was told, doing the tests, I just didn't like it. And I was never good at it. It was always hard for me.

How many years did you do?

I dropped out of BU, or BU and I mutually terminated our relationship after about a year and a half, 3 semesters.

All these years later, do you see an early indication of your talents, ambitions, dropping out of college, or do you think it was just more of a personal—

I'd love to draw some line where I was just too entrepreneurial and too doggone smart for college. I don't know that it was that. I was struggling with complicated— you know, I lived back and forth with my mom and my dad. I'd had a deep relationship with drugs and alcohol. You know, I was trying to find myself in all the wrong places.

So is there any lesson you take from that that you've passed on to your kids and saying, let me tell you, I learned something here?

My kids have shown me, and I'm so proud to see it in them, the capacity for hard work that's there if you're willing to really give it a whirl. I never thought I could do hard work because I couldn't do schoolwork. So early on in my career, I was afraid of the hard work. Like, I could show up and do the hustle and do the party and do this and that, but really sitting down And thinking things through and following through on plans and ideas is still a little challenging, but back then it was really frightening for me.

So before we get into stories of you in the agency world, when you dropped out of college, you were running, as I understand, a valet parking station in Boston.

Yeah.

And you actually got stabbed during an attempted robbery. Must be incredibly traumatic. How did that change your outlook and/or your trajectory?

I was out of college. I was working in a parking lot. I was living in the Howard Johnson's in Kenmore Square. I was sneaking my dog in and out of the hotel, and most of the things I owned were in my car. And I got stabbed, and I went to the hospital, and I needed to recover. So I had to go back home to Connecticut with my mom, and I went back home, and, you know, I was just there. And here I am, I'm 19 years old. I flunked out of college. I've been stabbed. I have no vision, notion, or anything of a future. I don't know what it's gonna be. I don't know what can become of me. And I was pretty, you know, this is not the script for a nice Jewish boy from a good family. But what happened is my grandfather called me and he said, well, you've really done a fine job of screwing up your life. I'd like to help you. Are you ready to get serious? And I said, I don't know. I think I am. I want to try. And he arranged for me to have an interview at the William Morris Agency. So I interviewed at the William Morris Agency. I talked around my lack of a college degree, which was required at the time, and I got into the mailroom. And something happened there. It was an immediate feeling. I, I can still feel it today, this feeling of comfort, and I understand how this works. I'm gonna be good at this.

So tell us a little bit about this. This is one of the more famous clubs in the entertainment industry, is the William Morris mailroom, and there were some really famous alumni besides you.

Yeah.

In the mailroom.

Yeah. One of the other famous alums who didn't have a college degree is David Geffen. But you're thrown into the mailroom and it's really simple. It's like, just do all these tasks. And back then there was mail, so it's a whole other thing. And the way that the interoffice communication was done was through memos that were sent down to the mailroom and copied. So you'd make 100 copies of a memo and then you distribute it around the office by hand in these mail carts. So you were literally at the center point of all the information. Everything flowed through you through these memos. So you, you really knew what was going on. It was like, imagine if you had all the email of everyone in your company flowing through your office all the time and could read it. And it was this very rich environment with a very rich tradition. And the agents there knew that they were supposed to try to provide you with some mentoring and some guidance and some opportunity. If I could just pay attention and focus on a couple of things that I liked, something good could happen.

How'd you get out of the mailroom?

I really wanted to be in the publishing area, and so that was my first thing. I wanted to be like a book agent, and I had this ridiculous vision of myself like reading 1,000-page manuscripts with like a pencil and editing and doing all this stuff, which was, you know, for a guy who probably had ADD would have been a disaster. The good news is they didn't want me. There was a young agent named Fred Milstein who was in the William Morris movie department, which again was this tiny— basically, he was the movie department. They were giving him his first assistant. So he and this guy George Lane, who was in the theater department, were gonna share their first assistant. I'd only been in the mailroom for like 6 months, and I went to interview with Fred, and I could see his chair was broken. The ball bearings were loose, and the chair was sort of awkwardly swiveling around. And I had my interview with him, and then at lunch, I went into the storage thing, and I took apart a chair, took the ball bearings out of that chair, went to his chair, fixed his chair, and left him a little note saying, "Hey, I noticed your chair. I think I fixed it." Da da da. Thanks for the interview, and I got that job.

So that was ball bearings began your career.

Exactly.

Why did you leave William Morris and head to ICM in the mid-eighties?

My mentor there at the time had moved out to Los Angeles, so I was in New York. And I was feeling somewhat without a mentor, and the department didn't have a lot of focus or strength because, again, it's the movie business in New York, which was not a thriving environment. I really wanted to move to LA, and the William Morris Agency didn't feel they really wanted me to move to LA. At the same time, ICM— Jeff Berger was running ICM, and he knew me, and he thought I was a very well-read and intelligent young man, and he kept pursuing me for a job. So ultimately, he offered me a job to— go out to ICM and be the book guy, meaning the guy who sold the underlying movie and television rights for the books that ICM represented.

Describe Hollywood at that moment, the power brokers. What did you step into? What was that world like?

It was an amazing environment because, you know, it was still the lions of Hollywood. It was the Dan Melnicks and the Ray Starks, you know, were sort of still ruling the land. And, you know, The guys who ran the studios were these larger-than-life lions, and they still could sort of make decisions based on their gut feel, you know. They could look in the eye of a young filmmaker and see something special and say, sure, here, kid, here's $30 million or $40 million, go make this movie. There was a lot of thirst for ideas and new ideas and books and scripts, and there was a lot going on.

And the business was changing so much. You had the emergence of the cable networks, HBO, pay TV, you had home video. How was that changing? I mean, that had to disrupt the system substantially.

Well, at first it fueled the system because there were millions and millions of new money flowing in unabated for home video and pay TV. So HBO made this crazy pay TV deal with Columbia at the time where they would just pay tens of millions of dollars for their movies. At the same time, you had all these movies being made based on video sales. So they would do an estimate of what the home video market would be worth. And that could be the entire cost of the movie. So there was a lot of action going on fueling this seemingly endless growth in home video.

There's a parallel almost to today with the Netflix and the new production. Did it feel like the world was expanding at that moment as it does today?

Well, it's interesting because today it feels like consumption's expanding, but the amount of players is contracting. So that's the difference is back then the amount of players were expanding. So you had so many different players coming into the market trying to take advantage of all this home video consumption. And now really what you have is you have this consolidation around these few giant players where they're really trying to control the entire streaming universe. So while their appetite is very big, their power is a little intimidating.

So we'll use the analogy of the retail business when Walmart showed up or Target and Exactly, Walmart, Target, Amazon, where they sort of constrict the trade into these few giant pillars. You were featured in a PBS Frontline piece, Hollywood Dreams, 1986. Did that help your career or did it lead to jealousy? I mean, give me the complexion of how that felt.

It was nuts. I mean, I look back on that and I go, oh my God, what could I have been thinking? I'll never forget the night that aired, I was so afraid and I got this call from Jeff Berg who ran ICM And I was like, oh boy, this is going to be bad. And he said, I just want to tell you something. I love it. He said, you are so raw and so connected to your client, and you are so connected to the pain of the artist. I think it's amazing. And that was a really good—

Wow.

Feeling, because I was in the middle of a battle on behalf of a client trying to help him keep his job, and at the same time trying to manage him through the process of losing the job. It was all out there. I left it all on the field, and it was very clear how real that responsibility is of representing an artist.

Just hold on a second because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.

Quick one before you jump back in. You're listening for ways to help teams move faster, make sharper decisions, and turn scattered context into work they can use. ChatGPT for Business can help. ChatGPT for Business gives teams a shared workspace with admin controls, permissions, and access to work and codex in ChatGPT. This means your business can move from question to answer and code to rollout quicker. Join over 10 million business and enterprise users worldwide already using ChatGPT for Work. Download the ChatGPT desktop app or contact sales to learn more.

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Welcome back to Math and Magic. We're here with Jeremy Zimmer. Let me talk just a second about your craft. You've been talking about story. What makes a great story?

To me, what ultimately makes a great story is, can we join this character and care about what this character is going through and feel compassion and empathy For the characters. And that's to me why great stories are so important, because it allows us to unlock empathy without obligation. With stories, you can just feel empathy.

Does it differ by medium?

I mean, it differs a little bit by genre. I don't know that we're accessing the character's heart in a Marvel movie. We have some connection to who they are, but after a while, I'm not sure that's what the audience is going there for.

You take a great story, you understand the story, how do you market that great story?

Well, that's one of the biggest challenges today in the environment we're in where there's so much noise and such a sort of cacophony of horseshit. It's really hard.

You start so many stories down the path to turn them into something that the consumer accesses. How much influence do you have on how it's marketed in that process?

Over time in the movie business, agents developed more and more influence because we first of all represent our filmmakers. Filmmakers became more powerful, but it depends on the project really. It depends on the project. A small tough movie are the kind of things we can have a lot of influence for— how they're sold, how they're marketed, who distributes it. The fight to get a beautiful small movie made is a very noble fight, not necessarily a very rewarding fight, but a very noble fight. And then once you get it distributed, you got to make sure it's distributed well. You got to do your best. And it's a world right now where spending a lot of money to market a small movie doesn't make sense, and that's provided an opportunity for Netflix and Amazon and others to come in and turn the streaming of these smaller movies into a real business.

In 1991, UTA was formed when leading artist agencies and Bauer Benedikt merged. You were a co-founder with Jim Berkus, Rob Rothman, Robert Stein, Marty Bauer, Peter Benedikt, who you mentioned already. What was the vision then? I mean, why put it together? You must have said, we're going to come together and we're going to do this. What was this?

We wanted to be what at the time would be the 4th major agency. We thought there was room for another large agency. We thought there was room for an agency where younger directors or writers who wanted to be directors could really get the kind of representation that the big agencies were providing for the big directors, but we would provide it for that next generation, that we were going to bet our future on finding and developing great young filmmakers and build the agency around that. Core idea. Writers and directors were the core principle of a large agency.

Who were some of these young talent that you really gave a shot to?

Well, when we formed UTA, some of the young emerging artists that we represented at the time were the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach, who we discovered at Sundance, and all of those are still clients Today. But we really recognized that, first of all, they're incredible artists. I won't say we were prescient, but I think we did believe that the studio system would want to start looking for emerging talent and emerging directors and would be willing to take different kinds of chances on different kinds of material.

2012, you took over as CEO, and UTA has had tremendous success. 330 employees going to 1,000. With offices in New York, LA, Miami, Nashville, London. You've both built and you've acquired. Why do you need to do both and how do you think about both of those in terms of building the organization?

We wanted to get really good in a few areas that we thought if we tried to build ourselves, it would take too long and we're not sure we would get there. Sometimes buying that kind of competence and expertise is a really impactful way to do it. So the explosion of news and news broadcasting was something we were excited to be involved with, and we thought that we could offer opportunities to those kinds of broadcasters. So we acquired NS Beanstalk, which was the largest agency representing newscasters and broadcasters. And then we really wanted to have a speakers agency because we thought that we had so many clients who could be valuable as speakers and thought leaders, and to have a speakers agency really understood that business. Don Epstein and his firm Greater Talent were, you know, one of the real market leaders there, so we acquired Don. So there's some areas like that where you can get, you know, God, get a guy who's been doing it for 30 years, has a built-in network. It makes a lot of sense. Then there are other businesses that are like podcasting. If we wanted to go out and buy the leading podcast agency, well, it didn't exist. So let's build that ourselves.

What about running a company came easy to you? And what was the hard part that you had to learn?

I mean, what came easy to me, I think, was Having an intuitive sense of where we need to go and what are the things that are gonna work and having an intuitive sense of the people and the movement that we need to find to get where we wanna go. I think the harder part for me as we get bigger is creating a more structured organization and understanding the need for a more structured organization. Founder CEOs tend to like to keep things kind of the way they are, and I'm not gonna let go of a lot of this stuff, and I don't need a bunch of bean counters running around. I find myself sounding like that guy. I don't want a bunch of bean counters telling me how to run my business, but I need sophisticated accounting and sophisticated executives to help me run my business well. It's toggling between those 2 mindsets that I find to be somewhat challenging.

If the 25-year-old Jeremy could see you now, what would he be most surprised about?

Well, he'd be really happy that I'm doing as well as I am, and he'd be really happy and surprised that I have found a woman in my life who's my real partner, that I've been able to raise 4 daughters, and that I've been able to, you know, succeed and thrive the way I have in this organization. I think he'd be shocked. The 25-year-old Jeremy Zimmer was scared to death, just hoping to become the 26-year-old Jeremy Zimmer.

Talk a second about spotting talent, and talent both in terms of clients and talent in terms of people you're putting in the organization. How do you do that? What do you think is your skill set in terms of finding that?

You know, I would've always thought I was a great talent spotter, and I still believe I have very good instincts around there, although I've had to learn that my instincts are not always right. For me, the key is to not be scared to make mistakes around talent, try not to overthink that. If I find a director or an artist or a musician, if I connect to something that person's doing, Let's believe in it. I do the same thing with my own personal art collection. You know, I'm not looking to be wildly strategic about each piece of art I buy. I'm looking to see something that moves me or hear something that moves me, and then if I can see the path of how I can add value, I want to get involved.

Is there institutional structure or process that goes with spotting talent that allows it to scale more for a business like this?

In order to be successful, an actor or a writer or a director or a digital artist needs many different elements of their career to be paid attention to and nurtured. Part of being a great agent is being able to sell your colleagues. If you believe in someone, the first challenge is to get your colleagues to really believe in them also. And if you can do that, you're going to be well on your way.

You bring strong values to this job. I'm going to go through a couple of them. Project Impact in 2011, it was a week-long effort where employees go out into the community. 2017, you famously canceled your Oscar party and held a United Voices rally to express the creative community's growing concern about anti-immigrant sentiment in the U.S. When the Harvey Weinstein accusations were first reported, you wrote an internal memo to the company expressing support for the accusers. And reinforcing the company's no tolerance policy on workplace harassment. You are very vocal in demanding more opportunities for your female and diverse artists. What kind of impact have you seen in and out of your company for these strong stands?

As a leader in the organization, if you give voice to the values and beliefs of your colleagues, they feel comfortable being part of the organization, that this is an organization that stands for the things I stand for. I think that's really, really important, and I've seen people feel comfortable here. They feel comfortable being who they are. They feel comfortable expressing whatever their culture is, whatever their preference is. This is a place where people can be themselves and be excellent as colleagues.

And how does it affect you in terms of clients taking that kind of strong impact?

I think clients are encouraged and excited by the stances we take, and they want to feel like they're with people who represent the right values in the world and are trying to make money and make the world a better place.

How do you mobilize the company and the clients for these actions? Because it's not just you declaring it, it's an organization and a client base getting behind it.

We have an incredible team internally that runs all of our philanthropic, charitable, and sort of social initiatives. And if I'm not thinking about something, they make sure I am. And if I'm not listening to what's important to the organization, they make sure I hear it. I'm really lucky to have a group of people who just make sure we're doing the right thing and looking in the right places. Now, I mean, the canceling of the Oscar party came to me one morning. I was reading the New York Times, reading a story about our client, Oscar Farhadi, and the immigrant ban, and it just came to me. And I was able to say, you know what? We're not having a party. Let's have a rally. But then what happened is 50 people made it happen. In an incredible way.

You run a company where your agents and colleagues are also big stars and power brokers themselves. What's it like to manage that kind of organization?

It's really exciting and really challenging. The great thing is there's no chance I'm the smartest person in the room most of the time, and I have very, very skilled people who are excellent at what they do, and my job is to really make sure they have the tools and the colleagues and the services and the support to do the best job for their clients.

You talk about UTA as a culture of entrepreneurship. How does that manifest itself?

In 2006, we kind of looked around and said, wow, there's a lot of content on the internet. Maybe some of our clients want to make content for the internet. And a young guy who'd been my assistant, Brent Weinstein, I said, well, why don't we figure that out? Let's build a business and do that. And he Put a whole business plan together. We went out and raised some money. We made him the CEO. He was an assistant. He became the CEO. The business didn't work. 2008 happened. We ran out of money. That was that. But we learned so much about how content is going to live and proliferate on the internet and what the levers of success will be that Brent came back and has been running our digital group ever since. And it's been an incredible, valuable experience.

This is a podcast about marketing. You're not only the steward of your company brand, but also very involved in the brands of your clients. How do you think about those brands, and how do you think about the dangers to the brand? What are you watching out for as you help manage these brands?

Today, there's so many things that can happen in a blink of an eye that can really damage a brand. So, you know, look, our clients are humans, and they're going to have good days and bad days and good relationships and bad relationships. And what we try to really do is help create the right environment so that when they're putting themselves out there, they have an understanding of what their audience thinks of them and wants to see and will connect with.

Do you track what those essential points are for each person's brand?

Yeah, we have a deep IQ department of 12 colleagues. We have a couple of doctors of statistics and research, and we do a lot of deep work into people's social profiles. We're the first social media agent here at UTA.

Do you spot stuff on social that are early warning signs for problems with the brand or issues?

We try to. I won't say we've been great at it, but, you know, I don't think anybody has. I think too many things pop up that you just don't remember.

You discovered audio and podcasts early on. How do you use podcasts to extend and even monetize these celebrity brands, these stars, this talent?

Well, I think right now when we look at a talent, a celebrity, or an artist, we go, what are the different buckets of opportunity that exist for the artist? And some of them, there's a very clear opportunity for podcasts. And you see, this is somebody who's got a great storyteller, this is somebody who Lives in a world that could be very interesting and compelling. This is somebody who attracts other people in an interesting way. We try to figure out what's the right slice and the right world for you. So with Will Ferrell, as you well know, it was Ron Burgundy, and then it was Chelsea Handler. It's a different slice. So it's trying to figure out where can you live and what can you talk about and what's gonna make sense for you that your audience is gonna be excited to hear about.

Social, digital, mobile, 5G, streaming, subscriptions, podcasts, The world has gotten a lot more crowded and also a lot more connected. How has it changed how you do business?

You have to be fluent in so many different areas and how they all interrelate and impact each other. You have to be able to have some understanding about how this piece affects this piece affects this piece, how it's all coming together, where it's breaking apart, so that you can predict with some degree of accuracy where things are going and where your clients should be.

We talked a little bit about the consolidation of the buyers for content. Do you think the major foundational entertainment companies are changing? And by the way, the mix of who those are changing? Are we at the beginning of a moment that we'll look back on and say, this is when it flipped?

I think I've been around long enough to see that there's not a permanence. We're in a moment of rapid change, and I think there is going to be a few big, big guys, but then there will continue to be More challengers coming into the ecosystem, new ideas. The old ways of doing it will weaken. Everything won't work. Some of the big guys will get in trouble. Little guys will come in and snatch market share. They'll become big guys, and the constant will be that talent and great storytelling is going to be important.

So how do companies lose their way in times like this? You've seen it, I've seen it. Companies are on a great trajectory, and then suddenly something goes wrong and They either disappear or they lose their dominance. What is it that causes that to happen?

Well, I think they get overdependent on one idea and one way of doing things, or they really believe that the way they've designed their business is the only way it can be, and they're not going to change. And I think when you hold on too long to one business model, you can, you know, get broken. I mean, Blockbuster had every opportunity in the world to buy Netflix, but no. We're gonna be this business. We're gonna be a retail business where people are gonna come in, and why would we give up this great business where we buy something for $19.99 and rent it over and over and over again for $4? That'd be crazy. And you know, you hold on too long and you get destroyed. Right now, the newest, smartest kids on the block are Netflix. They're just so much smarter than everybody else, and they know data, and they have this, and they have that, and da da da. But, you know, I think they have to look today at where they are and think, well, what are the changes we could never imagine? And start imagining them. If they were willing to do that, they'll stay as powerful and dominant as they are. If they don't, they'll come up against some of the challenges that Warner Brothers and Fox and all these other guys are.

On a final note, how do you think about How about work-life balance, and how much is your family touched by or involved in your work?

My life feels incredibly balanced because I'm passionate about the things I do. I love my family. I love spending time with them. I love my work. I love doing it. And I think if you're passionate about where you are and passionate about what you're doing, your life's in balance.

Is there ever a time when you can disconnect from your work, or is there ever a time you want to disconnect from your work?

This is my art. You know, I don't believe that Bob Dylan is ever not thinking about the next song, or that a great novelist isn't writing while he's sitting there having dinner with you. Not that I compare myself to Bob Dylan or a great novelist, but this is my art. It lives with me all the time. I love it.

We end each episode of Math and Magic giving a shout-out to the great talent in math and in magic. The analytical folks and the wildly creative ones. Who is the greatest analytical person you know or know of? The mathematician.

I can't answer that question, okay?

Who is the greatest creative? The magician. They just come up with ideas.

And I consistently am blown away by different artists at different times.

Okay. Jeremy Zimmer, thank you.

You're welcome.

Here are 3 things I picked up from my conversation with Jeremy Zimmer. 1, speak up for the beliefs of your organization. Jeremy has written sharp memos and even fired clients over behavior he doesn't endorse because he wants his colleagues to know UTA backs their values. 2, embrace empathy. Not only has empathy helped Jeremy in his work as an agent, but in his opinion, it's also the essence of great storytelling. 3, give your employees the space to build. Jeremy encourages his employees to investigate new areas, and he's happy to put resources behind their instincts. It's how UTA got into podcasts so early in the game. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.

That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic. a production of iHeartRadio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki Etor for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Azar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdock, and of course, Gail, Raul, Eric, Angel, Noel, Mango, and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time.

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