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Todd Goodwin
October 15, 2020
Have an opinion? Add your comment below. A deep love for music and a passion for working with people while helping shape their futures have been guiding principles throughout the career of this week's Power Player, Todd Goodwin, SVP and Head of °1824, a Marketing/Content and Experiences Team at Universal Music Group.
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How did you become interested in the Music Industry?
I’ve always loved music. It’s always been a huge passion of mine. I come from a very musical family, so I always had that around me growing up. My passion for music led me to pursue opportunities when I was in college at Texas State University, which was a short drive from the Austin music scene. I got a job at my college radio station, KTSW, and I became very interested in the music industry and marketing. Working at KTSW gave me the understanding of what kind of jobs were out there, and I built a network of people in the industry, mostly record promoters that were targeting college radio stations. That was the starting point for my career in music.
Where did you begin your career in the Music Industry and how did it lead you to UMG?
While working at the college radio station, I also worked part-time with Columbia Records during my senior year. And on top of that, I was also working at Waterloo Records in Austin. My position at Columbia had me working with a Sony Music rep, and I learned about a position that was opening up in Dallas, and I then worked as an assistant for the Epic Records promotion team for the local reps there. That led to my full-time career. I moved into a more marketing-focused role before relocating to Atlanta, where I managed the company’s relationship with the independent retail community on the East Coast. With that job, I traveled back and forth to New York, and I became close with Frank DeCicco, who was running the Sony Music college program. I later received an offer to be his right hand to run the day-to-day operation of Sony’s college marketing team in New York.
There were a few executives who had left the Sony system and were now at Universal, and they threw my name over to Universal Music Executive VP Michele Anthony, who I had crossed paths with earlier in my career at Sony and her work with the Pearl Jam team. I had a few great conversations with Michele about philosophy, what I wanted to do with the team, and what I thought would be possible at Universal. I joined the company in 2015 as part of Michele’s Commercial Services team, and she has really empowered me with the resources and the support that I need to keep growing and evolving. That’s how we’ve been able to take the college program and transform it into °1824, which now functions as an internal creative solutions team powered by a full-time staff of 13 and a part-time student team of 85.
What is the °1824 Division and what led to its creation?
From the outset, our core mission is to identify, train and recruit a diverse group of young people who are looking for their first break into the music industry. The way we provide that experience at °1824 is by essentially serving as a creative solutions team at the center of Universal Music Group. We serve as an in-house content creation division. We have a Creator Partnerships team that executes campaigns with the influencer community. We produce about 100 experiences a year, mostly virtual in 2020. We handle a lot of local, student-run, and non-traditional press outreach. Additionally, we are an ideation resource for our labels. All of those verticals are led by my amazing management team and powered by our student employees. Our goal is to identify gaps within our company and fill them by bringing young creatives into our system and giving them a platform to grow and thrive. As a result, we can do more things in-house that our labels formerly outsourced. Whether it’s shooting music videos, creating lyric videos, producing events on college campuses, or developing campaigns with the creator/influencer community – we serve all of those needs in-house as best we can.
When I was first hired by Universal, my first project was to build a competitive college marketing program. It was extremely important for developing artists, and UMG wanted to have a resource to support our new signings and get them in front of the key 18-24 college demographic that was driving streaming activity and helping our industry return to growth.
The first thing I did was an audit of each label and what they needed more of. Nobody needed more flyers or posters. What they needed were skills that were going to push their business forward. It became very apparent that quick churn content creation was a top priority. That’s when the lightbulb went on.
We started hiring film school students and young content creators to join the team, and we pivoted from only focusing on personality pieces, social media assets and concert capture, to creating official videos completely in-house. From the casting, budgeting, editing, and anything that a music video entails – we found a way to do it all in-house. We also added a few motion graphics people to our team and that really took our creation to a new level.
Once the content team became successful, we realized we needed to reposition ourselves with our artists, labels, and in the company. We chose the name °1824 because I felt like it encapsulated both who we are and who we are trying to reach – not just from a promotional standpoint, but from an opportunity standpoint. We created a platform for the most talented of this key demographic to do amazing things and put them in a position to lead. Our philosophy is identifying the skillsets that we need to push our business forward. We hire young people with the right skills and bring them into the company to do actual work and start their careers.
How does the °1824 Division differ from a traditional college internship program?
Most college marketing programs are built on this idea that you want to hire a bunch of people to go and promote things, which I think misses the point. You want to put students in a position where they can actually lead, offering skills that the company might be missing. Graduates from our team are in a better position to highlight what they’ve built, what they’ve created, and what they’ve taught the company as well. That’s the significant difference in our philosophy. For a student to graduate and be able to say they were a director of photography on a video that’s generated 50 million views – that’s highly valuable.
We structure our team very much like an agency and have specific disciplines, including content and creative partnerships. We have built our own press team, which oversees local college, student-run, and non-traditional media.
The leadership is a huge differentiator as well. Frank Hill, who is the Senior Director of °1824, and the rest of my management team put everything they have into the recruitment and mentorship of our staff.
When we hire somebody as a freshman or sophomore, we want them to have a 25-year run with the company. It’s about looking at students not just as people that we need to mentor, but as leaders who we can learn from. I think that balance and a skillset-first mentality is crucial to our philosophy and why we’ve been so successful.
We want a great spread of reps across the country, but ultimately, we’re looking for skills rather than just the location, which many other programs focus on. We understand the importance of having a team culture where voices and opinions matter, and we empower our team to put those ideas into action. I want the best talent coming on our team, and people should know that there’s opportunity on our team, even if you’re not in a major music market like New York or Los Angeles.
What are some of the challenges in marketing to the 18-24 demographic?
Our target audience want to be treated as curators and leaders of culture because they’re so connected to it, and they’re building and defining the future of what entertainment and the world looks like. They’ve grown up in a world where for their entire lives, they’ve been connected to a smart device or the Internet, and they can see through things very quickly. As a result, marketing campaigns must be extremely authentic. You can’t have people who just “parachute” in – stepping into a community to market something and then leaving. You need to hire people who understand Reddit, TikTok and how to engage with platforms to build meaningful conversations that spark authentic engagement.
Things happen very quickly, and what’s trending today could be irrelevant tomorrow. I think what labels and companies have to understand is that you can’t make things viral. We don’t get to decide that. The things that become massive viral successes often happen organically. At a company like Universal, I feel our labels and our company do an excellent job of understanding our artists and their fans, but at the end of the day, having employees who are on the ground level and an active participant in culture is extremely important.
In the time since this program began, the world has been turned upside down by COVID-19. How has that affected the way your program operates?
Like so many people around the world, COVID-19 has required us to be creative and innovative in how we continue to support our artists and labels. From the content standpoint, we were on a set shooting videos seven days a week. We were either shooting a documentary piece, music video, or capturing a live performance. When COVID hit, approximately 40% of our content team was actively learning how to produce lyric videos. Now, pretty much our entire content team is learning different programs to create different types of content, whether that’s animation, lyric videos, or documenting virtual experiences.
We’re also finding unique and innovative ways to interact with our artists on platforms like Zoom. We have been creating music videos in a new way by shipping green screens to artists’ homes and directing videos virtually. From the rep standpoint, we’re not at shows every night anymore, and we’re not taking face-to-face meetings with partners across the country as we typically do.
In past years, we hosted a conference in New York or Los Angeles where our entire team would come together. We’re doing that in a virtual capacity this year. We are creating these ideation task forces, and our reps actually work directly with the artist, management, and label to build campaigns to kickstart their careers with a fan-by-fan approach. The silver lining is that it’s challenged us and brought a lot of new ideas to the forefront. There are lot of learnings we’ll retain and continue to act upon whenever the world returns to “normal.”
The presidential election is fast approaching; tell us about your "When We All Vote" virtual campaign. Were you working directly with Michelle Obama in this effort?
We worked directly with the “When We All Vote” campaign team to develop a telethon-style ‘Hour of Action’ on August 20th, which encouraged people to use this hour to do something to change the world and bring attention to voter registration. We teamed up with “When We All
Vote” and had a few artists join like Devon Gilfillian and Chaz French. Rebekah Espinosa from my team hosted the event on Zoom and about 150 Universal employees participated. During that hour, we had 150 people texting potential voters in Pennsylvania and Florida, and we reached over 200,000 people in an hour!
We followed that event recently with a campaign with Voto Latino. We reached around 80,000 voters with another hour-long texting event. We’re also hosting a series of speaking events virtually with universities, where we’re having our artists participate in Q&As with students to really highlight the importance of voting. We’ve had Louis the Child speak to Syracuse University, Bobby Sessions speak with the University of Georgia, and more. Many of our artists feel they have a responsibility to use their platform to reach potential voters and speak to the importance of voting, and we want to help them accomplish that goal.
On the topic of young adults and politics, do you perceive a sense of apathy in this year's presidential campaign from that demographic?
Not at all. As a staff and as a team, we’ve been very committed to voter registration. We actually have a task force within our team that’s committed to voter initiatives, and everything that we’ve done has been spearheaded by this taskforce. I always ask them to be very open and honest with me, and I’m hearing that they and their peers are taking the election seriously because they see what’s at stake. It’s been pretty inspiring see their engagement so far.
Additionally, 11 of our current staff and four of our alumni are also part of the UMG Youth Task Force for Meaningful Change. Inspired by civil rights pioneer John Lewis, the YTFMC was created by and is spearheaded by our team member Chelsea Hannah, who is a Hampton University graduate and currently attending grad school at Columbia University. That team has done some excellent work, including hosting two events in the last couple of weeks to educate students about how to identify voter suppression and what to do about it.
°1824 recently hosted a mentorship event, PLUG IN: How Young Black Creatives Are Breaking Into The Music Industry. Can you tell us more about that event?
When you have a team that has employees based across 50 different cities, everyone comes from a different background. We’re a very diverse team, and we share goals to break artists and a build community of future industry executives. We’re very supportive of each other. This opportunity to work with the Congressional Black Caucus and be a part of their programming came through our public policy team. Universal has been involved in the CBC’s Annual Legislative Session for the past few years. Asia Howard, who’s a Senior Manager on my team, and Michelle Locke, our administrative assistant in New York, came up with ‘PLUG IN.’
It can be overwhelming when you’re a student or creative individual, and you’re trying to figure out how to take your passion and creativity and turn it into a career. It means a lot when you see somebody who shares some of the struggles you’ve been through. Asia and Michelle did an outstanding job. We had 170 applicants, and we are going to choose 15 individuals out of that group to go through a year-long mentorship program. The program includes quarterly meetings with UMG employees where we can help match their skillsets with opportunities in the industry and guide them on the right path. That’s the basis of the program, and we kicked it off with the two-hour long program with the Congressional Black Caucus. We’ll start the initial program where we do the mentorship activity before the end of the year, and we’re very excited about it.
We've had James Corden’s 'Carpool Karaoke' and Jerry Seinfeld's "Comedians In Cars Getting Coffee"... your team has developed the 'Chop It Up' program, taking the concept to a whole new level - literally. Tell us about that program and how it came to be.
During a meeting with our content team, two of our team members, Josh Charow and Nick Freeman, had mentioned a helicopter company, FlyNYON. Josh and Nick were at the New York University Film School at the time. We had talked about, ‘wouldn’t it be crazy to do an interview series where we interview artists in helicopters?’ Josh and Nick came back a day later and said they reached out to FlyNYON, and that they were interested. They then worked out a deal with the company, which was both strategic and great branding for the company. The concept was a two-camera shoot where artists were interviewed while being harnessed in an open-door helicopter flying above New York City. We had a good run with that series. The first episode was with Chantel Jeffries, and we then had Olivia O’Brien, Lil Mosey and Tank the Bangas. The series was a really amazing idea that was brought to us by the team, from ideation to execution.
Your program has placed more than 80 college reps into full time positions, 50 of them at UMG. Who are some of these individuals?
We started the team in 2015 and had our first graduating class in 2016, and that’s when we started hiring people within the company. We have graduates from our division in positions at all of our labels at UMG. Internally, we have Kristina Waters, who was recently profiled in All Access’ Women To Watch column, who’s now an Associate Director of Marketing for Universal Music Enterprises (UMe); Kiara Jackson, a Promotion Executive at Republic Records; Niya Fleming, who does A&R at Def Jam; James June, who’s at Capitol Music Group on the digital team; Christian Hill, who’s part of our sync team that covers Republic, Def Jam, Island, and Verve; Sami Herman is Darcus Beese’s assistant at Island; Natasha Zemlin, who’s in the sync department at Interscope, and Josie Goson, who’s on Interscope’s marketing team. There’s so many more, and I’m so proud of all of them because they’re all contributing in so many different ways.
We take mentorship and development seriously. To see our alumni take ownership of their positions and progress really quickly – it’s been beautiful to watch. I also have a 13-person full-time staff (including me), and out of my full-time staff, seven of them started working for me when they were students. I feel fortunate to be in a position that’s allowed me to grow my own people and see them thrive at full time members of the °1824 team.
Of which °1824 Division achievements are you most proud?
°1824 itself is what I’m most proud of because we took a college program and created an internal creative solutions team that serves many different needs. When the division was UMUSIC Experience before folding into °1824, we participated in a campaign to launch the Lord Huron album, and we won a Clio Award with Republic Records. That was a big accomplishment. I would also say creating the “Make You Mine” video for PUBLIC. John Jigitz and Brandon Chase on my team did such a phenomenal job writing the treatment and directing it. The video now has close to 60 million views, and we shot it for $6,000. We also did three of the lyric videos for 5 Seconds of Summer’s last campaign, and a massive video for Queen with “Thank God It’s Christmas.”
We’ve also been working closely with UMG’s Diversity & Inclusion team to have very important conversations that transcend music – whether it’s about social justice, mental health, etc. – there’s so many things we’re using our platform for. Yes, music will always remain at our core and bring people together, but it’s the conversation that people create around that music that can be the most meaningful.
What are your plans for the °1824 Division in 2021?
Expanding our model internationally is a big priority. I would love to take the °1824 model internationally and start launching iterations of the team in additional territories. We did a proof of concept with the U.K. that worked really well, and we want to launch verticals in other territories. We also have some interesting ideas around A&R that we’re going to start implementing over the next year.
Really, the focus remains on continuing to build and grow – we want to do bigger videos and bigger events, and work with bigger creators and more platforms. At the end of the day, I want to see the people on my team grow and succeed, and I want my team to continue to spread out into the industry and get more full-time placements. No matter what we do, retaining the best talent on our team and watching them move throughout the company is always going to be one of the things that makes us successful.
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