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By Cheechee Lin and Bijan White
The annual PULSE Conference hosted by UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment, and Sports (MEMES) gathered together leaders in film, sports, music and media industries to discuss adapting strategies to address the challenges in ever-evolving business models.
Mike Hopkins (’01), CEO of Hulu, was the 2015 Game Changer Award recipient. During his opening keynote, Hopkins discussed Hulu’s strategy to grow subscribers and launch buzzworthy originals. Hopkins believes that the strength of Hulu, not to mention its main revenue source, lies in targeted advertising, and that people stick with Hulu because of accessibility and the variety of content available.
Andrew Goodman, AT&T’s VP of digital content, delivered the closing keynote, talking about the AT&T and DirecTV merger that transpired last year. Goodman says that DirecTV has a “clear value placed in sports and a very passionate fan base... You look for specific content to engage a passionate fan base, whether it be sports or other genres.” AT&T is also looking to invest in Mexico, as the Mexican market has favorable regulations and a growing middle class. The potential for cross-border broadband makes Mexico an attractive destination for global expansion. Goodman also believes that short videos distributed through YouTube, Facebook and Vine are becoming increasingly popular and represent a growing business opportunity.
The panel on entertainment further examined the explosive growth of international markets and engagement with global audiences in an ever-fragmented content landscape. As Todd Steiner (’06), VP of the entertainment group at Comerica Bank, put it, producing a film was like making a bet “every single week.” “Investing $100 million in a studio film, then blowing all of the hundred million and hoping for the best — that’s a pretty big bet,” he says. “With the new technologies, people are doing things more creatively, and they’re doing things faster, like using their phones to create and edit videos — this was unheard of before. There is compression of the money in the industry, but there is also more creativity at the same time. The best part is that [individuals] now have tools at their disposal to bring their ideas into reality.”
This year’s PULSE Conference also marked the inaugural UCLA Anderson Entertainment Case Competition, sponsored by Paramount Pictures. Anderson brought 16 teams of MBA students from top programs around the country to analyze and present a solution to a real-world business problem. This is one of the few media and entertainment case competitions of its kind, and the first for Anderson. The panel of judges comprised a combination of Paramount employees and executives, visiting professors and industry experts and executives. The team from Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University won first prize, $4,000 and first-round summer internship interviews.
The Center for MEMES and the Entertainment Management Association established this competition to provide students with a competitive learning experience in which they gain exposure to issues in the media and entertainment space, while also giving entertainment executives access to creative solutions from the future leaders of tomorrow.
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