Tuesday, November 15, 2011



We've just started working with him so what we have begun with is the idea that he is a guy who has a very particular point of view in terms of how he wants to get his art out into the world, whatever that art form is. He obviously had a big presence on television, has a big presence in the music business and will want to have a big presence in the movie business. [He is also interested in] the partnership business more than endorsement business [working] with companies whose DNA is kind of like his. For us, he's an ideal client type because he's extremely thoughtful, as is everybody on his team. He has a very specific point of view in terms of how he wants to approach the world and he will take the time to do it correctly and he's not swayed by things like big checks or things that need to happen very quickly that are not ultimately for the long term benefit of his career. He is a strategist, and we hope that we are strategists for him.

He's also great in a room. He's really, really smart [and] he's very direct. He's a really interesting, fun and challenging -- in the best way -- guy to be around and to work with. He views the world horizontally, as we do, and so for us it's the best type of client imaginable because we can think through opportunities as opposed to race through opportunities and we can always strategize, take a beat, view things in the short term and the long term. He allows us to do the best work that we can do, and we think that we'll do really good work together.

He looks at everything that is associated with him as something that will either positively influence how people think of him beyond his art or potentially negatively influence how people think about him beyond his art, so everything that we're trying to do is designed to be reflective of who he is as a person, what he stands for [and] how he wants to be presented to the world and what he cares about. So for us, it's thinking: are there companies -- big ones or little ones -- or are there businesses that are established or start-ups, that seem to blend well with what he's trying to do and say? And his thing is, it's not flashy and it's not designed to be quick -- it's really thoughtful. He has specific points of view about categories he wishes to work in, companies he wishes to work with, all that sort of stuff, and part of this is due to the fact that as a young guy, he thought through this a lot and he has proper team members on his existing team. We're additives to a table that's pretty well set before we got there.

n these partnership businesses, I think they will be few and far between, but hopefully they will be really well chosen and really thoughtful.

And I think lastly, he is a guy who is genuinely philanthropic, and he's a guy who wants to pay real attention to people who can be benefitted by his aide and that's going to be a big part of what he does going forward as well. So I think those four things probably represent the primary pillars of what his business is going to be. There will be offshoots because, again, he's so, so smart and so interesting to talk to. They're going to be offshoots to these things that we don't even know about because we haven't put him in the rooms that we're thinking about going forward because he's busy because he has an album coming out next week. But when we have a minute and we have time, our plan is to put him in rooms and set him up with people who have the ability to say yes to certain things in all these categories and just see how it plays because he is not only a fantastic artist, but he can handle himself in any room including any business at the CEO level.

So there's zero baggage, there's no difficulty having him going into a room, there's nothing that represents preconceived notion of who he is. You have the formula for a guy to do great things over a long period of time. And his ambitions are big, but we believe that his talent is such that the things he wishes to do are attainable, and those are big things in all these areas and probably some others that we haven't mentioned. He's absolutely the real deal and he has nowhere to go but further up and up. And I think that he will do something that will be pretty definitive, and people will look at that stuff and say "Wow that guy did spectacular things over a very long career." He's a young guy and I think that he has a young and an old soul, and a young and an old mind. He's incredibly smart and incredibly versed on what's going on in the world, and he's also 25. And that's kind of the most impressive lethal combination, to blend those two things.


versus

""Pop should be a spell"--Marc Bolan

2 comments:

Ed said...

Wow. Who is that?

SIMON REYNOLDS said...

that's Drake's new agent, talking about Drake's bright future