From supermodels to movie marketing insights, the man with the Goldridge pen reveals where the new

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners who want to improve and unlock the value in their businesses through effective communication. Today I'm going to be talking with Danny Goldman, who is the founder and managing director of Goldridge Media. Now, for full disclosure, Danny and I were at university together back in 1986 and 1990, but since then he's gone on to an amazing career Buying one of the first ever video ads on the internet, working for large branded agencies, and now running his own consulting firm, distributing movies and TV content for established studios. Danny's going to talk to us about how the business model works and also how it's been changing due to the direct-to-consumer models adopted by the large networks and the large program providers. Danny, why don't you tell us what you've been doing and what you're doing now?

Well, I started out in 1990 when we graduated in the PR world, similar I suppose in a sense to your experience. I was looking for something that was a combination of business and creativity, and I settled on the PR world. I'm not sure I nailed it, but it was a good effort. And the thinking was right. And then I did a year of working in the sponsorship industry, and I just felt that I was going around a little bit in circles and stumbled across the world of advertising, in fact, and discovered that there was something you could do called media buying where you got to buy space on behalf of clients within media, and that could be TV, print, or whatever it was. And I thought, that sounds really interesting. That's the kind of combination of business and creativity that I really want. So I joined an agency called Lowe Howard Spink, which has morphed into various things since then, and worked on a number of big accounts. I suppose the one that I spent the most amount of time on was the Vauxhall account. And Vauxhall did some really interesting campaigns like launching the Corsa with the world's leading supermodels, which was a really interesting campaign to work on. And then moved to another agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty, who are quite well known in advertising circles, and then spent 3 years working on the Peugeot account at a company called Initiative Media, and ultimately This was around 1999-2000, took the first forays into the emerging online advertising world and set up Initiative Media's first digital buying agency called initiative.com and bought the UK's first video banner ad for Peugeot, which was interesting as well, interesting experience. And then in 2000, I was headhunted to join Sony Pictures to become VP of Sales for a large part of their EMEA business. And that involved using my experience and understanding, particularly broadcasters and how they valued content, to license Sony Pictures content, which on the film side was movies like Men in Black and Da Vinci Code and Terminator 3 and 4, and TV shows like The Shield and Breaking Bad and Damages and The Tudors and Seinfeld, and some quite old shows like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie and Charlie's Angels. So it was a real mixture of content. I spent 11 years there. And then ran a small UK distributor, a CEO of that business, set up Miramax's European TV distribution arm, but not in the horrible Harvey era, but in their private equity era. Worked for Curzon Artificial Eye and released 3 Oscar-winning movies, which was again another really interesting experience. And about 4 years ago, I set up my own consultancy to work with content owners, producers, big US studios, US producers, UK producers, to help work with them to build their distribution and to some extent their co-production presales. and even development activity, all in the world of TV and film. So that's me in a nutshell.

Well, it's a long and storied, if you pardon the pun, career, Danny. Then just tell us now, because it seems like kind of a special and almost secretive world, other than the Harvey Weinstein story. We'll get inside that.

We have special handling.

Okay, not with Weinstein, I hope, alone. So how does it work? How does it work, this sort of secretive studio has content, and, you know, it gets distributed into broadcasters? How does that work from a sort of a business perspective? And how do you communicate with those different potential outlets for the content?

Well, I don't think it's that secretive. Maybe not well known, but I love the thought of it being secretive and some kind of Masonic thing. If only, you know, just if only for the clothing that we could have worn.

Okay.

Amazing experience. Yeah. But I suppose it's not that widely known. Ultimately, in the content creation world, It's a, it's a mixture of art and business, and it's where art and business collide. So on the creative side, which is probably the piece that people know most about because that involves actors and directors, those guys have brilliant ideas and will work with people to finance those ideas onto screen. That could be onto the film screen or onto the TV screen. Those companies then, having funded that content, want to get their money back. So in film, there's a distribution pipeline, or traditionally there was a distribution pipeline that involved releasing a movie in cinemas, then releasing it on DVD, and then even recently on digital download and digital streaming, and then ultimately making that content available to broadcasters, pay-TV broadcasters in the UK, like Sky Cinema, maybe an Amazon Prime Video or Netflix. And then the last leg of that chain would be the BBCs, ITVs, who would play those movies from time to time. That windowing structure is evolving all the time, partially because of COVID partially because of just general trends in the marketplace. But you can imagine At every step, somebody needs to be there at the content owner. Let's say it's a US studio like Sony Pictures. Somebody has to work for them to knock on the door of the cinema and say, these are the terms under which you can play my movie. They're going to knock on the door on Tesco's or HMV in the old days and say, this is the split of the retail price that we want to get from you. And these are our marketing commitments in return. And then somebody has to do a deal with the Skys and the Netflixes and the BBCs of this world to agree what the license fee would be, how long will that show be under license and therefore available to be broadcast, and what are the economic terms around that. So I think for most people, if they thought about it, they'd probably work out how it might work. On the series side of things, it's a little bit different because there isn't the theatrical aspect to it. And what you tend to find there, of course, is that somebody is buying the show, somebody's commissioning the show, paying for that show, and that's usually a broadcaster, but also streaming services now. And They may pay 100% of the budget, they may pay less than 100% of the budget. But in any event, they're paying for the show to broadcast on their platform, and then it becomes available either subsequently or internationally, and someone has to do that deal too.

And is that really then, Danny, where you come in? And people like you, as you say, it's maybe just not well known. Are there many people like you out there that are taking this content into the studios, or is it—

There's no one like me, Jim.

Well, we've known that all along.

I'm a one-off.

We've known that all along. So obviously you're in your own special niche, but how are the—

To answer your question, it's a really interesting juncture that you come to in asking that question, because the whole nature of this business is changing quite radically. COVID has, I think, is accelerating those changes, and the longer the impact of COVID is felt, the more profound the change is going to be. But just generally, this world is changing enormously.

In what way, Danny? In what ways it changes? Is it becoming— because there used to be people that created marketplaces, one would have imagined that technology now would have enabled content producers to have almost like a MIPTV, which I think is one of the big international programming conferences, right, where people would go and buy and sell content. One would have imagined this— there are now platforms for aggregating and selling and bidding for the content.

People have tried to launch those. There is one platform that has been operating now for a few years, not particularly successfully. It doesn't It's not a business that lends itself to that kind of commoditization. But what's really changing is that the traditional model that involved territorial licensing and sequential windowing is changing because of the increasing prevalence of global platforms. So where once it was just Netflix, that was disrupting the model. Now there's Amazon. Now there's Disney Plus. Now there's Peacock from NBCUniversal. Now there is HBO Max coming. There's Hulu, also part of the Disney world. Even Sky to some extent as a multi-territory regional player. So there's a significant shift taking place where traditionally the content owners would have licensed the content out to third parties. Now increasingly, they're looking to build direct-to-consumer offerings that allow them to effectively build a subscriber base and a customer base without having to have that mediated by third parties. And therefore, when we talk about how many people are doing this job and how many people are involved in distribution, That model is just shifting all the time. The number of people in it are reducing all the time because the scope of distribution is shifting all the time. And so big changes in the distribution world.

Yeah, I can see that because we have Apple TV+, and I can see that Apple TV's funding the program and, you know, has the subscriber at the same time. So in terms of for the promotion then, Danny, of the shows? Because presumably some of the ROI is on who turns up, you know, who goes to the cinema or who buys it in store or who downloads it. Can you give us any insight into how that is done? The studios directly control that or they outsource that to somebody? How is that done?

Well, again, it's different from between film and TV. On film, the studios are responsible for the marketing of film. They sometimes do that in conjunction with their partners. But essentially, it's down to the studios and the content creators to build a brand. And every time they launch a film, effectively, they're creating a new brand. And to build awareness for that, It's another reason why we're seeing this, this kind of shift in the windowing, because when I talk about windowing, I mean the length of time it takes for a movie to go through these different cycles of consumption. Recently, there was an announcement that AMC Studios, for example, have reached an agreement with Universal that allows for movies to play on Premium pay-per-view, premium VOD, so being able to be downloaded into the home on a temporary basis, 17 days after theatrical release, when typically in the US it was more like 3 months, and in the UK it's 4 months. And that's a reflection of the fact that the studios are spending so much money on marketing that they want to get the biggest bang for their buck. They want to get customer consumption taking place as close to that marketing as possible so that marketing works as effectively as possible. They don't want to wait another 4 months and then have the cost of trying to remarket a movie. With series, it's a little bit different because it's really down to the buyer, the commissioning broadcaster, to to build the, uh, to build the brand effectively. And that can be external marketing, but given they have relationships with their customers, they talk to their customers every minute of every day, they have a certain amount of promotional airtime, and they use that pretty well to, to launch new shows. And then of course they do— they are involved in other promotional activity that are more sort of PR and interview-based and social media-based. So there's a mixture of the ways that people communicate to try and build and launch new movies and shows.

And do you think though, if there's this issue where the shows are going out and being sold straight away, does it mean things like merchandise will become less important? Because if the window of the sale is so short, the logistics of designing, distributing merchandise must be getting harder and harder. And merchandise used to be quite a good source of revenue, I would have thought.

I think it depends again. So if you talk about film, yeah, I mean, films are released pretty close together around the world. And that's exactly the point. The point is that having spent the money advertising and marketing and promoting a movie, you want it, you want that spend to work as effectively as possible. So you don't want to then wait and wait for it to come out on other platforms. Those deals that are about merchandise are all done way before the movie's even shot in many cases. Promotional partners come on board very early and build their merchandising campaigns. very early, and that's based around the creative vision and the scale of the project. I think when it comes to TV shows, you're doing something like maybe a Game of Thrones, for example, that has had various merch elements to it. I mean, that becomes a function of how well the show does, and I think it's much rarer for a big merch campaign around the TV show that happens right from the get-go. It's more once it's shown it's working and it's getting an audience that people want to tap into that. So the merch side, that just does its own thing.

Now, Danny, when we talked about how people can get in touch with you, you said you don't have a website. So how does it work in your line? in this sort of rarefied line from a marketing point of view?

Well, maybe I should have a website. It's not that I've got anything against having websites, I just haven't really got around to it. Does it work? Well, I've got a 20-year history in the business, so I guess people know me and I know other people. And when I was starting out, it was more of a case of saying, hey, this is what I'm doing, these are the things that I can offer to you, and just sort of getting myself out there through my network. But I found over the course of the last 12 months in general, and actually more since lockdown, funnily enough, that I've had more people contacting me or saying, I've heard what you're doing in, in this area, maybe you could do that for us. So it's come more from referrals. So it's, I think, as you were alluding to, because it's not a massive world, you know, your reputation and standing and experience is probably your biggest calling card.

Okay. And you also got now a great podcast as well. I'll include that into the show notes. So Danny Goldman, so if you want to find you, how can they do that?

I suppose LinkedIn is probably the most— that is the best way of getting hold of me. So that's really the main conduit. So yeah, catch me on LinkedIn.

Perfect. Danny, thanks for joining us on the Speak PR Podcast and really proof that you can build a very successful and enduring business really based on your skill sets and on your reputation. Thank you.

My pleasure.

So thank you for listening to this episode of the Speak PR Podcast, which is for business owners who'd like to learn how to unlock the value of their business with more effective communications. Today I was talking with Danny Goldman, who's the founder of Goldridge Media. So until we meet next time, I wish you the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating and also watching some movies.