As a former Governor, media company executive and now entrepreneur and independent consultant, I have a unique perspective to bring back to the role of Governor.
In my prior tenure as Governor, I focused alot of my efforts on validating our peer group’s role within the larger organization and with educating the rest of the board on the opportunities in digital. I was active with championing the need for a head of digital and was on the committee that found and ultimately hired Maury McIntyre, now the academy’s president. I was also very involved with the brand committee, leading the way for the academy’s new branding and modernizing the strategy and focus on how we communicated the Academy’s value prop. I spent a lot of time with the staff and other board members, making sure our peer group was represented at the highest level. I very much enjoyed that deep dive in.
And while I’m very proud of my time as Governor, now I’d like to approach the role of governor in a different light. Our peer group no longer has to validate our very existence or fight and explain our perspective on our awards. Seth, Marc and the PGEC have accomplished a lot in that area in the last few years. And while that work will always be in play, now is a time to really turn to both our peer group and the industry to see what role we can play.
There are a few initial areas I would like to focus on:
Diversity
We need to focus on diversity from a number of perspectives. Television is leading the way with diversity in front of the camera but not so much behind and also within our own peer group. In terms of growing new leaders and getting fresh blood involved from different cultures and genders, we need to create specific ways to do that. So I think we can look at creating a more formal initiative to drive that diversity and focus on growing ‘new governors’ and PGEC members outside of our current demo. It’s a great opportunity to expand our reach.
Events and Education
And as I make a living with events, I think that’s another area for growth. Perhaps it’s time to look at events as a brand extension, a teaching opportunity and ultimately a networking play. We should be leading the way in creating a culture of socializing where potentially, monthly gatherings become the norm, rather then waiting for much larger, highly produced events. Smaller more intimate regular events would really drive community. We all grow when we get together and learn from each other. And while it’s very important for us to have a presence at major events, we can continue to evaluate what those events do for our peer group and weigh our involvement from that perspective. And what new ways can we bring new information to our peer group? What new channels of education can we explore?
Awards
Our awards and its process have been an ongoing and evolving enterprise which has been the bright light in our peer group for many years, establishing us as leaders in our industry and helping to expose great work to the community at large. The challenge is that with new formats, such as VR, new job roles and new consumption habits, the awards and the ability to ‘judge’ them have been a moving target. We need to strategize early on on how to expose all the great work that’s been done to our membership for proper vetting and voting as well as communicate the opportunity to be part of the process. This may mean a re-eval and championing of different scenarios for viewing and voting that extend far beyond the Academy’s process.
Relevancy and Demos
Lastly, we need to be relevant. There’s a community of creators, influencers [they hate being called that], content creators and producers that move through the industry in a completely different way then the mainstay of the TV Academy’s demographic and even our current peer group. In order for the TV Academy to stay relevant and for our peer group to grow and evolve, we need to bring that community in. And the only way we are going to bring that community in, is to evolve our offerings and make them relevant for the era of cross platform content development, new monetization models and the ever evolving consumption habits of the modern consumer.
I am very excited about what lies ahead and look forward to exploring all these new opportunities.