William Morris Endeavor (WME) and Proprietary Technology for Agents

How William Morris Endeavor (WME), one of the leading talent & literary agencies, uses technology to allow its agents work smarter, better, faster, stronger.

William Morris Endeavor (WME) is an example of effective alignment between an operating model and business model. One of WME’s advantages in the agency landscape is that it is a large and diversified, representing talent across film/TV, literary, commercial, scripted television, unscripted television, music, and branded lifestyle. By focusing on supporting growth with technological developments, WME has made its business model more effective by ensuring that the core components of the traditional operating model has stayed aligned become more, not less, efficient in the new era of representation.

 

Hollywood and Talent Agencies: A brief introductionrichard-lund-hollywood-sign-at-night

In the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood and the film business was dominated by eight major film studios. Actors and actress operated as
individuals, signing long-term contracts directly with the studio with little to no bargaining power over their salary, roles, and contract details. Actors were forced to enter these disadvantageous situations because there was no alternative.

Enter the talent agent. Talent agents work on behalf of their clients to identify opportunities, help them get those opportunities, and to negotiate a favorable deal. In modern Hollywood, agents navigate a more fragmented and complicated ecosystem of stakeholders and decision makers, including studios, producers, casting agents, creative executives, writers, and directors, while simultaneously serving as a liaison for those entities and the talent they represent.

Business Model

By leveraging relationships, information, scale, and expertise, WME provides value to clients by securing jobs and favorable business deals and letting them focus on their craft. WME provides value to other players in the ecosystem by acting as a conduit and point of access to a pool of talent.

Operating Model

Proprietary Technology & Systems

The business model of an agency depends on information flow and sharing. To identify casting opportunities and which people to call for auditions, influence, etc., each agent needs accurate and timely knowledge about what is going on with film and television projects. Due to sheer volume of data, organizing and disseminating this information is very challenging.

The standard operating model entails junior agents “covering” projects, exchanging phone calls and hundreds of e-mails per day to find out information and share it with colleagues. This process enables the department to work together on behalf of their clients with more information than any one person could amass.

WME differentiates by emphasizing developing technology and infrastructure to make this information accessible and digestible. Three of the most relevant software projects endeavors resulted in “Projects” (a place that holds information about any film, television, theater project), Contacts (shares all the agency’s contact information) and Phone Log (a system for keeping track of all phone calls). These applications allow agents to share, access, and act upon information that is continuously collected throughout the day over phone and e-mail.

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In 2013, introduced WME iConnect, a internal and proprietary app designed and built by in-house by a product and development specialists (that no other agency has), which provides WME agents access to all of these platforms through their iPhone and iPad. Through iConnect, agents can access the most up to date information at any time from anywhere.

 

Prior to this innovation, the common practice was to distribute “grids”, or project information, once a day via PDF e-mail delivery or print. PDFs distributed at the end of the day may have contained information that was inputted much earlier and could have been vital on a call or meeting before distribution.

 

Before this application was developed, an agent out of the office received her phone log periodically via e-mail or verbally over the phone. WME iConnect allows agents to access contacts, phone log, and make calls all directly through the app, eliminating the inefficient need to “hub” through the assistant to connect to the individual and find out who called. (Example of old model: see https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/123473https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/23152https://wikileaks.org/sony/emails/emailid/6533).

 

Alignment and Support

In all the ways that the agency business has changed, it has also stayed the same. Business is still driven by obtaining information and using relationships to service clients. Now, with the proliferation of content producers and distributors, it is more important for agents to have their processes streamlined and efficient so can reach more people in a day.

 

Furthermore, the operating model allows agents to take advantage of the size and multiple competencies of WME’s business model to bring in more revenue. Making processes more efficient creates more time to work across departments and cross-functionally. For example, an agent can now make deals for an actress through doing a commercial or endorsement or by lending her name to produce a reality television show in addition to a film or television career. Not only does the operating model support the traditional aspects of a talent agency, it supports the future synergy goals of having multiple cross-department revenue streams for each client and therefore maximizing profits for the agency.

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Student comments on William Morris Endeavor (WME) and Proprietary Technology for Agents

  1. Interesting! This industry is so far outside of my old world that the need for this kind of software had never occurred to me, but now that I see it I can think of all sorts of applications where this could be moved to other industries. It would be particularly useful for component/equipment companies trying to sell their items for use in a large engineering or construction project. The companies typically have sales force members who meet with their personal contacts in the office and at trade shows, but pooling the information about those potential projects would definitely be quite useful for forming a cohesive sales strategy and eventually putting together a good bid.

  2. I wonder why WME wants the technology to be proprietary. It sounds like Salesforce doesn’t actually translate into the process of managing agency business and deal but that some other technology solution could. Is the WME solution so specific to the WME business that it only works there or could this kind of tech process work with agencies in any other industry as well? It definitely seems like a wise competitive advantage for the agency to have their own talent for development and building technology project to improve their business operations. The livelihood on the business relies on people connecting other people to opportunities. I also think it would be interesting for WME to consider how someone could disrupt it (for lack of a better world) given that a lot of the operating model is still fairly similar to how it was in the 90s, 00s.

  3. This post is super interesting to me, I really would never expect to see how useful can innovation in operations be for an agency, but I understand how “just in time” information is crucial for this business to be successful. It might be a stretch to compare it to Wallstreet, but while reading the post, I imagined frenetic agents calling managers, producers, casting directors, all at the same time, and trying to book appointments and get the best contracts just like traders do, trying to get the best deal for their clients using real-time information and having to compete with other traders, with access to the same information. The trader with the best access to the biggest amount of information will get the best deal, same story for the agents.

  4. My only exposure to this world has been Entourage, so very nice to read a bit about the real industry. This is a business that I imagine will always have a high requirement for human interaction; these are big, complex deals that people need to work through together. But that doesn’t preclude automation where it’s not needed. I think it’s impressive in how they’ve scaled a technology solution to have their agents focus on the actual value-add activity – namely securing projects/talent – and gotten rid of the low-value admin work. Doing so not only reallocates costs to more appropriate activity, but also improves the efficiency of the employees.

  5. We live in the world that has become wider in sense of business and competition. Everything went into the Web in addition to the existing physical global challenges in business. I heard that one of the latest innovations is moving to Ideals virtual data rooms – cloud-based security-protected repositories.

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