RadicalMedia’s New CEO Wants to Test Business Models That Give Production Powerhouse Stakes in Work It Does for Others

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At production powerhouse RadicalMedia, the only thing constant is change.

Originally conceived as a way for founders Jon Kamen and Frank Scherma to explore new content formats after many years in the advertising business, the firm now has a reputation as a go-to place for music documentaries, branded entertainment and long-form content. Radical Media has touched everything from the Questlove musical documentary “Summer of Soul” to the streaming version of “Hamilton” that made its way to Disney+ to “This Is a Gardening Show,” the offbeat Zach Galifinakis series on Netflix that is built from episodes just 15 minutes long.

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The founders intend to keep testing new frontiers, with one tweak to the company’s leadership ranks. Justin Barocas, a founder of the Anomaly agency, is taking up the reins as CEO, while Kamen will move to an executive-chairman role and Scherma will maintain his position as president. With that move, Barocas would like to see the company increase the number of theatrical properties it takes from Broadway to screens, and move into taking a greater amount of ownership in the content it creates.

“It’s not very different from what we see in the marketplace now where the work-for-hire and the services business is changing,” says Barocas, during a recent interview at Radical’s offices in downtown Manhattan. “Being able to commercialize it in very different ways is one of the key areas.” RadicalMedia could look at models that include co-financing, maintaining backend rights, developing proprietary formats, and retaining underlying rights in stage adaptations and branded projects.

Across the advertising ecosystem, owning some of the work created for ads and other promotions has long been a sort of Holy Grail. Many ad concepts become pieces of popular culture, spurring everything from memes to merchandise. Agencies, which once relied on a steady commission, never really got to benefit from any ancillary uses of the intellectual properties they had a hand in creating.

Many have tried. In 2006, for example, the agency once known as Crispin Porter + Bogusky, took a minority stake in the Haggar clothing company as part of its arrangement with the manufacturer. But similar work continues today. Many media agencies are developing practices in what is called “principal media,” a term meant to describe the process of buying up commercial inventory from media companies and re-selling it to advertisers, rather than simply negotiating prices and placements.

RadicalMedia is testing these waters as more advertisers demonstrate a yen to create their own content. Geico is working on a holiday-themed special that is expected to utilize the many ad characters it has created over the years. Athletic-clothing brand Under Armour has set up its own internal studio to better handle its content needs as more advertisers work to capture consumer attention across a wider array of media outlets.

“The idea of being able to use entertainment to solve brand challenges and really commercialize our strengths is where I think what we’re working on in terms of the future. This is the destination for music storytelling, whether it’s theater adapting to streaming or television, whether it’s artists who want to tell their story in a different way,” says Barocas who says that “being able to take that strength and commercialize it” will give Radical Media an incentive “to be true partners” with advertisers, artists and media and entertainment companies.

Kamen sees the new moves as part of the original maneuvers that originally gave rise to Radical. The “constant disruption” of the media and marketing industries “has been going on forever,”: he says. When he and Scherma founded the company, “we always looked and wanted for Radical to have an attitude of embracing whatever those changes will be. HE adds: “We’ve sometimes been ahead of the curve.”

In an earlier era, Radical Media was involved with an MTV dating series, “Gamekillers,” that was produced along with the advertising agency BBH and was backed by a sponsorship from Unilever’s Axe deodorant. Some of the personality types used in the show were also featured in Axe commercials. And Radical enjoyed a long working relationship with the iconoclastic ad agency Wieden + Kennedy, which devised work for Nike that took the company well beyond the typical 30 second commercial.

New concepts with similar themes have surfaced in the broadband era. Some advertisers can back documentaries or series that end up alongside more traditional content selections on Amazon’s Prime Video or NBCUniversal’s Peacock. “There’s no question that brand dollars are going to continue to play a role, even in this streaming universe,” says Kamen. Marketers will need to determine how to make advertising part of the on-demand experience, but “How do you do that effectively? How do you do that tastefully? How do you do that while embracing an audience and making sure that you’re appreciated for having brought something?”

The executives say Radical’s current team will remain in place. Chris Kim, Dave Sirulnick and Jim Bouvet, who head up the company’s studio, entertainment and commercials divisions, respectively are expected to continue in their roles.

Barocas is in many ways making a return to RadicalMedia, rather than an arrival. He worked alongside Radical’s team when he held a job at Wieden, and Kamen gave Barocas and others time to develop Anomaly in Radical’s offices. He intends to keep burnishing the company’s hard won skills in bringing advertisers “something incredibly different” than others, Barocas says. In an industry that is shifting to accommodate new technology, even RadicalMedia wants one thing to remain the same — its reputation.