MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
Join hosts Joseph Itaya and Anika Jackson as they dive into conversations with leaders and changemakers shaping the future of digital media. Each episode explores the frontier of multimedia, artificial intelligence, marketing, branding, and communication, spotlighting how emerging digital trends and technologies are transforming industries across the globe.
MEDIASCAPE is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. This online master’s program is designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers
From Disney to Oracle: One Executive's Wild Ride Through Media Disruption
Jeffrey Thompson embodies what it means to be a transformational leader in today's rapidly evolving media landscape. With remarkable clarity, he walks us through his journey from being the first Chief Diversity Officer at Disney to spearheading digital strategy at Condé Nast, bringing a unique perspective on navigating massive organizational change amid technological disruption.
Thompson's approach to diversity at Disney wasn't simply about representation but about authentic storytelling that resonated globally. "Media companies are creating culture," he explains, highlighting the special responsibility entertainment companies bear in showcasing the world's richness. This philosophy guided Disney's evolution from characters like Cinderella and Snow White to developing content featuring Princess Tiana and productions like Coco and Black Panther – moves that were both culturally significant and commercially successful.
The conversation shifts to his time at Condé Nast, where he faced the monumental challenge of transitioning a traditional print publisher into the digital age. Thompson reveals his methodology for driving change: building compelling data-driven business cases that help executives visualize market trends and consumer behavior shifts. He cautions against the fate of companies like Kodak and BlackBerry that failed to transform despite having the technology to do so, emphasizing that while being first isn't always necessary, intentional planning for what's next is non-negotiable.
As Commissioner of LA County Workforce Development, Thompson now tackles how technological advancement will reshape employment across industries. From mechanics learning to service electric vehicles to healthcare transformed by analytics, he envisions pathways for workers to adapt rather than be left behind. His documentary work, including "Scrum" and the upcoming "Gibraltar Project," demonstrates his belief in finding "riches in the niches" – stories with profound impact that major studios might overlook.
Join us for this masterclass in leadership during periods of massive change, and discover why Thompson's parting advice to seek perspectives different from your own might be the most crucial skill in an increasingly personalized digital world.
This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.
Welcome to Mediascape insights from digital changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Hi everybody and welcome to Mediascape, and I want to introduce you to somebody who is very, very special, close to our program, to our university, and who has accomplished just an amazing number of things, in addition to being one of the kindest, warmest, most thoughtful executives and veteran leaders in the media space that I have ever met. This is Jeffrey Thompson.
Speaker 1:Jeffrey, thank you so much for joining us today. Hello Joseph, thank you for having me. Delighted to be here. All right, everybody, just take a deep breath, grab a cup of tea, because I'm going to introduce Jeffrey and I'm not even going to go through all of his incredible credits and experience, he would take too long. You can look him up on LinkedIn, jeffrey Thompson, but I'm going to give you just a couple of highlights. You get a sense of the breadth and scope of experience that this wonderful gentleman brings.
Speaker 1:So Jeffrey is a media executive and he has been at a couple of very notable companies, and again I'm only going to name a few. He was the first chief diversity officer at the Walt Disney Company and we'll be talking about that extensively. He was the vice president of digital strategy and business development at none other than Condé Nast. He's currently an executive at Oracle. He also balances his time. He seems like he has more than seven days in the week and more than 24 hours in the day as a feature documentary film producer, and his most recent film is called Scrum, which is currently available on Amazon Prime. I encourage everybody to check it out. It's a really, really great film. Additionally, he is the commissioner of the LA County Workforce Development Commission, which is part of his service to our community here in Los Angeles, and amazingly, he is also an instructor for multiple classes in multiple programs at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
Speaker 1:So it's going to be hard to fit it all in. I think we're going to have to schedule a few episodes, jeffrey, but thank you again for being with us and let's just dive right in. I want to ask you to set the table before we go back and get into your history. I want to ask you one question right up front. Okay, what's the most important thing that our listeners and our students should be thinking about to frame our conversation? That's the most important thing to you right now, in March of 2025?.
Speaker 2:You know I have to tell you that's a difficult conversation and my EDD which is why I do different things like this won't allow me to say one thing. But let me try to say one thing. We are at the crossroads of where we see entertainment, media, digital, the entire ecosystem of telecommunications sort of collapsing and integrating, meaning that our technology allows us to become one with the world, meaning that I can get to any country with data, with targeting, with great marketing, and I can also get to every culture, every language, every subpopulation, and so diversity and the conversation that we're having around diversity meets technology. Entertainment and telecommunications and how we get our news out to anywhere in the world is one of the things that is absolutely top of mind to me and I'm spending a lot of time on it these days.
Speaker 1:That's a great place for us to start. All right, let's reel it back and head back to your Disney days. Right, one of the pillars of your career. Did you always love Disney, since you were a kid?
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, I played alto and tenor sax, so you're a musician, you love art, you love those musicals and you love things about you know the creative expression. So when you looked at Disney I wouldn't say I was a Disney file, which means that I loved everything Disney, but I grew up with Disney. A big part of my ecosystem right, the imagination of Disney, the vision of Disney, the always looking at what's next in innovation of a Disney those pieces are really important to me and I've held on to so how did you come to be at Disney in the beginning?
Speaker 1:It must have been a really exciting thing that happened for you. Did you just go straight into that role of chief diversity officer, or did that incubate for something else?
Speaker 2:No, I was at Disney 11 years, people 11. Year 8, I was appointed by Wes Coleman, the chief human resources officer, and Bob Iger, who's now currently the CEO, to be in that alliances, working on sort of strategic alliances. Sometimes that was integration type things. With Pixar, we made an acquisition of Pixar, we acquired Fox Family, which ended up being ABC Family. So I was on one of the integration teams for that when we were putting certain content pieces together, and those are really important discussions. What I would tell you is that the diversity role was by far the most important role, impactful role that I've had and it was what we call a transformational role, meaning it was designed to help me grow my career, but also for me to leverage my knowledge of all the business units of Disney and the challenges of Disney and the challenges of Disney and where we were trying to get to from an audience perspective, and that's why we we picked someone that was inside the organization to take on this very first VP of global diversity role and help build what is our first comprehensive strategy for diversity across. So the Walt Disney company, which people forget, is ABC, it's ESPN, it's theme parks, it's Disney Channel, it's hotels around the world and commerce around the world and great product offerings and characters around the world. So I was very proud. Let me just say one last thing on this because I think it's so valuable.
Speaker 2:Many companies are going through their same iterations of probably what Disney started 15 or 20 years ago, which was looking at the fact that Disney we all grew up with, main Street America, which is, you know, little America, all the wonderful values of Little America and Main Street America, so those local towns throughout America, and what we've seen is now Little America has gone to Little Globe, meaning that Disney has theme parks around the world in Paris, in China, you know, disneyland Pudong and Disneyland Shanghai is in Pudong, a very beautiful place in China, hong Kong Disneyland, tokyo Disneyland, our Florida parks, of course, and then California parks. Where I'm getting with that is, every culture around the world loves something about a company like Disney. But we were targeting still a lot of very mainstream characters, right? So we looked at our princess franchise and we had wonderful princesses that had wonderful character values. And I look at them it's Cinderella and it's Snow White and it's Sleeping Beauty and it's Ariel. All great characters, great franchise elements.
Speaker 2:But as we're starting to build business in India. What does it mean about? How do we have characters that express our love for India as we start to express our desire to broaden our terms and create products like Coco or Black Panther or Princess Tiana, princess and the Frog? These were characters that we had to learn and we had to go out of our way to be intentional about showcasing the world that we care about those brands and we want you to see yourself in our movies and in our content, and so it's that kind of targeting that sometimes it can be very intentional, but it's very authentic because audiences are changing and most consumer companies are finding that they have to do some of the same things, despite the fact that there's a lot of controversy in the news these days about diversity and what it means for not just our country, but what it means for you know who potentially might be left behind, which I contend is no one.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we're going to circle back to that a little bit later, but I just want to ask you about this because it's always been on my mind. You know, everybody of a certain age and generation has grown up with Disney as the frame for our experience and our understanding of how the world works, how it can work. I'll just speak for myself. I grew up in really during that golden era of the Disney musicals Little Mermaid, beauty and the Beast, aladdin, lion King. I was a span of ages but I watched those over and over.
Speaker 1:My point is that I think Disney has the most awesome opportunity and responsibility of any company that's ever been created to set the values for. It's crazy, not just kids, but I mean it's like the whole country starts off as kids and what are they watching? They're watching Disney. They get a sense for how the world operates. So you know, I want to ask you, you know in your time as chief diversity officer there at Disney and you were also the vice president of global diversity and inclusion a word that we hadn't even really heard about all that much back in the 2000s you know we've heard about diversity, but we weren't using that word inclusion too much. You know we've heard about diversity, but we weren't using that word inclusion, too much. Talk to me about that responsibility that you feel, that Disney holds, the power it wields, and what you tried to do to make sure the kids were absorbing these sophisticated ideas in an entertaining way, but being really responsible about it.
Speaker 2:Well, it's interesting that you asked this kind of question because it's very passionate and sort of near to my heart, and I think that when I look at the management team at the time of Disney, which you had some people that really were focused on this you know sort of the changing audiences that we were targeting and you had others that were like look, I've grown up in this business, I've been in this business for 30 years, I don't need to really do anything different. But let me just say this my feeling is that media companies and technology companies have a higher hurdle when it comes to showcasing products and characters and the diversity of our world and our country, right, whether I'm talking about the United States or whether I'm even talking about LA County, which has 10 million people in LA County, a population bigger than 42 states. So I've always said that, you know, companies have a sort of a responsibility. However, when you're a media company, you're creating entertainment, you're creating films and TV shows. In fact, you're creating culture, you're creating, in some cases, what people believe about themselves, and so media companies have, in my mind, an incremental burden to make sure that they are showcasing the richness of the diversity of our world.
Speaker 2:If you go back to the 1950s and 60s kind of what I identify, as you know, you didn't see many of us on television and you didn't see us and many times when you did see us on television or film, it was in very stereotypical roles. So when things like Princess Tiana came out and great properties like that it's not just that can you commercialize and can you monetize and can you is there a business case for diversity, which becomes important. There's a lot of brown people around the world that Disney targets, right From Brazil to India and other. You know people want to see themselves in content and that becomes very powerful. And that's different than you know when you're doing iPhone marketing or other types of product offerings, because people are part of their culture, is part of the actual product itself. Yeah, that's why I'm so passionate about it.
Speaker 1:It is an awesome responsibility and a multi-layered responsibility. It's pretty incredible that it's hard for me to wrap my mind around it and I just have to say that, for all of the from my perspective I know that there's been bumps and some foibles along the way I think that Disney has embraced it and has done about as good of a job as can be done with their intention and with the vast amount of programming that they have done. It's amazing. Okay, so let's move on. So you wrapped your time at the Disney company and you moved on to Condé Nast oh my gosh, from one monster company of influence to another, just amazing and you were the vice president this is amazing to me of digital strategy, which is its own whole huge bucket, and business development, which is its own whole bucket. Tell us about, actually, you know what?
Speaker 1:There's a friend of mine who likes to say the bluff, which is the bottom line up front. She was the Undersecretary of Defense at the Pentagon and so she would always say this is just an aside. But she would also say always say you know, you never know when you're briefing the president how long he's going to have. So we just say the bottom line up front, and then we give them the details. Tell us, if you could, condé Nast, what's Condé Nast's mission from the inside out? What is Condé Nast about?
Speaker 2:Now you think about it, because I love what you just said about bluff. Let me give you the bluff and then I'll go back to what Condé Nast is about. I went to Condé Nast as a vice president of digital strategy and business development. I went with a new management team. I went to New York, loved that entire experience right and, although it was challenging, went for the purpose of driving them out of magazines and into new forms of business. Did not want to see Kodak. We did not want to see what happened to Kodak Happened to a great, wonderful brand like Condé Nast.
Speaker 2:For those of you who don't know Condé Nast, we had 20 different brands from fashion brands like Vogue and GQ and Glamour magazine. You know we were the heyday of some of the very best advertisers in the world. We had Architectural Digest. We had the New Yorker. We had, you know, brides magazine. We just had a bunch of great publications, no-transcript, disrupted by things that at the time I went to Condé Nast, we knew. We had social media. We had Facebook. We had YouTube. We had all these new forms of digital distribution. But look at what TikTok has done just in the last five years, and so that directly competes, even though it doesn't look like publication against publication, it's like a new medium of distribution competing against an old school medium that was very important in the development of countries like America.
Speaker 1:It's just amazing, guys, everybody who's listening to this, let's realize that we are listening right now to somebody who has been one of the drivers in one of the biggest shifts that has ever happened in the history of communication. You know, you think about when the printing press came, the transition from print to digital, with global distribution and publishing ability instantaneously, and not just that, but user generated content. You know, and on and on, jeffrey, the fact that you were able to be this leader and to navigate these huge companies that are not, they can't, they're not nimble that's the word I was looking for, right, they can't just make a switch easily the fact that you were able to be one of the captains of that big navigation. It's quite amazing. Just can you talk about that for just a minute, about what that's like being an executive and inside of such a behemoth of a company and figuring out how to persuade them to make these big changes? You know, like moving into digital.
Speaker 2:Well, think about it for a minute. And, by the way, you're being very kind. You know, understand that each of us has to understand our own strengths and what our own opportunities and what are areas that we kind of don't like to focus on. In mine, I learned early on that I was an executive who was always going to be a transformational executive. So I'm all about and, by the way, a lot of companies are forced to be thinking always about one step into now and one step into wait what's our future? What's our future roadmap? Where does the market go as technology shifts? Or, in this case, like now, as AI integrates? Like what products do I need to create? So I'm what's called a transformational executive. I'm always on the business development side, where we're looking three to five years out what new products? What new businesses? What is going to be disrupted? Right, it's very predictable that you could say that, okay, I could see that publishing from hindsight was going to be disrupted now that we're looking back. But there were some executives that were saying we know it's going to be disrupted in the next five years. What do we do to either change that shifted, optimize our position or create new products or get out of certain businesses. So, like, for me, it's knowing who you are, knowing what keeps you up at night. And for me, like, even like one of the jobs that I don't talk about much at Disney but I loved, was when we were transitioning from DVD, I know, but like an old school technology. Then we were exploring our very first digital technology, which was not streaming. First digital technology was moving to Blu-ray disc, which was, and that was the moving you know, most of our content, of our six or seven studios and getting the motivation and the movement to say you got to move to that next digital strategy in that next digital project before you get to pure digital. And pure digital is what? When we've gotten rid of the consumer package, good meaning, you don't have the disc anymore. Now you go straight to streaming with Netflix and other you know, disney plus and other types of of straining platforms that are really technology platforms. So it's getting people focused on what's next in your business. And maybe what's some of the consequences if we don't move right? What are the consequences if we don't build our brand in another direction, if we don't build?
Speaker 2:You see, like Condé Nast was a really great exercise for me because it was leaving a big, ubiquitous company like Disney and getting to a company that's mainly distribution was publications and magazines. And it was pretty obvious to the team that went in that if we don't move and look for these revenue streams in other areas and new types of products, right, you go from a magazine, do you go to a digital reader? You say yes, but then that's not what the marketplace accepted. Right, some people move to digital readers, but most people move to social media, most people move to actual video, and so it becomes like wait a minute, we're not a video company. How do you convince executives? And let me just say this last piece, because I think it's really important you got to I'm burying the lead here, folks you got to use data and building a business case, a strategic business case, to move executives down a path.
Speaker 2:Right, you have to consistently show research of where the market trends are going, what consumer behavior is, observing behavior. I always say in classrooms observe people's eyes, what they're doing, not what they're saying. Observe what they're doing with their time, what they're doing with their spare time, their free time, their work time, observe the new trends and habits, and then you're come a long way to understanding that you know sort of what direction you'd go. I was in the airport last week, headed to Washington DC, and I just sat around and watched people and I had one of those flashbacks.
Speaker 2:20 years ago there would have been a bunch of people with newspapers and magazines and books and guess what People are reading. But they're reading on their iPhones and they're reading on their tablets and they're watching videos and they're sending notes to their friends and they're doing social media and so watching that behavior are really great insights of what's coming Right, and you could have seen that if a lot of company executives could have seen that. So I've been spending my time mainly in that space. Convincing people is not easy, folks. My time mainly in that space. Convincing people is not easy, folks. When you're trying to tell a company that their products are ugly or that you know that. You know that's outdated, yeah.
Speaker 1:They're kids. You're up in a young but you're obsolete. You did, yeah, I'm.
Speaker 2:I have to be the one to tell you but yeah, you got to do that with data, you have to do that with research, you have to do that with, you know, keeping people focused on what is our vision for the future for our company.
Speaker 2:And I look at companies like some of my favorite companies Kodak, right, and one of the companies that invented the digital camera, yet it put them out of business because they didn't transform their old businesses fast enough and modernize them. And I look at, like you know, one of the very first products that I was able to do, email I'm doing this email outside of the office a company called BlackBerry. But BlackBerry got crushed by not continuing to innovate, and the iPhone came along with its touch screens and storing photos and iCloud and an app store and photographs, and guess what happened? Put a great technology like the BlackBerry into sort of dormancy, and so it's those kinds of things that you don't want. You know you have to lead or you got to move out of the way in a disruptive environment, and so I'm a big believer in leading in those areas.
Speaker 1:You are one of our lead teachers if not our lead teacher in teaching leadership in the program at DMM. There was one semester last year where you couldn't teach it and so I said, okay, I'll pinch it and I'll step in for you, and I probably did a pretty shadow of a job compared to what you normally do. But when we were talking through leadership with the class, my biggest thought about what I think is really important in leadership is the sense of embracing change, making change the norm, so that as leaders, we're like there's a prescriptive and there's a machinery that is built in that we just say we never stop changing. We are only thinking about what's next, next, next, next, next, next, next. And then that keeps that word that I couldn't think of right away before nimble. That keeps your whole team never thinking like, okay, we're. And then that keeps that word that I couldn't think of right away before nimble. That keeps your whole team never thinking like, okay, we're just going to be in, we're going to go into maintenance mode for a long time.
Speaker 1:You know, leadership means we're on the front, we're in the front, we're pushing, we're, we're the tip of the spear, we're the scouts I think of. You know big groups of people. There was always like a scout or two that were. They were out there miles maybe 5, 10, 15, 20 miles ahead of everybody else that are looking around. So to me that's a big one. But I want to throw it back to you because you know you've been talking about change and leadership and just that philosophy of making change, not a reaction. But that is the norm. What do you think?
Speaker 2:Well, in a disruptive environment, in a fast-paced environment like we're in with the digital ecosystem, telecommunications when I say digital ecosystem, telecommunications, all the technology industries, all the social media companies which are very powerful and big and global your traditional studios and television networks, but so media, entertainment technology, telecommunications those are big, robust areas where technology is driving a super fast pace of change. Now I'm a big believer that you have to drive to what's next. I'm also a big believer that you don't have to be first. Sometimes, like you drive to first, like Microsoft Surface that their Surface tablet was first, they had the first tablet, not iPad, and it was a horrible failure at the time because they were ahead of the market. Consumer behavior hadn't caught up to where the visionaries at Microsoft at the time were.
Speaker 2:Apple launched iPad years later. There was better content offerings, there was better technology infrastructure so that someone would put on a little video on their iPad and it actually worked and it was a good experience. So sometimes there's an argument that you want to be first but you don't have to be first If you have a big, robust business. But you have to be intentional about planning for what's next. Think about what Disney has done with Disney Plus.
Speaker 1:Disney was in the movie. I was just thinking about Disney Plus. I mean there is. In some ways it looks like they're way behind Disney. When are you going to get on the game? But boom, when they arrive, did they arrive?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you want to make sure that you're. You know like, remember there is risk mitigation. You don't need to always be first and cannibalize your business, but if eyeballs are moving and platforms are developing that are strategic to your long-term vision for your company, you have to find a way to be intentional about moving and exploring. Disney bought a company right Bantech to start learning how to stream and to start understanding getting that muscle. They started looking at how do I move direct to consumer, which is, remember, a company like Disney is like a lot of companies where their technology or their products went through third parties. You know you did a TV show at Disney, usually it was going to a third party platform. Or if you did a movie, it was going to a theater owner's platform. Disney didn't own those platforms. So Disney had a lot of revenue that would come through what we call B2B platforms business to business right. And at the time you have companies like Netflix starting to grow up saying, hey, we're going to be direct to consumer, we're going to have content direct and you own the subscriber, you own the customer service, you own the quality or not of the platform. You know you own the engineering, you own the sort of that verticalized platform. A lot of companies Sony, disney, warner Brothers, fox go through most of your traditional studios, the third party businesses, were how they monetize most of their content and now that was changing into a verticalized.
Speaker 2:So it becomes important to say how do we get the muscle to change, how do we get the new kind of talent to change the big difference? Like you know, like when I was watching Blu-ray disc, you needed a consumer package. Could you know sort of background. So meaning you're doing PNLs, like profit and loss statements you're doing. You know you're developing a product just like you would developing a Procter Gamble. You know a line of deodorant but it's a different kind of product. You're going to retailers and third parties but very similar to sort of consumer packaged goods skillset. And now you go to distribution of direct to consumer streaming. And now you need wait a minute, we got data scientists we need. We need different kind of analytics teams. We need different types of engineering teams and product iteration. Our marketing teams are now becoming digital marketing teams. So when you start really thinking about it, you put those together and you have a real opportunity. And I've concentrated on Disney and media because it's kind of fun and sexy and people kind of know Disney and media and media because it's kind of fun and sexy and people kind of know Disney and media.
Speaker 2:But think about it if you're in transportation right now and you're just seeing this revolution to electric vehicles and this revolution to cars that have 500,000 sensors on each car that might become autonomous cars or driving vehicles, like we're seeing with Waymo driving around the city of Los Angeles right now, as driverless vehicles that are on their own, independent, and you're seeing a whole new ecosystem. So that's the same kind of digital, but deployed differently. Think about how healthcare is about to be transformed thanks to acquisitions that Microsoft has made Oracle right currently work Oracle. We bought a company called Cerner all around healthcare analytics and outcomes of the future. And how do you triangulate and advance medicine and healthcare outcomes based upon having advanced technology? So I'm mentioning three big ones, of course, but financial transformation, you're going to see just a ton of the digital ecosystems that have cut across every single area.
Speaker 2:Let me give you one that I tell my students, but I just want you to make sure you understand. I tell them you don't have to go into all the new sexy, glamorous industries. Think about what Uber has been able to do to the taxicab business to transform a dormant you know sort of taxicab experience and they created a whole nother way, leveraging an app, somebody else's platform, either Apple or, you know, android's platform and they created a business on top that competes directly against taxicabs. Right, they just relooked, reengineered, revisited and innovated and disrupted a marketplace that's been in place for over a hundred years. So you don't have to be in just something brand new. You can do things by looking at what could be made more efficient or where could there be another, a better customer-friendly experience, or change that user experience dynamic. So I'm very passionate about it and it can happen in a lot of different industries, as we see.
Speaker 2:I gave an example in class this past week. Poppy was purchased by PepsiCo for $2 billion, and I think it's Allison Ellsworth is the founder of Poppy. The soda you know like a different kind of soda pop. Right, it's like more you know, with probiotics and sort of new technology inside of the soda. And you ask, why didn't Pepsi develop themselves? They paid $2 billion because a lot of innovation comes from small groups and small teams that are on the ground looking at the gaps in the space that are occurring because of changing tastes, at the gaps in the space that are occurring because of changing tastes, changing habits, changing trends. And this lady caught on. Five years later she sold her company to $2 billion to one of the biggest beverage companies in the world. So it can happen across almost any industry, looking for sort of those gaps that innovation has brought on by.
Speaker 1:Why don't we stay right in this lane, right here? Because you are doing this incredible civic leadership job as the commissioner of the LA County Workforce Development Commission and that's thinking ahead to where jobs are headed. And I know a whole bunch of people are very, very scared about AI. They're scared about autonomy and robotics and things that are coming to disrupt and potentially take away parts of the workforce. So how long have you been commissioner? And then could you tell us about this work that you're doing at the commission?
Speaker 2:Commission all about. You know how do we train our labor force of 10 million people here in California, our biggest county in the United States, but also, what does a job of the future look like, how do we protect our labor and our markets, and how do we innovate as a region as technology shifts? And the examples I use would be things like, for example, you know if you're a mechanic. Well, are you a mechanic of a traditional car? Are you learning how to be a mechanic of an electric vehicle or autonomous driving vehicle? So that's sort of the easy one. Right, you're a roofer. Are you doing solar roofing rather than old school roofing? So the thought process is you know what are those extensions, what are the types of training gaps that we have? And then how do we get people skilled up to take on these rules, which sometimes will be very disruptive? You mentioned artificial intelligence. It's going to be one of those technologies that's kind of like Google. Remember when we you know, oh go, google, it go, search on something. Be an ingredient that is going to end up being in a lot of our products and a lot of our services. Right, it's going to be a thinker for us, it's going to be an extender, but it's also going to be an innovator, but it's also going to be a disruptor, right. The same way that, you know, the automobile or the bicycle disrupted horseback riding right, which used to be transportation. We're going to see innovation and change and disruption, and so getting people's skill to move to the next level becomes very important.
Speaker 2:How I got into this, I've been talking about this what's next stuff for a while, right, what's next in transportation? What's next in healthcare? What's next in media and entertainment? You know, what's next in our infrastructure for utilities and energy, and those are all disruptive areas that disrupt labor forces, right. And so, as one of the biggest counties, or the biggest county in the United States, you know, la County was saying like, how do we, you know, begin to get a strategy around the posture for what's next right, in some of these really big areas?
Speaker 2:We have this big thing in three years called the Los Angeles 28 Olympics that are going to be right here, a global showcase for LA. And while some people want to talk about the flaws of Los Angeles, I talk about like we are a center of gravity, a laboratory for the world. We're going to show innovation of new technology. You know, I look at so many companies that have developed in California from you know, new companies like Rivian or Lucid companies that my students now get jobs in which I love, but these are companies that are like developing what's next Waymo, right, the autonomous driving company that was started by Google, but there's so many more.
Speaker 2:We talk about the fact that the iPhone was created right here in California by, you know, one of the biggest companies in the world, apple, but it wasn't created for California, it wasn't created for the United States, it was created for the world, and so it's important to understand that a lot of the products that we're creating are transforming society and we're just the laboratory here in California, in Southern California. So really powerful, important and important work of thinking what's next in our labor force.
Speaker 1:Wow, I love what you just said. It gave me some chills as I think about California and Southern California and Los Angeles and what our region means I think about. Here at USC, you know, one of the heartbeat educational incubators of the great minds you know, along with our friends over at UCLA and the other great universities that are all around the Los Angeles area. I've always believed that we are the engine of creativity and innovation for the whole world, absolutely, and we are.
Speaker 2:I mean, like you, think about what you just said about ucla and usc, which is a, you know, traditional rivalries. But I love ucla and I love all the think about just southern california. Great universities are here from you, from cal arts to caltech to kelsey, fullerton, to cal poly, to uc irvine to uc san diego.
Speaker 1:You just heperdine and lmu and chapman.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and think about now. You take all those universities and put them in the middle of Wyoming or the middle of Idaho or the middle of other great states, and they would kill to have those universities with all those freshmen and graduate school students coming in to innovate and lead and learn, and it transforms areas, it transforms regions. So I think that you know, we should never take for granted how many great and, by the way, I've only mentioned, like schools in Southern California, and I didn't even mention the Northern part of the state, which also has great universities the fact is we have this great innovation, this great robust thinking that comes in every single year to Southern California and it's something that we should, just, you know, pride ourselves in. So thank you for mentioning it.
Speaker 1:We're transformers. We're more than meets the eye. You might say we have a global crossroads. So, in addition to all this work that you've done on a corporate level, you also are a creator yourself. So you've done, we've talked about your big macro projects, but then you are a film producer. You know one movie at a time. Tell us about Scrum. Tell us about that, and then I'm really excited to hear about your new project that's coming. But tell us about Scrum. Tell us about how that spoke to you as somebody who you know. Diversity not only it's who you are, right, it's in your heritage, it's in your blood, but it's also in your soul and your spirit and what you project out and teach the rest of us about. Why did Scrum appeal to you from all of those, from all of those areas, and what the heck were you thinking? Going trying to make a movie? I can't think of anything harder than that.
Speaker 2:Well, let me tell you, you put good teams together. I'm the producer, so I build the teams, build the budget and things of that and you know you can work if, as long as you have a good director, good writing and a sort of a good storyline and concept and some flexibility along with funding, you can tell a great story. Let me tell you. I'll tell you a tiny bit about Scrum and a little bit of how I got into this. Scrum is a story about rugby, and that's the surface story. But the secondary story which I did learn at Disney is it's a story about love. It's a story about redemption, with kids starting out in rugby and then turning into national champions. We tell the story of an African-American coach in the middle of the deep South at a very prestigious, affluent, primarily Caucasian university, that this guy is going through midlife crisis, teaching rugby at a small college and he wanted to be an investment banker, and so his parents are like we paid for graduate school, we've done all these things and you're a little rugby coach in the middle of the deep South, where we don't even play rugby that much. Well, year three, this guy not only turns this group of students around, including the school mascot, which used to be a big character, recruited that person to the rugby team, turns into Division II National Champions for America, division II National Champions for America, and they won the Division II National Championship. Rags to Riches Hero Story.
Speaker 2:I worked with a great team and a director by the name of Thomas Morgan who ideated and created the story. I partnered with him and, by the way, it's a great example that I talk to my students about. Make sure you're always networking, make sure you're never burning bridges. I was brought into this project. I didn't adiate the project. I was brought into it at a state where I could have a good impact on it by my former senior vice president at the Walt Disney Company right. So I had left Disney years prior. My former boss came in and said look, we're working on this great project. You could be a part of this, and I jumped all over it and, sure enough, three years later, we have not only a great film that's on Amazon Prime right now, it's called Scrum S-C-R-U-M, but it's at Sony and it's been picked up and we're trying to get it to be a live action picture.
Speaker 2:Now, why am I saying all this? Disney got my creative juices flowing because I got my first producer credit while I was at Disney on ABC Family and that was on a back to school special called Schooled like school with an E-D. Like you know, I got schooled kind of thing, but as a manager as it ended up being a VP at Disney you can't be in management in a studio like that and also produce. You can't be in management in a studio like that and also produce. And so when I left Disney, I ended up getting to a small startup called Shout Factory and Shout Factory it's called Shout Factory TV now and these little young entrepreneurs, they were busy trying to transform their business and they were taking artists like James Brown and Richard Pryor and Steve Martin and you know they were taking artists that were sort of, in many cases you know, had been around for years. In the case of Richard Pryor and James Brown, they were both deceased entertainment.
Speaker 2:We were like repurposing and creating new content from a lot of these old groups that were very important culturally.
Speaker 2:It's like how do we bring Richard Pryor back to life even though he's no longer on this earth?
Speaker 2:And so we were doing these kinds of digital deals and my first producer credit outside of Disney was there and that led me to start saying, wait a minute, maybe I could start doing these documentaries and tell stories that go back, put the diversity hat on, tell stories that big Hollywood would have trouble picking up, because you know the economics and the commercialization, you know they're niche stories and I've always said can you find riches in the niches? And many times you can't find riches in the niches and many times you can't. And so you know I tell them. You know when I talk about scrum and rugby and this midlife crisis guy going through you know the tough time in his life putting this bad news bears of groups together and then they win the national championship. It's a niche story that becomes bigger than when we originally intended, and so we try to find ways like that. If you want. I'm working on another one now, but I can talk about it later if you'd like.
Speaker 1:No, no, right now. That's exactly where I hope you were going Because, again, you're always right on the edge of. You know, right at the beginning we talked about it's not just entertainment for you, you know, it's not just digital, it's culture and entertainment at its heart and in the soul. And I teach this to my students that a great story has three elements. Well, a story should have three elements. Right, the characters' life should change. You know, on the inside, that's great. Their life should change on the outside, that's better. But if they change the world that they live in in some way we've seen this in the Star Wars and the Harry Potters I think about. You know, we're talking about kid stories that you know, I think about how to train your dragon they actually changed their culture. So I love this that you are as a storyteller, you're always right on the bleeding edge of what's happening culturally, and so tell us about this, the next very timely story that you're working on now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's funny because streaming has brought about the fact that I can you know, there's an independent producer class of directors and producers that has grown up in the last maybe 10 to 15 years that can take projects and take them directly to streaming services and get stories told that were hard to get picked up and hard to tell previously. I want to be clear when I say this If you're an independent producer, you're always looking for stories that are either niche or overlooked, that can be commercialized. Right. If it's a big, huge story Black Panther, disney's got it right, spider-man you know you get the big ones. You're going to have big studios pick them up. So I can take on projects that are a little more controversial, that have a little more edge to them, or pick up something that's dormant, that might be resurging, like, right, that was James Brown. That was a voting rights documentary that I did about. You know something that you know other big studios weren't picking up Scrum was about the same thing. Well, I want to introduce you to the Gibraltar Project. This is a project that's about one of those important subjects that a studio is not going to pick up but that I can sliver and take a narrative and commercialize it, and we talk about this difficult subject called reproductive rights and reproductive health and we talk about the debate that's going on in Europe. It's called the Gibraltar Project.
Speaker 2:Gibraltar is in the territory in Europe and we filmed in Gibraltar, and Gibraltar had a very interesting take on reproductive rights. They were very conservative. You could go to jail. You could get convicted of a crime if you did not follow their policies, which were much more restrictive on reproductive rights. At the same side, america, the United States, was much more moderate on abortion rights and reproductive rights, and so what we've done is we've taken the two sides and we share both sides of it. As Gibraltar is going more moderating on reproductive rights, america is tightening up and moving to where you're making reproductive rights less available, and what's happening is we explore that in the juxtaposed positions, and so we do that at a really interesting rate. It's called the Gibraltar Project.
Speaker 2:We've finished principal filming, we're now in editing, we want to go to festival next year. We're telling a great story. We have some high-level people, including the premiere of Gibraltar on camera in this documentary, and so I'm encouraged by what we are seeing. But you know, anyone who's been in the creative space knows it's when you get. You know, you, we, the editing room is an important room because it talks about what is that story, what's the story arc, what makes it educational, but also what makes it entertaining.
Speaker 2:You know, I will say one last thing about this. I'm in the documentary category for a reason because my heart of hearts is I'm a storyteller and I like telling stories about nonfiction and these stories. There's so many rich stories about different parts of American society or global society that are never told, that are really important, or global society that are never told, that are really important, and I feel like I can do my little bit to tell a story in a different way, in ways that I learned about when I was at the Walt Disney Company, but even when I was at Condé Nast and when I was at Shout Factory. Really important to learn to tell stories that can resonate with either niche audiences or regional audiences and in some cases you might get big global audiences. So super critical Gibraltar Project. Please look out for it.
Speaker 1:All right, thank you for sharing that with us. Well, we saw it at the Oscars this past year that there is a renaissance of really small films, important films, important stories that have evergreen truths baked into them. But they don't necessarily have to be these gigantic, big-budget films to have impact. And I'm a filmmaker, as you know, and a director, writer and producer and it's really heartening to me to see and to hear from you and to see this shift that's happening. Some of these very small, very niche, the niches, the riches and the niches. I like that.
Speaker 1:I'm going to hold on to that one and think about how a really small story that seemingly is very small can be a microcosm of really big themes that are happening around the world. You know, here at USC Annenberg, right, we're the communication school. I say it until I'm blue in the face the most important force, the most powerful force in the world, it's not money, not bombs or war, it's communication, the ability to communicate, and that starts with the ability to tell a story that is human, a story that's compelling, and that word compel is an interesting one. What makes something compelling? It means that it compels you to act, and that's what we're in the business of as communicators and communication teachers For anybody who's listening.
Speaker 1:I hope that you think about that idea and the power that we have to take ideas just words and ideas and somehow compel our audiences to turn those ideas into action. And we are the engineers of that process. We don't engineer planes or bridges or vaccines. We engineer ideas that turn into action, and that comes from great storytelling. Jt, I've kept you on for a long time and I know it's just about time to wrap up, so I didn't prep you for this one, but I want to ask you the question that I love to ask, if you wouldn't mind, which is if you have one piece of advice or maybe it's a saying that you have or that you've developed or that you heard about from somewhere one piece of advice that you could share, and it could be something related to career, it could be life philosophy One core, abiding piece of advice that you could share with anybody who's listening right now.
Speaker 2:You know in this, you know one of the powerful piece about everything we've talked about with digital and this digital ecosystem and targeting audiences and all the analytics of that, and I, you know, you kind of have data to understand what populations are doing. If you're a marketer, it's wonderful. You know what people's favorite colors are, you know what favorite cars are. You know where to put their money to get them to be influenced. You do the same thing in filmmaking in many cases. Let me do one of the cautions. It's something that's on my mind a lot and that is that you know we see these wonderful platforms like Meta, facebook and Instagram and TikTok that have revolutionized the world in many ways, and how we capture data and how we capture eyeballs. Right now, we get news and entertainment out, but now we're seeing that more than 50 percent of people Americans are getting their news from platforms like Facebook or an Instagram or a TikTok. And to your point, the one thing that I would share is more of a caution Make sure you're reading wide enough. Don't just read your opinion. Read other people's opinions. Debate both sides, like we're doing with Gibraltar Project. We're not just showing one side of the reproductive rights story, we're showing the other side of the reproductive rights story.
Speaker 2:Get into the head of people that may be disagreeing with you, and the challenge we have is that technology allows me to target so closely to what we already like or what you already like. So if you look at the algorithms, I get what I already know I like and I have to go search for things that might be different than my opinion. I think the world's going to be a better place if we figure out that there is something called over-personalization. I want to personalize. I want to know when you like something. I even want to know when you dislike something, because I need to know how to convince you differently if I'm a marketer. But when it comes to social issues and how we learn and how what is, you know, the sky is blue or the sky is gray. It's important that you are well read and seek out opinions that are different than your own. So that'll be my wisdom of you know for the day.
Speaker 1:I have so many thoughts on that, but we're going to leave it right there because I want you to have the last word and I want to say the deepest thank you. It's really an honor that you'd come and teach with our programs, an honor that you'd share an hour, an hour and a half of your incredibly valuable time with all of us. I can't wait to share your this episode out with as many people as I can, and I will always remember what it was that you said right there at the end to be reading broadly, especially the things that we might not agree with absolutely.
Speaker 2:Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:It's been great, joseph professor jeffrey thompson, among so many other incredible roles and accolades, that he's had different titles, different things, and I couldn't help but, sitting here, think, boy, we need people like you and more and more public service and politics, which is really an incredible act of service, and I hope that you'd consider that, because we need people like you who are leading with warmth and thought, innovation, ethics all the things that you embody on a daily basis. Thank you very much for joining us everybody here on this latest episode of Mediascape and I'll see. We have so much more to discuss with Jeffrey no-transcript. To learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.
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