At production powerhouse RadicalMedia, the only thing constant is change. Originally conceived as a way for founders Jon Kamen and Frank Scherma to explore new content formats after many years in the advertising business, the firm now has a reputation as a go-to place for music documentaries, branded entertainment and long-form content. Radical Media has touched everything from the Questlove musical documentary “Summer of Soul” to the streaming version of “Hamilton” that made its way to Disney+ to “This Is a Gardening Show,” the offbeat Zach Galifinakis series on Netflix that is built from episodes just 15 minutes long.
The founders intend to keep testing new frontiers, with one tweak to the company’s leadership ranks. Justin Barocas, a founder of the Anomaly agency, is taking up the reins as CEO, while Kamen will move to an executive-chairman role and Scherma will maintain his position as president. With that move, Barocas would like to see the company increase the number of theatrical properties it takes from Broadway to screens, and move into taking a greater amount of ownership in the content it creates.
Across the advertising ecosystem, owning some of the work created for ads and other promotions has long been a sort of Holy Grail. Many ad concepts become pieces of popular culture, spurring everything from memes to merchandise. Agencies, which once relied on a steady commission, never really got to benefit from any ancillary uses of the intellectual properties they had a hand in creating.
In 2006, for example, the agency once known as Crispin Porter + Bogusky, took a minority stake in the Haggar clothing company as part of its arrangement with the manufacturer. But similar work continues today. Many media agencies are developing practices in what is called “principal media,” a term meant to describe the process of buying up commercial inventory from media companies and re-selling it to advertisers, rather than simply negotiating prices and placements.
RadicalMedia is testing these waters as more advertisers demonstrate a yen to create their own content. Geico is working on a holiday-themed special that is expected to utilize the many ad characters it has created over the years. Athletic-clothing brand Under Armour has set up its own internal studio to better handle its content needs as more advertisers work to capture consumer attention across a wider array of media outlets.
This is the destination for music storytelling, whether it’s theater adapting to streaming or television, whether it’s artists who want to tell their story in a different way,” says Barocas who says that “being able to take that strength and commercialize it” will give Radical Media an incentive “to be true partners” with advertisers, artists and media and entertainment companies. Kamen sees the new moves as part of the original maneuvers that originally gave rise to Radical. The “constant disruption” of the media and marketing industries “has been going on forever,”: he says.
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