Media & Entertainment

Refocusing leadership within a reshaped media landscape

Change is disrupting the media and entertainment industry at a breakneck pace. The transition from traditional media channels to direct-to-consumer, on-demand and subscription models has now accelerated as apps, social media, mobile devices and streaming is becoming the new normal. These new forms of media have taken hold and changed the industry along with consumer expectations.

What does all of this change mean for the leaders of media and entertainment businesses today? What questions do they need answered, perhaps more urgently than ever? They need to navigate disruption, form new models and come out stronger with the right leaders, talent, processes, structures and strategies to succeed in the future, whatever it holds.

Current and future media and entertainment leaders must recognize opportunities to rebalance value creation and challenge old norms for doing business. To support their transformation, they need more digital-ready and multicultural talent — resources that are hard to find in today’s market. They need to identify new recruitment channels, upskill their current workforce and build attractive reward and compensation packages. Then media and entertainment leaders must have the capacity to build and inspire diverse teams with varied skillsets.

Our industry-leading search and advisory practice will help your organization solve challenges across your talent cycle, from executive search, leadership assessment and executive coaching to organizational design, succession planning, total rewards consulting, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. Our experienced team of media and entertainment consultants will help your organization evolve to thrive in the dynamics transforming the media landscape.

What we do

Our media and entertainment consultants can help you attract, develop and retain best-in-class talent for your organization.

Adjusting to constant disruptions in the market requires an agile pipeline of leadership talent prepared to weather the storm. We work with you to assess the full spectrum of your talent-related needs.

Where we can help

Our media and entertainment practice has the experience and skills to address the challenges and opportunities facing media and entertainment companies across the ecosystem — from television to social media, gaming and more.

Here are just some of the challenges we help clients address.

Realigning the organization to build new capabilities

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, media and entertainment organizations can no longer operate as silos. As digitization and other media and entertainment trends take hold, traditional forms of media distribution are giving way to direct-to-consumer models. Streaming, second screens, on-demand content, new interactive experiences and social media have become the norm globally. Along with them has come a complex labyrinth of financial, investor and corporate support ecosystems that organizations must navigate. Organizations that are slow to adapt to the transformational forces in the industry won’t survive.

To meet the evolving demands of consumers, content aggregators and ecosystem partners, organizations need forward-thinking talent with agility, creativity and business acumen. They must understand the growing confluence between media, entertainment and technology and recognize the importance of a clear, socially resonant identity.

Our experienced media and entertainment consultants will lead you through strategic workforce planning, helping you align your organizational and talent strategies. We’ll show you how to create an optimal structure and talent acquisition strategy, from setting and recruiting your top team to retraining employees or recruiting at volume to build entirely new teams.

Identifying and developing future leaders

The media sector has unique leadership needs. Highly skilled and experienced leaders and professionals are essential to deliver on your business strategy. However, ongoing consolidation in the media sector is creating a shortage of leaders who are able to head up the increasingly large and complex organizations that result from mega-mergers and other new combinations.

Before your organization can prepare its successors, you must understand your internal talent pipeline and develop a thoughtful and transparent succession strategy. Our media and entertainment consultants offer actionable, research-backed insights that help you analyze and develop the talent you have. We will create an executive Success Profile that aligns with your organization’s strategy to show you whether you’ve got the talent you need for the future.

Our leadership assessments will assist you as you decide how to allocate your resources: either toward learning and development for high potentials or in recruiting new prospective leaders. Then, we help you implement succession strategies and planning processes, so you can map out generations of future leaders.

Rebalancing rewards and employee experience in a disrupted landscape

When big tech entered the media landscape, companies leveraged a mix of financial resources and high-equity valuations as tools to break apart and attract massive teams of top talent. These dynamics have forced more traditional media players to design creative total rewards programs to compete for and retain top talent. Conversely, big tech platforms have increasingly found that employees want more than monetary rewards, sparking the need to more carefully manage talent development and other factors that drive the employee experience.

Organizations need strategies that help them continuously put their employees first, improving the employee experience throughout the employment lifecycle. Our media and entertainment consultants will work with you to build a comprehensive employee experience program.

First, we survey your employees to determine their needs and assess how well your organization is meeting them. We help you spot areas of opportunity to improve as well as build feedback loops. By listening to your employees and creating new opportunities for enablement, engagement and motivation, you’ll boost your employees’ performance and help them find greater fulfillment in their work.

A key part of a winning employee experience is an enticing rewards and benefits program — and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to construct a compensation program that appropriately rewards deserving professionals. We can help you build an effective compensation program that creates an engaging employee value proposition. We can suggest the right strategy for your global market and address trends with a flexible, competitive compensation strategy that reinforces your business goals and aligns with your culture.

Delivering on diversity and inclusion

Widely recognized for their strong influence on society, media and entertainment organizations are under pressure now more than ever to progress underrepresented voices and talent — from the office to the screen. Developing media as a balanced reflection of society starts from within. We assist media organizations with eradicating long-held hiring patterns, eliminating unconscious bias and creating an engaging and inclusive environment for all employees.

We examine your hiring, development, compensation and promotion practices to ensure that opportunities are equally available to everyone and train leaders to make inclusive choices. We use our proprietary assessments and other research-validated tools to help you identify and develop high-potential talent. And we work with you to construct clearly defined career tracks that give up-and-coming talent the experience that positions them for leadership roles. In short, we help you take a more systematic approach to diversity, equity and inclusion and help you build a transformational, inclusive talent strategy that will accelerate your company’s performance.

Let us be part of your success story. Contact us to see how our media and entertainment consultants can help you shape your story today.