David Kramer has taken the reins of United Talent Agency at a fraught time of consolidation and contraction for Hollywood’s core business of film and TV.
It’s no accident that the agency’s first big public event after his promotion to chief executive this month was the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. The agency’s presence at the event through its MediaLink advertising consulting arm is sizable, and it vividly demonstrates how UTA has diversified into branding, marketing, consulting and the creator economy.
Kramer should know. He joined what was then a fledgling boutique literary agency in 1992, straight out of USC’s Peter Stark Producing Program. In a “Strictly Business Live” interview from Cannes Lions, Kramer pointed to the agency’s scrappy startup roots as a guide to the company’s growth in areas beyond TV and film.
“We had to be in the discovery business, we had to be in the development business, we had to be in the in the collaboration business with one another to compete with other agencies at that time,” Kramer said. “The great thing is that discovery, that development, that collaboration, that client-centric approach has been imbued across the DNA of all the different areas that we’ve either built out ourselves or the businesses we’ve acquired, and making sure that that philosophy holds to this day, as we whether we’ve moved into music, comedy, touring, sports.”
The overriding goal with acquisitions or expansion initiatives is to create more business opportunities for UTA’s core clients who work in creative industries.
“The playground has expanded in so many different ways. That allows our people who work at UTA to try different things, to be challenged in a different way, to be ready for these crazy shifts we’ve seen in our business,” Kramer said. “More importantly, it allows our clients, who are more ambitious and more excited about trying different things than ever before, to work with a group of agents who are excited by all those opportunities and ambitions as well.”
David Kramer
One of the biggest changes that has come during the tumultuous past five years was the end of packaging revenue – historically an enormous source of revenue for large talent agencies. But that decades-old business paradigm was squashed in 2020 by a successful reform campaign waged by the Writers Guild of America, asseting that the whole system was rife with conflicts of interest. Kramer acknowledges that the sunset of packaging fee opportunities has been an adjustment, which is another reason why the agency has been on a diversification push.
“The end of packaging came at an interesting time when the value of packaging was also starting to diminish,” Kramer said. “The diversification of our business started to insulate us from some of the revenue that was created from packaging. You’ve also seen a lot of of actors who never would venture into to television. Those walls have come down. And you’ve seen movie stars go into television. Television stars go into movies. That’s created a lot of financial opportunities for them and for the agency that in conjunction with the diversification into music, comedy, touring, creators, sports, news, speakers, publishing has been super-additive.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.
(Pictured top: David Kramer greets the crowd June 17 at the MediaLink party held at the Hotel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes during Cannes Lions)
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