At a time when TV and film is becoming more expensive to produce and having more trouble standing out in a fragmented entertainment landscape, brands are becoming an essential tool for creators to both finance and market their projects across platforms.
CAA’s head of media and partnerships Libby Bush has been responsible for leading the agency’s team behind collaborations between hit series like Netflix’s “Bridgerton” and Flonase and Apple TV+’s “Severance” and State Farm. She’s also worked closely on connecting brands directly with CAA clients through projects like Ariana Grande’s Swarovski ad campaign, the NBC competition series “On Brand with Jimmy Fallon” and Kerry Washington’s YouTube series “Street You Grew Up On.”
“What we try and really remind everybody in the marketplace is that for things that can’t get financed, brands should be one of the calls you make. But it’s not just about getting things made. It’s about, ‘let’s get the show made and make sure extra people find it’,” Bush told TheWrap’s Office With a View. “Our job is to make sure that brands understand there’s so many different ways to work with storytellers and creators. We’ll continue to see creative deal making, because talent’s ambitions and storytelling are so big and so broad,” she added. “One size does not fit all in this business. There’s a lot of options on how to financially get deals done and creatively tell great stories in entertainment and culture.”
Bush, who grew up as an athlete playing soccer, basketball and lacrosse, landed her first job out of college at the NBA league office in Manhattan for its team marketing and business operations unit in the early 2000s, giving her an in-depth, behind the scenes look at everything from sponsorships and ticket sales to marketing and in-game entertainment. She would go on to serve as the marketing director of the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks from 2007 to 2009.
Eventually she would “get the itch” to take a look at a career in the broader entertainment landscape and end up landing at Disney, where she first started working with brands to help finance ABC’s TV shows. Then Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, sparking her curiosity for brands and content even further. She would move over to the studio to lead its global partnerships team, where she was responsible for the MCU’s integration and co-marketing deals dating back to the original “Iron Man” in 2008 through “Guardians of The Galaxy” in 2014.
“I learned a lot about storytelling in all those places. Obviously, when you work for incredible IP and massive companies like the NBA and Disney, you learn the power of your story,” she said. “So one of the biggest lessons was to hone my own story.”
By 2015, she decided to take a chance on herself and launched her own agency, Tandem Entertainment, which would consult for Disney and other clients looking to broker brand deals, promotions and other partnerships. In 2021, CAA came knocking to acquire Tandem for an undisclosed amount.
While acknowledging she was never looking to sell Tandem, Bush said the CAA acquisition turned out to be an “amazing deal for all sides” after being in and out of conversations with various parties since the company’s second year of operation.
“We went pretty far down the road with a lot of different suitors. But when I had conversations with CAA, it was the first time I understood what a massive company they were that has incredible reach and scale and connectivity and really an entrepreneurial foundation in terms of how they think about the people that work inside their company. That was a very easy decision for me,” she said. “But I was always in the business to make a mark in the industry, put really interesting partnerships out in the world and incentivize great conversations and build a place where people want to come and work.”
What did you learn at the NBA, Disney and Marvel that has helped you in your current role?
Understanding how you want to position yourself and your offering is a lot of what I took away because a lot of people have preconceived notions about what working with or inside of Disney was like. If I was going to put really interesting programs and partnerships together, then story was everything — whether it’s the story of the business you’re building, the person that you are as an executive, or what it is you’re selling out into the world.
I would also say I learned a lot about mentorship and mentoring. When you work in really big corporations and you start out young in your career in these big organizations, you realize really quickly that people will continue to grow in their careers and they may end up anywhere. So to me, it was always about treating everybody — whether they were next to you, below you or above you — the same, and how important it is to collect relationships and nurture them. Your network becomes everything to you in your career. Understanding how to use it and protect it and nurture it is a really big lesson for me throughout those companies.
What’s your advice for someone looking to get started in the industry or advance in their career?
Go for it is my advice. Oftentimes, we are convincing ourselves not to do something. ‘Don’t ask for the promotion. It’s too early. Don’t go for that job. I don’t check every box in that job description.’ My biggest advice is that you don’t know what you don’t know until you get to a place and I can’t imagine ever hiring somebody that checks every single box.
I certainly didn’t get promoted because I waited for somebody to recognize my worth. It takes fighting for yourself, asking for things even though you might not feel qualified or you might not feel like you’ve hit the mark completely to deserve it. The worst people can say is no.
It’s a little bit of the fake it til you make it. I never worked for an agency. How did I have the right to start one? But I believed enough in myself, I was willing to take the risk and I was willing to hear the word no as many times as I needed to until I heard the word yes. Holding myself back and not doing it because I didn’t have the qualifications was just never a part of the trajectory for me.
What are some of the key trends you and your clients are focused on?
One of the biggest trends is talent want to be in business early with brands. They realize in a much bigger degree than I think they have in the past decade how interesting brands can be to them, creatively, financially and from a marketing perspective. That’s been something that we’ve really been excited about wrapping our arms around sitting inside of CAA.
Everybody wants to get in early, because everyone’s realizing that there’s just way more impact that everybody can drive. It’s going to take a little while for platforms to get comfortable with that and feel okay that they’re not going to lose out on anything, but the product at the end of the day is just going to be better all around for everybody.
On Brand with Jimmy Fallon is a great example. That was a dream of Jimmy’s forever. He’s been talking about building the show creatively and had this idea for maybe a year or so. We couldn’t figure out a way to get that show made because it was a big show. It was a big idea and an expensive swing. So unlike the traditional route that he would usually take, Jimmy and his team here at CAA on the television side showed us the show and said, ‘Listen, we know NBC likes the show, but it’s a really expensive show and it’s been sitting in development for a really long time. Do you think the show would be interesting if we took it to brands?’
We saw the creative for the show and were like, ‘Absolutely, this is TV gold for brands.’ The idea that they can go through Jimmy instead of the platform became a really interesting opportunity for us. So we took it out to market. We went to NBC and said, ‘Listen, let us partner with you guys. Let us take this to brands. You tell us what you need from an investment perspective, and we’ll get the show done together. And together, we will bring in great brands that don’t hurt the creative, that enhance it, keep it entertaining, and then financially make this show a viable opportunity.’ Eight months and 10 amazing partners later that show started airing on Sept. 30.
When I was building this division, we spent the first two years embedding ourselves in the platforms because we needed to prove to all of our partners that we are here to help the business, not hurt the business. So we need to understand the world of ad sales, the challenges when it comes to marketing shows and the budgets that are getting squeezed. So how do we develop really strong relationships on the platform sides with Disney, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and Peacock? That’s what’s helped fuel the success. We never could have done Jimmy’s show or America’s Culinary Cup with Padma Lakshmi that we just closed a great deal on or Decades of Sports with CNN on the Warner Brothers side if we didn’t have those relationships.
What do you make of the trend where brands are becoming directly involved with content production through their own studios?
It’s been around for a while for sure. Obviously what Red Bull has done from a studio perspective is brilliant. PNG has had a tremendous studio for a really long time. There’s great brands that are doing it really, really well. And I would say it takes patience and it’s not for everyone.
I think the majority of brands will not fall into that category for a variety of different reasons. At the end of the day, brands have to sell products and that’s what moves their stock price and that’s what makes consumers excited about them. Whether they are the executive producer of a piece of content, a show, or marketing to consumers, I think it really matters and they’re delicate choices.
Our team tends to like brands as marketers more than as studios. It’s not because we don’t believe in the brands that are doing it. They’re brilliant at it and in it for the long haul. They’re okay investing a lot of capital in exchange for a long term return, because it takes a long time to see that money back. But we tend to play in the brand-as-marketer space. There’s a lot more flexibility for brands, a lot more ways that they can use their investment dollars. So that’s been more of my team’s focus.
We’re seeing some brands that have been in the studio space for awhile start to think about building a studio for a brand. It’s essentially another marketing tool for them. So do they have to invest in script development and become the reason that a show gets made or can they have more success doing Jimmy’s show or something with Issa Rae? It’s nice that there’s options, but it’s going to be a super small set of brands that I think continue to play in the in the studio space.
What about the debate around traditional TV versus YouTube?
Personally, we love it, because it just gives us everybody options. Not everybody wants broadcast television or streaming or social. Our value proposition is helping to support the content ecosystem, from film and theatrical releases to scripted and unscripted television to some of your biggest digital content series. Now we’re working closely with the Mythical team, we’re working really closely now with Dhar Mann and brands need that type of variety. There’s so many brands in the world and so many different types of consumers.
There’s different objectives that brands have to reach and those platforms and different content creators provide opportunities to really diversify their marketing strategies. It allows us to call on everyone. There’s not a brand in the world that we shouldn’t be having a relationship with because of the breadth and depth and variety of the type of content that we have.
We’re working really closely now to try and figure out what does the relationship between our team and YouTube look like. They’re obviously not a small platform and they work with brands all the time. But is there a way that we can help support their efforts in all the content creators that CAA represents? How do we replicate what we’ve done with big broadcast companies and streaming companies and take it onto social platforms? We’re starting to toe dip into it.
Kerry Washington is a big client of our agencies and she’s got a YouTube series called “Street You Grew Up On.” It provides a different outlet and audience for her. We’ve brought brands into that show every single season and they’ve been tremendous marketing partners to grow her channel and to also help ensure that the show gets made every year. So we need all the different types of creators and platforms, at least in today’s world, as we think about the variety of companies that are still excited about content and culture.
