We Just Launched REPRESENT- And I'd Like To Tell You Why.

When I left my job as president of M&C Saatchi’s Heavenspot last summer, it was fun to hear friends and colleagues speculate about my next step. Many knew me from my days at Warner Bros., Fox, or New Line and assumed that I was going back to a studio; others thought maybe I was headed to a platform like Facebook or Google; while others (especially those who had been paying attention to my social media posts) thought maybe I was making a transition into work in advocacy or justice.

In a sense, they were all right. Except the organization that I wanted to join didn’t exist, we had to build it first.

I’ve had the incredible fortune to work with film and TV properties that rank among the legends: Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons, and scores of others. Working on the marketing side of the business, I learned an immense appreciation for the creative vision of filmmakers, as well as how to spot when that vision may not align with the audience’s expectation. Early on, I wasn’t doing the glamorous work — but I was in the trenches, working to inspire interest in people choosing where to invest their limited time and hard-earned money.

As the industry changed, so did the direction of my career. I was fascinated by the disconnect between the industry’s perception of our products and those of the audiences. At a studio in the 2000s, I sat in a meeting where our senior execs mocked the idea that anyone would watch TV on a phone-sized screen “instead of a 52 inch screen.” “Can you imagine the audio quality?!?,” they choked with laughter. Then they walked out of the room and down a long hallway of cubicles, blind to the row of 20-something assistants watching video iPods while eating lunch at their desks.

I began to spend more time on content consumption behavior, specifically the complicated relationship between audience, content, and distribution. Eventually, I landed in a role at Warner Bros. that allowed me to create a program to analyze the behaviors and motivations of fan communities of hundreds of films across the studio’s catalog, spanning all genres, budgets, target audiences, and eras, with significant creative flexibility. Unsurprisingly, relatability was always a significant factor in inspiring passion for a film, but interestingly, current audiences were less inclined to stretch to figure out how they could relate.

Through all of this, I also had to navigate the peculiarities of an industry that doesn’t always make great business decisions. Relationships and traditions weigh heavily on the culture — a culture built when the business was still the playground of wealthy white men who commoditized attractive women and ignored (or dehumanized) everyone else. This was the lens through which film, television, and advertising was still viewed, with the financial prize usually going to those born with a seat at the table.

(Still with me? OK, cool. I promise this all comes together.)

A few years later, I moved to the creative agency world. I created and lead a new division at Heavenspot, responsible for creating the award-winning social media presence and campaigns for premium film and TV properties for giants such as Netflix, Disney, Twentieth Century Fox, and Warner Bros. Eventually, that agency was acquired by M&C Saatchi, a global ad agency, and I became president. In my new role, I oversaw all aspects of the business — creative, business development, strategy, technology, and production — for a team that had a portfolio of dream projects that ranged from Coachella to Orange Is The New Black to Beauty & The Beast.

Then we were asked to participate in a project that was significantly different than anything else in our team’s history. It meant traveling the country, meeting students, parents, and community leaders — and it was entirely rooted in social impact and justice. It was at this point that everything changed.

My colleagues and I found ourselves in Texas border towns, rural Alabama, my hometown of Detroit, and everywhere in between. No matter if we were in Memphis or Massachusetts or Miami, sitting on a curb or on a college campus, the stories were achingly similar. Young people aspired to creative careers — they wanted to be writers, filmmakers, photographers, animators — while their parents wanted them to have jobs with health insurance and a 401K, and the community leaders spoke candidly about the lack of opportunities. I talk frequently about two young women that I met near El Paso, making stunning music videos for which an agency would charge six figure fees. One worked in an elder care facility and the other in a livestock processing plant — neither had ever been paid for their creative work.

My first thought was to hire some of these talented young people and relocate them to our office in Los Angeles — but the more I listened, the more I realized how narrow my field of vision. Many of the most talented individuals we encountered were working multiple jobs or part of multi-generational households. There was a clear and present correlation between those who came from more challenged socioeconomic situations and those who thought a creative career was out of reach. We didn’t need to contribute to the talent drain, we needed to figure out a way to redirect the opportunities and support them in the process. We also made new friends with deep experience in the organizing, advocacy, and education communities — none of our epiphanies were news to them.

There was — and is — a direct connection between the barriers faced by so many (disproportionately people of color and women) and the homogeny on screens that consumers that were increasingly rejecting, but attempting to address those would require an incredible amount of work, and cooperation between people and organizations that were not used to working together.

At this time, I also took a brief leave to go work in refugee relief efforts overseas. The deeply personal realities of the lives I saw around me were starkly contrasted with the images that I was seeing in the media, even those that were well-intended. I saw several film crews drop in, shoving cameras in the faces of scared children, talking about the refugees in front of them, and bouncing back to a warm shower in their hotel on the other side of the island. One fellow Angeleno asked me to unplug the wifi that was giving the refugees a critical lifeline to friends and family, so that he could charge his phone. When one has no connection to the subjects on the other side of a camera’s lens, there is a tendency to observe them as characters in a global melodrama — interchangeable extras without dimension or backstory. The parallels to the rest of our industry’s treatment of people of color, women, people with disabilities, and others, did not go unnoticed.

At that point that I realized where I wanted to focus my career — and I would need to leave my role at the agency in order to do it.

In an incredible gesture from the universe, I wasn’t going alone. After I announced my departure, every woman from our executive team said that she was going to come, too. Suddenly, we had a dream team of creative, technology, digital media, and strategy professionals. We did what all startups do — we worked from my living room.

We attempted to break down the challenge into easily manageable pieces, but after several months, it was clear that a more holistic approach was required. This meant adding more team members who brought deep expertise in creative development for film and TV, as well as digital distribution, and production. We brought in advisors who were world-renowned experts in various aspects of advocacy. We brought in partners like National Geographic and Fox who would allow us pilot our methods in real-world work, while providing revenue to keep us moving forward. We moved into an office in the arts district in downtown LA.

This team of incredible women (and yes, until last week they were all women…) has worked around the clock, making the impossible happen, leading with both head and heart. [Side note, we brought in the people who we thought were best for the job. When we look around the room, our team (executives, staff, and advisors) is now over 93% female and 50% people of color.]

Last week (and nearly a year later), I walked one of our advisors — a respected senior studio executive with a 20+ year career, a member of the Academy, and a brilliant woman — through the final launch plans, she said: “This is it. You guys have it.”

We have developed something that we believe unites the best parts of entertainment, advocacy, and community organizing…and we are ready to start introducing ourselves to the world.

Ready? Here it is.

Our company, Original Media Ventures, houses three different entities, that all work closely together:

? Original Studios: developing entertaining film, TV, and digital series from underrepresented creative perspectives, with a focus on Gen Z audiences. (Studios, Networks, Producers — looking for stories and storytelling talent? We’ve got you covered.)

? Original Partners: creates virtual teams of diverse creatives from across the country to ideate, develop, and produce work for brands. (Brands, Agencies — we can support your in-house teams with ad-hoc creative crews that reflect the diversity and fresh perspectives of your target demos, guided by experts with experience on world-class brands.)

? REPRESENT: our open community of creative minds, and the engine that powers the other two divisions. Members of REPRESENT are offered resources, insights, coaching, training, feedback, encouragement, and paid opportunities — all designed to be geographically and economically agnostic. This community will have opportunities to work on paid projects for brands with our Partners division, and to pitch film and TV projects to our Studios division. (Know a talented creative, either aspiring or practicing?) Send them to HereToRepresent.com)

We’re thrilled to be partnering with fresh creative voices from an endless spectrum of perspectives and experiences, and the businesses who have the vision to appreciate their talent and contributions.

Thank you all for your friendship and support over the years, we’re so excited to move forward together.