Jordan Levin had a keen eye for the kinds of shows that would get teens and twenty-somethings to tune in when he was entertainment president and later co-chief executive of the upstart WB broadcast network. Levin, who spent 10 years at the network before leaving in a 2004 management shakeup, had a hand in the network’s signature hit shows, including “Dawson’s Creek,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “7th Heaven,” and “Gilmore Girls.” While at WB, also Levin oversaw Kids’ WB and helped to launch the American Girl film franchise under WB’s original movie division. Levin earlier was a Walt Disney Co. executive, where as a development director at Walt Disney/Touchstone Television he helped develop family hits such as “Home Improvement” and “Boy Meets World.” After a year spent consulting, Levin joined four colleagues producers Peter Aronson and Mike Karz, and talent managers Kara Welker and Dave Rath to launch a specialty content development and talent management company called Generate. In February, the firm signed its first deal with MTV Networks to create youth-oriented programming for multiple media platforms.
Question: You’ve spent most of your career working in ventures geared toward teen-agers and young adults. What’s the appeal?
Answer:
Young people really set the consumption habits and trends for society, whether it’s music, fashion, television, film, and now broadband and mobile. They have this ability to connect with each other; there’s this instantaneous adoption of new trends and new styles. Older people look at the thing on their hip and say, “It may do all these other things but it’s still just a phone.” For younger people, it’s a communications center; it’s their conduit to all forms of communication, information and entertainment.
Q: What have you been doing since leaving the WB?
A:
After I left the network in the summer of 2004, I directed an episode of “Everwood” over the fall and really started thinking about Generate last year. In the meantime I was doing consulting. My partners and I really started to come together to launch Generate during summer of 2005.
Q: What’s the goal of your new company?
A:
It is a production and talent management company that is going to target younger consumers wherever they are accessing and experiencing their entertainment. We’re media neutral in our approach. Consumers are becoming more empowered because of technology and the customization of media experiences.
Q: So it’s a content bet, not a technology bet?
A:
Right. The chokehold for the last two decades and more has been on distribution. There was a large pool of talent seeking access to limited distribution. We believe the chokehold is shifting to talent, so that there is a limited pool of talent that a now-larger pool of distribution has to seek in order to make their pipelines sing.
Q: Would you have expected this change when you were helping launch the WB back in the mid-’90s?
A:
My choice to go to the WB was predicated on the belief that television was following other media in moving from broader-based to more targeted media. Technology is always what facilitates these changes. Cable television enabled the proliferation of more channels. FM radio not only enabled better quality sound, it enabled the creation of more niche-oriented formats. Now satellite radio and pod-casting continue that trend. We’re big believers in embracing technology to generate new business models, but we’re not making a bet on a specific piece of technology.
Q: Your partners are longtime colleagues and friends. How did you all come together for this new venture?
A:
It came together very naturally. We all happened to be in the position to work together at the same time. Peter Aronson and myself have always discussed it since were junior executives in the television business 17 years ago, and Mike Karz and I have talked about doing something like this for years as well. Pete was finishing up his stint as executive producer of “The Bernie Mac Show,” Mike was coming out of a New Line deal. At the same time we all knew Dave Rath since the early ’90s, during the early stages of the alternative comedy scene here in Los Angeles.
Q: Why does Generate have a talent management division in addition to production?
A:
We realized our approach to content development also extended itself very well to talent management. Kara and Dave specialize in representing talent who have multiple skill sets they’re often both writers and performers. They’ve had a history as an agency of specializing in comedy, which is especially ripe for both broadband and mobile offerings. They represent talent who embrace new technology and in many cases are using it to communicate directly with their audience, such a blogs and user-generated content.
Q: Who would be a good example of this?
A:
One of their clients who has been getting a lot of attention is Andy Milonakis, who has a show on MTV2. Andy was discovered by Kara and Dave on the Internet from the content he was supplying on his own. They were producing the Jimmy Kimmel show and introduced him to Jimmy, who took a shining to him, put him on the show and that led to the MTV deal. Now he’s in his second season and they’re expecting more from him. Not only does Andy have the show, he also has a ring-tone deal, a healthy Web presence, and there’s movie ideas in the works.
Q: How has focusing on programming for young people created a competitive advantage in the companies you’ve worked for?
A:
Our new company, Generate is founded on a principle that was one of the core principles of the WB, that both audiences and advertisers will seek efficiency over reaching a wide variety of people. Efficiency means attracting the highest concentration of viewers within a specific demographic. Advertisers will pay a premium for efficiency. And they will pay an even higher premium for efficient delivery of a hard-to-reach audience. Younger consumers are the most difficult to reach because they are in so many places, media-wise.
Q: You were on the ground floor of building the WB. How did that experience inform how you’ve helped set up Generate?
A:
I joined the WB when we were about the same size at Generate is now. We had decided the WB was only going to be successful if it approached business in a slightly subversive fashion. When we were forming the company, we felt there was opportunity in being small and agile and able to move quickly, unlike the larger networks. From a management standpoint, we had passionate young people as well as seasoned executives with experience reaching our target audience. That’s the same approach we’re taking at Generate.
Q: What kind of rules did you have success in breaking at the WB?
A:
There used to be a rule that people in film never work in TV and visa-versa. But we were giving opportunities to young film talent who had never done TV shows in their lives, like Kevin Williamson at “Dawsons Creek” and Joss Whedan with “Buffy.” We also sought out half-hour writers to create hour shows. Brenda Hampton, who created “7th Heaven,” came out of half-hour. Amy Sherman-Paladino created “Gilmore Girls” and came from a “Roseanne” background.
Q: What was the result of that cross-pollination at the WB?
A:
It gave our shows very cinematic sensibility, which appealed to young people who happen to be heavy moviegoers. In the mid-’90s, TV dramas at that time were generally very dark in tone and procedural in execution, like cop shows. There were not lighter hour shows on the air. We felt this was one area in which we could set ourselves apart.
Q: How does that experience translate into how you hope to utilize talent for productions at Generate?
A:
It’s what we hope to be doing here, like taking game creators and talent who have been creating on the Web, and moving them over to more traditional media, like television and film. At the same time, we’re taking talent from more traditional media and giving them the opportunity to create in new media, such as gaming, broadband and mobile.
Q: What was going on that led to the need for WB and UPN to merge and become the CW network this fall?
A:
As it loses share to new media, especially younger viewers who are the core for both UPN and the WB, traditional media has to consolidate. Even at their height, there was an inevitability that both networks would be challenged financially to survive as long as the revenue was derived from a broadcast model with the current state of available affiliates. The pressure increased as broadcast became less attractive for delivering younger audiences, since TV now competes with games and online usage for their attention.
Q: Was it that debate over whether the network should broaden its audience that lead to the circumstance prompting you to leave the company?
A:
There was always discussion about who our audience should be the entire time I was there. Let’s just say, I was a true believer in the value of more targeted media and micromarketing.
Q: What do you find interesting in the approach that it appears the CW will take in targeting its audience?
A:
Both the WB and UPN have had problems whenever they tried to broaden their audience instead of staying tightly focused. It looks like they’re coming together to replicate the target demographic that was most successful for the WB throughout the first 10 years of its existence, as well as the audience that led UPN to its greatest success in recent years. I think that validates the original strategy that (founding WB Chairman) Jamie Kellner created, which was a further evolution of the Fox strategy, which itself was an evolution of ABC’s strategy. A new network has to attract disenfranchised audiences and offer something different. And going young was the way in for us.
Q: Does a network hit an awkward age at the 10-year point?
A:
You essentially have to make a couple of decisions. A: decide who are you and whether you are going to stick to that; and B: if we are going to be more targeted, just like a radio station what kind do we want to be? Jamie would use the radio station analogy all the time. You can either age up with your audience, such as a rock station like KLOS, or you can flow your audience though, like a KROQ. What MTV Networks does is flow through the audience on many of its networks in an effort to keep the median age stable. Each is designed to serve a consistent audience profile. And that is very attractive to me, because that means they’re not moving targets for our content.
Q: Is your inaugural deal with MTV Networks a good example of the kind of work Generate wants to do?
A:
This is an ideal first deal for us, The focus of our company is reaching younger consumers. The sweep of MTV Networks, from MTV to VH1 and from Nickelodeon to Comedy Central and Spike, collectively reach that audience in an incredibly powerful way.
Q: How does Generate’s partnership with MTV Networks work?
A:
The production side of our company is exclusive to MTV in the broadband and mobile space to provide content to their own broadband or mobile networks or their other partners. It’s also exclusive in basic cable, but first-look in the rest of television. That means that we have to bring them everything first, and if they pass on it we can’t take it to another basic cable network. But we can go to broadcast the five networks or pay, like HBO or Showtime.
Q: How did you get into the television industry?
A:
I loved movies and I loved television all types, and I went to the University of Texas specifically to go to their film school. I worked on some movies in college, but I eventually came to the conclusion that television offered more opportunities to make an impact and have your voice heard in the process. My first job was as a program associate at Walt Disney/Touchstone Television, an entry level executive training position. I worked my way up to the director level before I moved to the WB.
Q: Coming into the business as a fan, did you ever become disenchanted after learning how the process really worked?
A:
I was certainly surprised by how many people didn’t seem to love the medium they were in, or in some cases, have an appreciation or historical context for what they were doing. To me if you’re in the movie business you should probably know about the Marx Brothers or who Howard Hawks is. And there are a lot of things that can make you cynical after you’ve been in the industry a while. But when something really works, and it connects with people and does so in an original way, that makes up for the lows. The highs can be few and far between, but they’re pretty great.
Jordan Levin
Title:
Founding partner
Company:
Generate
Born:
1967, Chicago
Education:
B.A., cum laude with special honors, University of Texas at Austin’s College of Communications, Radio/Television/Film Department.
Career Turning Point:
Joining the original team that launched The WB television network.
Most Admired People:
Jamie Kellner, founding chairman of WB
Hobbies:
Skiing, fly fishing, surfing, wine collecting
Personal: Lives with wife Helen Hutchison in the Pacific Palisades with their two daughters and one son.
