This story originally appeared in La Fronde’s Oct. 29 newsletter.
I spent about the first 10 years of my career working in cable TV, and even back in the early 2010s, the traditional studio model was showing cracks, with streamers like Netflix starting to produce original shows. With every development meeting my team had, it was becoming clearer that finding and retaining talent was getting a lot harder because we were now up against the Netflixes and Hulus of the world. The proliferation of streaming was the first big Hollywood shakeup I can remember, and what’s happening now is what I’d like to call the next phase of that shakeup.
The same talent I mentioned, who once had traditional networks and streamers as their main options, can now cut out the middleman altogether. The long-term effects of all this are a real question mark, but WME’s head of entertainment marketing, Liz Walaszczyk, says that we might see a seismic shift in creative output now that studios aren’t the only ones holding the keys to reaching big audiences. Liz's earlier work includes serving as a talent producer for ‘George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight’ in her home country of Canada before moving to New York to work in NBC's late-night programming with talent like Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien. She later went on to work on the brand side with companies like Bacardi before landing at WME last year. She’s seen this Hollywood shift firsthand and is leading a new type of entertainment pipeline, connecting brands with talent to create big, buzzy projects that have some cultural cachet to them.
For this week’s Maxed Out, I talked to Liz about her role as a cultural tastemaker and matchmaker at WME, how she gauges whether a partnership is working or not, how she discovers talent, and her media diet.
I know you've made several career pivots throughout the years, and I'm always curious to learn from people who’ve gone on to different parts of entertainment or media. How do you know when it's the right time to make a change?
It's a good question, and it's interesting that you would call it a pivot, because I feel like organically throughout my life, things have just evolved in the world, and therefore your career just goes with that trajectory. The core of what I started doing that I think has been a common red thread is journalism, right? I went to school for journalism, which is essentially just studying, being curious, telling stories, and studying human psychology and why people do what they do, and getting to know people and being open to people. And so I think exploring any sense of curiosity throughout your career has just been a red thread. It just automatically evolved from journalism to media and producing.
And then through producing, when you're a head talent producer at NBC, when you're helping produce and book talent: What's coming up, what's cool, what's next, what's the trend? What should we be focusing on? Late night was part of that era where it just went from journalism to producing to then trend forecasting, and then trend forecasting essentially is marketing now. It's just getting ahead of things and seeing what's coming next and who to be paying attention to and what to be paying attention to, and how to tell a story, and how to reach mass consumers, and how to understand people and what they're going to gravitate towards. It's fascinating because to me it has never felt different in any kind of career I've ever had. It's always been about what do people care about, why, and how do you make them care and pay attention, and what's going on that they should know about. It's the same thing.
Stories and narratives, right? That's a big part of it. What are people going to connect with, and why? And the study of why people would connect with that. What you're doing right now is literally the same thing that I'm doing when I'm thinking about a brand and how to make people connect with a brand. You're just doing it in terms of what would the world care about hearing from this person, right? What's interesting? What would people find interesting about this? It's the same muscle.
How do you decide what talent to work with, and how do you know if they're a good fit for a brand or a company?
We put a lot of effort and energy into talent strategy and entertainment strategy and content strategy overall, more broadly, with brands now playing a more significant role in entertainment. And with talent, what does their playbook look like in the sense of hero talent versus supporting talent, creator, influencer? There are different levels of talent, different ways and levels to engage with talent. So if you curate your ambassadors the right way, you're looking at what does the playbook look like for this brand specifically, so it is really, really brand specific.
But I love what Rick Rubin said, which is if it doesn't make sense, it's not going to work — it does need to just genuinely feel right. And if it doesn't feel right, it has to feel just wrong enough that it's clever and could make sense, and a great example of that is Seth Rogen and Sephora, right? It's so clever, but it makes sense. So it's got to be authentic and genuine and organic, or again, just clever enough that you could do something creatively with it, where it could just be a win.
With that playbook, are there any best practices that you think of when it comes to forming those relationships and knowing when that partnership works?
I think there are different levels of engagement now and different ways to engage. So in terms of a playbook, I would challenge people to look at how we can engage with this person in a way that makes sense and can be beneficial to both sides, and make it more of a partnership, because I do think that talent is now more eager than ever to become creative collaborators and become partners, as well as endorsers. The world of entertainment and brand is shifting so much. Looking at our talent as more creatives, and hearing their opinions and their thoughts and what could work based on their audience and who they have access to and who they resonate with, but in an authentic way that would make sense for the brand directly: That would be what I would challenge brands to think about. Being open to hearing perspectives of people that are out in the world every day, reaching audiences on such a mass level, and being open to creatively collaborating with them differently.
Would you say that's the biggest mistake you see brands make when it comes to working with talent? That they look at the numbers and the fact that someone has a huge audience, but not necessarily if it makes sense from a fit perspective?
Every brand requires something different based on who they are and what their needs are, and how many demographics they want to reach, and how broad their audience is, and if they're global or they're local, or what regions they need to focus in. So it's definitely a different approach based on the need and based on the brand. And I don't know if I would say mistake, because I do think that they have to achieve what they have to achieve individually. But I do think that the biggest point of opportunity is definitely to be open to engaging differently and be open to engaging for different reasons. When a brand is looking to engage with talent, there are obvious reasons, and then there are less obvious reasons, and I would challenge, in a good way, people to think creatively when doing talent strategies. To think of the more non-obvious reasons why things might make sense and play with the creative around that and see what could come out of it. Because sometimes when we're just leaning on the science of it, which is the metrics and the measurements and the KPIs, the art might suffer a bit. It's an art and science thing, I think, when trying to really crack culture and make waves.
When I did the Baz Luhrmann-Belmond thing, it was a really interesting, unique, creative approach to a brand marketing something. To your point, it doesn't always have to be a metrics thing. It could be a creative exercise, and then checking to see if that actually would align with consumers. Let's flip the script here a bit and approach things differently and be open to things that could turn into magic. I just feel like the word magic means sprinkling a bit of the fairy dust, which has happened. That's what Hollywood does. Hollywood historically has hedged bets on creative projects and people's visions. It's what a movie is, right? It's somebody's interpretation of something and their desire to bring it to life, and studios and people believing in this vision, believing in the creativity, believing in it being told, and then seeing it come to life and seeing it win. So that's the art, right? Of course there are metrics involved, but there are elements of both that I think are important when creating magic in marketing.
And you can do it in a safe way. You don't have to hedge big bets and go out loud with it out of the gate. Just think differently in your creative process. Flip the script a bit. Be open to testing, learning, experimenting. You don't have to go big, but just be open to a different path to get there. Be open to briefing Hollywood creatives on what stories you can tell, and not solely advertising creatives, right? Do both. See what you get back. Just be open to a different model and different approach.
I came up through TV and film, and I've seen how much has changed in that landscape, to where there's less and less reliance on traditional studios to develop content. You see a lot of brands having their own studios, creating their own space to develop entertainment. Do you think that's a trend we'll see more of, and that traditional Hollywood as we know it could eventually disappear?
It's a good question. It's a big question, and maybe I'll try to answer it by breaking it up into a few pieces. I do think that the natural evolution of media and consumption is what it is, right? At one point we had black-and-white movies, then we got color. At one point we had no sound, then we got sound. So it's got to naturally evolve in some capacity, and I think we're at this point now where the internet has really opened up the ability for everybody to have distribution, right? Everybody in the world could have their own distribution. So I think the natural evolution of the industry is happening now, and I think everybody's trying to figure out what playbooks make the most sense. And I think that whenever there's change, there's opportunity, right? Any institution shifting, any corporation shifting, any change is uncomfortable for anybody, ever. But what also happens when there's such change is you get to think big, think progressively, do things differently, think outside the box, and create new formats, create new playbooks, all of the things we talked about at the beginning. We're seeing brands now wanting to build studios, and we're seeing talent start online and then sell massive streaming deals. It's all shifting and changing. But to me, that just opens up so much opportunity for innovation, and so much opportunity for you, Stephanie, creating and making what you want out of your career instead of following. Everyone could still follow a path that they signed up for and were taught, no question. But you now have the opportunity to make of it what you want, which is why you've now probably launched this thing six months ago. Because you're like, wait, I have this need and this desire to do this thing. So I do believe it has opened up so much opportunity in being innovative in how we want to navigate our careers and build our futures and build our own individual brands in the space. And to me, that's so exciting.
And I think it gives the opportunity for brands in marketing to think differently and naturally evolve into what they could be, which is essentially patrons of the arts. Traditional marketing is critical and necessary, and will never go away, but it's now given them permission to be more patrons of the arts in a partnership capacity versus a sponsorship capacity. If and when that continues to get cracked and grow, we're going to start seeing some really cool things. The fact that you could have a brand that's giving you a short film that blows your mind and makes you cry. I mean, it's been done. But what if that becomes the norm now? It's a cool new way of looking at what a brand could mean to you, beyond being something that you usually see pop up when you're watching something on YouTube. There's a true ability to have brands partner right now and grow and evolve their marketing efforts, while at the same time it gives opportunity to individuals that are building their careers and their brands to look and think differently at what the world has to offer in this space.
The contraction in legacy media doesn't mean media is necessarily dead. It's just transitioning into something different. I thought Banana Republic's microdrama was interesting. Same with Gap. Brands are seeing the value in building their own communities versus outsourcing that to somebody else.
It's becoming the norm, and we're going to keep seeing it. And if they find the right partners, which is why we built our practice: to be the right partners that help them navigate, because it is a little foreign territory to them, right? Hollywood is different. I do think that having a representation practice that can really help brands navigate, but service them the way they need to be serviced, because they are marketing engines and businesses that need to be run. How to navigate entertainment, and somebody that has their back and can speak on their behalf and really see what's out there and have comps to go back to them with. Having somebody really help you navigate is only going to set brands up for success. So that's genuinely why we organically built this division at WME, because we were seeing a need for that more and more. Brands were becoming more and more interested in the space. Some of them have been doing it for a long time and know what they're doing and are fully in it, and some of them are really new and wanting to get started and figure it out and need the navigation, so we have to curate a team to build across both.
Is there anything else you wanted to mention about the state of Hollywood, WME, or your career?
I think that change should be exciting. As things continue to evolve, looking at it as a point of opportunity is something I would encourage everyone to do. We're living at an interesting time where we're forging our own paths and learning, and always having curiosity be a part of that, I think, is critical in terms of how we're navigating the future. Because being curious inherently leads to, I don't know, optimism in a way. Because you're learning, and when you're learning you're growing, and all of that to me is exciting.
I think that's one upside to this: Change isn't necessarily a bad thing! Alright, now we arrive at Maxed Out. What do you like to scroll through? Any newsletters, podcasts, websites, apps, or books?
My curated daily consumption would consist of, obviously, the usual suspects, in the best way possible: Puck, The Wall Street Journal, The Information, The Ankler, Adweek, Marketing Brew, etc. I like to listen to The Daily. I think that gets my head in the game of what's happening in the world.
And then I do think it's important to pay attention to the right people online, so like Instagram specifically, where they don't necessarily have what you would deem a traditional media platform, but something that they do themselves. So I pay attention to people like Ronnie Fieg and Willo Perron, people that are on the ground creating culture and cultural moments every day. You learn so much. I don't know if they're doing it on purpose, but you learn so much when you're paying attention.
Is there a specific place where you discover talent, somewhere that's helpful to survey the landscape and see what's out there?
Nothing is better than the four walls that I come into every day for work, because all of these people are paying attention to everything happening in every nook and cranny all around the world, in every country, and who's being talked about and who's being loved and who has some amazing voice. So my coworkers essentially are the best possible resource for seeing and understanding what's bubbling.
The best algorithm: the human algorithm!
Exactly!
