From supermodels to movie marketing insights, the man with the Goldridge pen reveals where the new opportunities are in media distribution.

Daniel Goldman bought the adverts which launched the Vauxhall Corsa alongside supermodels Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington and Linda Evangelista.  Today he runs Goldridge media and on this podcast shares the business model of movie distribution, content windows and the impact of producer to home channels on the industry and marketing of new shows.

The Motion Picture Association released a new report on the international box office and home entertainment market showing that the industry reached $101 billion USD in 2019. According to Amazon International Movie Database, since 1900 there's been an average of 2,577 films produced each year around the world.

Digital growth was capital to home entertainment, driving 14% of overall growth. Viewing data shows that 85% of children and 55% of adults are now consuming TV shows and films on mobile devices.

So these changes are creating new business models and opportunities for entrepreneurs.

Tune in to Danny's podcast, "Here comes Pod," here

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Jim James is the Founder and Managing Director of the EASTWEST Public Relations Group. He recently returned to the UK after 25 years in Asia where he was an entrepreneur. Whilst running EASTWEST PR, he was the Vice-Chairmanof the British Chamber of Commerce in China, he also he introduced Morgansports cars to China, WAKE Drinks, founded the British Business Awards, The British Motorsport Festival, EO Beijing, and was the interim CEO of Lotus cars

Transcript

Jim James: 0:02

Today, I got the chance to speak with Danny Goldman, who is the Founder and Managing Director of Goldridge Media. For full disclosure, Danny and I were at university together back in 1986-1990. 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 he's now running his own consulting firm distributing movies and TV content for established studios. Danny shared with me about how the business model works and also how it's been changing due to the direct-to-consumer models adopted by large networks and program providers. After graduating in 1990, Danny started out in the PR world, similar to myself. He said he was looking for something that was a combination of business and creativity, and he settled on the PR world. He's not sure he nailed it, but it was a good effort, and the thinking was right. Then, he did a year of working in the sponsorship industry. He felt he was going around in circles, and stumbled across the world of advertising, and there he discovered that there was something you could do called media buying where you got to buy space on behalf of clients within media. That could be TV, print, or whatever it was. He was really interested in it and found it to be the combination of business and creativity that he was looking for. This led him to join an agency where he worked on a number of big accounts. The one he spent the most amount of time on then was the Voxel account, and Voxel did some really interesting campaigns like launching the course with the world's leading supermodels which was a really interesting campaign to work on, he says. After this, he went on to work for another agency called Bartle Bogle Hegarty, which is quite well known in advertising circles, and then he spent three years working on an account for a company called Initiative Media. It this was around this time, in 1999-2000, when Danny took his first foray into the emerging online advertising world. He set up Initiative Media's first digital buying agency called initiative.com and bought the UK's first video banner ad for Persio, which he also recalls as an interesting experience. In 2000, he was headhunted to join Sony Pictures to become VP of Sales for large parts of the EMA business. That involved using his experience in understanding particularly broadcasters and how they valued content to license Sony Pictures content, which on the film side was movies like Men in Black, Da Vinci Code, Terminator 3 and 4, and TV shows like The Shield, Breaking Bad, and Damages, The Tudors, and Seinfeld, and some old shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, and Charlie's Angels, so it was a real mixture of content. He spent 11 years there, then ran a small UK distributor as CEO of that business. He set up Miramax's European TV distribution arm not in the horrible Harvey era, but in the private equity era. He worked for Curzon World and released three Oscar-winning movies, which was another memorable experience. Four years ago, he set up his own consultancy to work with content owners, producers, big US studios, and US and UK producers to help them build their distribution and, to some extent, their co-production, pre-sales, and even development activity all in the world of TV and film. That's Danny in a nutshell. What he does, distributing content to broadcasters, may not be well-known, but he says he loves the thought of it being secretive and some kind of masonic thing, if only for the clothing that they could have worn. In the content creation world, it's a mixture of arts and business, he says. It's where these two collide. On the creative side, which is probably the area that people know most about, because that involves actors and directors, those guys have brilliant ideas, and he works with them to finance those ideas onto either the film screen or onto the TV screen. Those companies then, having funded that content, want to get their money back. In film, 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 making that content available to paid TV broadcasters in the UK, like Sky Cinema, maybe on Prime Video or Netflix. The last leg of that chain would be the likes of BBC and ITV who would play those movies from time to time. That windowing structure, according to Danny, is evolving all the time, partially because of COVID, partially because of general trends in the marketplace. But you can imagine that at every step, somebody needs to be there as the content owner. Somebody working for the content owner to knock on the door of the cinema and say,"These are the terms under which you can play my movie. This is the split of the retail price that we want to get from you, and these are our marketing commitments in return." Next, somebody has to do a deal with the Sky's, Netflix's, and the BBC's of this world to agree what the license fee would be, how long that show will be under license and therefore available to be broadcasted, and what are the economic terms around that. For most people, Danny says 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, he says, because there isn't the theatrical aspect to it. What you tend to find there is that somebody is buying the show. Somebody is commissioning that show, and that's usually a broadcaster, but it could also be streaming services now. 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 then someone has to do that deal too. Danny says that because of COVID, the whole nature of their business is changing quite radically. COVID is accelerating those changes, and the longer the impact of COVID is felt, then the more profound the change is going to be. But generally, this world is changing enormously. He says there is one platform that has been operating now for few years, not they're not particularly successful. It's not a business that lends itself to commoditization. What's really changing is that the traditional model that involves territorial licensing and sequential windowing is changing, because of the increasing prevalence of global platforms. Where once it was just Netflix that was disrupting the model, now there's Amazon, Disney+, Peacock from NBCUniversal, HBO Max, Hulu which is also part of he Disney World. Even Sky to s me extent is a multi-territ ry regional player. Da ny acknowledges that there' a significant shift taking pl ce where originally, content ow ers would have licensed the co tent out to third parties. No increasingly, they're lo king to build di ect-to-consumer offerings th t allow them to effectively bu ld a subscriber base and a cu tomer base without having to ha e that mediated by third pa ties. Therefore, when we talk ab ut how many people are doing hi job and how many people are inv lved in distribution, he says hat model is constantly shifti g. The number of people in it ar reduced, because the scop of distribution is hifting all the time. And so, th re are big changes going on right now in the distribution world. My next question for Danny was to ask for some insight in terms of promotion, if studios directly control it or if it's outsourced. He says it's different from between film and TV. On film, the studios are responsible for the marketing of the 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 building awareness for that. He says it's another reason why we're seeing this shift in the windowing, and when he talks about windowing, he means the length of time it takes for a movie to go through these different cycles of consumption. For example, recently, there was an announcement that AMC Studios has reached an agreement with Universal that allows for movies With series, Danny says it's a little bit different, because to play on premium pay-per-view or premium VOD. It means that movies can be downloaded into the home on a temporary basis 17 days after theatrical release, when typically in the US, it was more like three months, and in the UK, it's four months. That's a reflection of the fact that studios are spending so much mon y on marketing that they wan to get the biggest bang for the r buck. They want to get cus omer consumption taking pla e as close to that marketing as ossible, so that marketing wor s as effectively as pos ible. They don't want to wai another four months and then have the cost of trying to rema ket a movie. it's really down to the buyer, the commissioning broadcaster to build the brand, and that can be through external marketing. But given that they have relationships with their customers and talk to them all the time, they have a certain amount of promotional air time, and they use that pretty well to launch new shows. They are also involved in other promotional activity that are more PR-, interview-, and social media-based. So, there's a mixture of ways that people communicate to try and launch new movies and shows. Since shows are being sold straight away, I asked Danny if that means things like merchandise will become less important, because if the window of the sale is so short, the logistics of designing, and distributing merchandise must be getting harder and harder, and merchandise used to be quite a good source of revenue. Danny says it depends. If you talk about film, films are released pretty close together around the world, and that's exactly the point. The point is that having spent the money on advertising, marketing, and promoting a movie, you want it to work as effectively as possible. You don't want to wait and wait for it to come out and on other platforms. Those deals that are about merchandise, he says, 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. Now, when it comes to TV shows, Danny says that when you're doing something like Game of Thrones, for instance, that has various merch elements to it, that becomes a function of how well the show does. It's much rarer for a big merch campaign around a TV show that happens right from the get-go. It's more like once it's shown it's working and it's getting an audience that the people want to tap into that. So on the merch side, according to Danny, that just does its own thing. Though Goldridge Media currently doesn't have a website, Dan y believes that it's his 20-ye r history in the business th t gives him credibility. Peop e know him and he knows peopl. When he was starting out, it w s more the case of him sayin, "Hey, this is what I'm doin. These are the things that I c n offer to you," and just getting himself out there thr ugh his network. But he's fou d that, over the course of the last 12 months and actually mo e since lockdown, funnily eno gh, he's had more people contac him saying, "I've heard what y u're doing in this area. Maybe y u could do that for us," and so e says it's come more fr m referrals. Because the dist ibution scene is not a massive orld, Danny says your reputa ion, standing, and experience are t If you want to learn more about Goldridge Media, you can find Danny on LinkedIn. And with that, I hope you learned a lot from him today. I'm so thankful that Danny had time to speak with me. He really is proof that you can build a very successful and enduring business based on your skill sets and on your reputation.