Innovators: This Comedy Management Team May Change The Business of Comedy
The business of comedy is changing fast. Young comedians who want to succeed can’t just follow the career path of the generation before them anymore. It’s no longer an option to just get the Tonight Show and then sit back and watch your career take off. Even getting a one hour comedy special doesn’t mean the same thing it used to mean. With no single guaranteed path to success, comedy is complicated, and everyone is scrambling to try to figure out the best way to make money and launch their careers.
As part of our series on innovators in the business of comedy, we sat down with Rick Dorfman, Conan Smith and Steve Wettenstein from New York based management company Converge Media Group to find out where the business is going and how they are serving their comedy clients in the digital age.
Before forming Converge, Dorfman and Smith worked with comedians for over twenty years separately– Rick on the management side, Conan on the agency side working with some of the biggest names in the business. They know how management has succeeded in the past, and they’ve seen the business changing quickly. Now they’re using their collective 40+ years of experience, to understand the future. With a focus on new types of opportunities for their clients, in-house ideas and production, and a corporate structure that helps them get it done fast, they may be at the front of a new model for helping comedians turn their art into business. Beyond looking for opportunities for their clients, they are creating the opportunities themselves, coming up with the concepts, finding buyers, and even producing the content.
Why The Old Model Doesn’t Work Today
“When Conan and I first started in the business everything was about — develop a stand up comic, get their seven minutes that tells their story and go sell a sitcom,” Rick told us. “Then reality tv and everything else started to take some of the landscape of sitcoms and more and more cable networks started up, and the business changed significantly.” They asked themselves, “how do you take a client and turn them into a sitcom star,” and is that even possible anymore?
With the business changing so fast, the management-artist relationship may be more important for this generation’s performer than ever before. To a comedian, this all looks terrifying, but to Rick, Conan and Steve, it’s all opportunity.
Branded Entertainment and Beyond
With talk shows and sitcoms no longer dominating the model for comedians who want to make a name in the business, Converge is being progressive in finding new ways to putting their clients to work. They aren’t just looking for projects, they’re creating the projects themselves. Right now, branded entertainment is the perfect place to do that.
Rick started paying attention to the role brands could play in comedy management about ten years ago. “I was partners in a production company in Westchester that was doing a lot of stuff with Pepsi, and it was like the entrée into branded entertainment and online content. It opened up a whole world for us where we started to really see where the direction of content was going, in addition to the traditional sense in film, and television, so we really went down that road with a lot of gusto.” When Rick and Conan partnered up, they started to add direct relationships with the advertising companies to their important contacts. Rick, Conan and the rest of the team found that they could come up with the concepts themselves in-house, go directly to the brand to pitch the ideas. and then place their clients into the projects.
Today Rick says they sell as much content to brands like Pepsi and Heineken and Time, Inc. as they do to traditional content networks. “All different kinds of brands and companies are gobbling up content,” he said. Just a few years ago everyone was talking about viral videos. Now, that has already matured into something else. Brands want authenticity. That authenticity comes from using storytelling, and the webseries has replaced the viral video as the method of choice. In this new market, Converge can take their client’s ideas, and go work with Pepsi to bring it to life. Or maybe they approach a company and find out what problems they are trying to solve. Trying to get more teenage males to take up running? Need more adult women to start listening to music? Converge will come up with a concept, cast it, and create it.
Some companies like Pepsi, don’t even want their name on the project. Rick explained how it works. “They would love to create the Big Bang Theory, and then put it out there and have people talk about how great a show ‘x’ is. Then they market the fact that they were behind show ‘x’. So that people think about show ‘x’ in terms of Pepsi and that creates some type of an emotional response so that when you’re standing in front of the soda case you pick Pepsi over Coke.”
It all translates to more ways to get work for their comedian clients. But it’s more than just another paycheck source. The new branded market also is an opportunity to help young comics fund a dream project, or grow their skills. “Some of our young talent that are great- they’re great writers and great actors and they want to get into directing,” Rick said. These smaller projects allow a young comedian to get the chance to direct a small project, hone those skills in a real way, and get paid for it while building their resume.
“I think that’s what’s so great about comedians specifically,” Steve added, “is they’re capable of doing all of those different things. You can come up with an idea, that came from a brand or some other entity and work with them and get a product that’s still in their voice and in their tone. That translates to all these other mediums.”
In House Production
Another area where Converge is really branching off from traditional management is in the arena of production. After they’ve sold their ideas, and placed their clients in the projects, they are also producing the projects in-house, whether it’s a webseries, a comedy special, or any type of content.
“We have a head of production, he runs all of our production so Conan and I, or Steve– the management side– will conceptualize with our client, we’ll go out, we’ll sell it. Once its sold, we hand it off to Mick who is our head of production and to Lou who is our COO. They work out a budget and they work out the shooting schedule. We oversee the creative with the clients and we get it done.”
So, Conan explained, “if we have a brand piece like Rick has put together, we’ll try to put our clients in that piece, in some capacity so they’re making money. We don’t commission them on it because we take a fee from whoever is hiring us for that and then we also love to hear our clients ideas and put them in the hopper, and we’ll start fleshing them out with them and then putting them in pitchable form, and then selling them together with the client. So we’re the production entity for whatever project that we sell. ”
That’s worked great for the early years of Converge, but this year, they’re upping their game yet again. Back in January, Converge was bought by Danny Zapin who runs Zealot Networks, another company that has a vision about leveraging content with brands. Rick talked about how this changes his business. “They’ve taken Converge and put it at the epicenter of all of these companies that he purchased– tech companies and sports management and ad agencies, music management, record labels, new media rock stars.” He added, “We’re growing. We definitely have more resources. The Zealot network is going to be the talk of the town right now, certainly in Hollywood. It’s gigantic and continuing to grow. To be in the middle of that at the beginning phase, where we are one of the original companies to be purchased, is exciting.”
Traditional Management Still at the Core
Even with all of the new avenues opening up, the team is emphatic that the core of the company is still talent management. “It’s the central pillar. The other aspects of the things we do stem out from that,” Conan explained.
“Everything from– if they’re on the road, we’re booking their travel and making sure everything’s alright for them with that; we’re developing with them, what the ideas are; making sure they have agents and lawyers that are team friendly towards the goals we set for them. We guide them on a day-to-day basis. . . . And we don’t sign a million people. We are very selective about who we want to have in. Cause you know, it’s a reflection upon our taste, and that’s your reputation and in this business that’s everything. If you don’t have a reputation that people trust, and they don’t realize you as a tastemaker, and the arbiter of people that are the next generation of talent that’s coming through, then you’re not going to really be successful. You want to be– when I call someone and say hey take a look at this guy or girl, they’re going to click on the link.”
Part of the traditional management is a system Rick came up with called the silo system, which Conan calls ingenious. “It basically is a blueprint for everything a working comedian could possibly do, from writing a book to going on the road.”
Rick came up with his silo system while teaching a course in Artist Management at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Although management is a personal thing, he said, there are elements that are repetitive. So for the system, Rick broke down every possible revenue stream that a comedian or an actor could possibly make money in, from acting, television, film, radio, podcast, merchandising, licensing, theater, personal appearances, and mapped it all out. Then he broke those down into other categories, so television was broken down into writing, directing, creating, producing. And then from there, the minutia of that. “Really what it was designed to do was be a safety net for us as managers and representation to look at — are we making sure that we’re covering every possible area of someone’s career at the appropriate time.”
The End Game
The end game for their clients is constantly evolving to whatever is “the new thing.” Conan is always aware that “a sitcom is great but there’s many other ways to monetize your clients.”
Rick agrees. “We can do anything and its all a la carte. We can produce a television show and just sell it to television or we can sell it to a publisher or Pepsi can come in, and we can create it, we can come up with a brand strategy, we can put YouTube talent into it, we can use influencers, traditional talent.” The options are all there. He added, “it’s much different than the conversation you have with a 3Arts or a Principato Young, or some of the other big management companies that are doing phenomenally well and amazing companies. We just had to figure out a different way of doing it and try to ride with the times, so that’s what we’re doing.”
But through everything, at their core, they will stay a management company. “It’s about developing talent,” Rick said, “and all of the other stuff that we’re talking about is just creating opportunity for our talent to succeed.”
You can read more about Converge Management Group at convergemg.com.
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