Creative 100: Media, TV & Streaming Innovators

Whether penning newsletters, developing memorable shows and podcasts, or standing apart in the cluttered streaming landscape, these media innovators confronted the changing tides and mastered the art of storytelling. Barrie Gruner, Executive vice president, Hulu marketing and publicity Bridging brands: Barrie Gruner enjoys working closely with Disney+ colleagues in the streamer's partnership with Hulu. “Bridging the two brands and teams as a milestone moment for the company was hugely rewarding,” said Gruner. Telling hopeful tales: Gruner worked on We Were the Lucky Ones on Hulu. “As a Jewish entertainment executive, I am so proud to touch a project that tells a family's true and hopeful story about surviving the Holocaust. Doing this today is more important than ever,” said Gruner. For the birds: Gruner admits that her hobby might age her beyond her actual years, but she admits to being passionate about birding. “I do it almost daily. It is calming, educational—gives real perspective. I do have to say that I'm offended on behalf of some of the birds with names like the ‘lesser goldfinch’ and ‘common raven.’” —Kyle O'Brien Jack Kelly, CEO, Three26 Ltd Monetizing news: YouTube channel TLDR News founder Jack Kelly is making strides where more established publishers have failed: turning a profit from YouTube news content. With viewers increasingly watching YouTube on the bigger screen, TLDR News—roughly 10-minute explainers for those under 35—seems a more lucrative bet than publishing on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. It monetizes through programmatic ads placed by YouTube as well as host-read sponsorships. Creating for the platform: Kelly credits this success to using YouTube in ways that creators would, rather than reclipping broadcast news segments. TLDR News has five core channels including Global, EU and Business, publishing videos like "How a US-Saudi Defence Pact Could End the War in Gaza," with nearly 190,000 views and over 1,000 comments. And it uses that engagement to its advantage: If a video gets too many thumbs-downs, it makes another one discussing the audience response. While marketers remain squeamish about news content and platforms pull back their support, successfully packaging news to younger people is rare. —Lucinda Southern Issa López, Showrunner, director, writer, True Detective: Night Country Hit show: Issa López is the Mexican director, writer and producer who created True Detective: Night Country, the fourth season of HBO’s True Detective series. Starring Kali Reis and Jodie Foster in her first adult TV role since 1975, the series concluded with widespread acclaim. The New Yorker called the fourth season “a feminist revision of a series best known for its macho poetry and its ogling eye.” Flipping the script: López told Vanity Fair that she envisioned Night Country as a “dark mirror” to the first season. “Where True Detective is male and it's sweaty, Night Country is cold and it's dark and it's female,” she said. —Aleda Stam Marion Maneker, Founder, writer, Artelligence Art attack: “Trying to Understand the Art Market,” the blunt headline in Marion Maneker’s LinkedIn profile, goes some way to explain how even seasoned experts grapple with the industry’s complexities. Formerly the president of ARTnews, publisher at HarperCollins and features editor at New York magazine, Maneker’s newsletter, Artelligence, covering the global art market, was recently bought by buzzy media startup Puck. Beyond the art nuts: Maneker’s missive boasts 32,000 free and paid subscribers and features stories on events like New York’s gigaweek (when auction houses fantasize about doing more than a billion in sales) and fresh reporting on Inigo Philbrick’s attempt at a comeback after his $86 million fraud. With that scope, Maneker’s newsletter is read not just by art houses, auctioneers and galleries, but also increasingly by those funding the transactions: bankers, insurers and lawyers. —Lucinda Southern Jane Marie, Producer, co-founder, podcaster, Little Everywhere Carving her own path: Jane Marie is a Peabody- and Emmy Award-winning journalist and podcaster who co-founded the podcast production house and recording studio Little Everywhere in 2016. Hit shows include The Dream, which over its three seasons has tackled multilevel marketing, wellness and the life coach industry. Finally! Marie and Little Everywhere’s most recent podcast series—Finally! A Show About Women That Isn’t Just a Thinly Veiled Aspirational Nightmare—follows the everyday lives of American women and bills itself as “reality TV, just on the radio.” The Financial Times said the show had an “understated yet distinctive charm” with “sweet, funny and fascinating self-portraits.” Out for fun: Before starting her own venture, Marie was a producer for esteemed radio show This American Life for nearly a decade. TAL host and producer Ira Glass told The New York Times that Marie is “simultaneously out for fun and has a deep sense of injustice. Often people who have a keen sense of ‘That’s not fair!’ aren’t also charismatically funny.” —Brittaney Kiefer Terry Minogue, Executive vice president, creative marketing, Paramount 'A Mountain of Entertainment': After three years and 15 installments, Paramount+’s brand campaign, “A Mountain of Entertainment,” has yet to disappoint. Terry Minogue is a key reason why, as he oversaw its latest entry, which went viral for “its absurdly humorous storyline involving Sir Patrick Stewart throwing [the animated character] Arnold at a mountain as the band Creed sang.” Built for TV: Minogue has honed his TV marketing skills for years, helping build brand campaigns for numerous Spike TV properties, such as Bar Rescue and Ink Master, and SyFy. Defining challenge: Minogue is striving to reach fragmented audiences in entertainment with custom offerings across Paramount’s portfolio. To do that, Minogue has a personal mantra that drives the marketing: “On time, on budget and, most importantly, on brand.” —Jameson Fleming Sam Reich, CEO, Dropout Changing the game: Sam Reich has been instrumental in building out Dropout’s offerings, including creating the streaming service’s most popular show, Game Changer. “I believe I am one of Hollywood's only CEO slash game show hosts,” he said. New game? New rules: Much like Game Changer, where Reich writes new rules for every episode, he’s rewriting the rules of Hollywood to make Dropout a sustainably built media company. “We are trying to be a talent-first company by (a) creating a terrific on-set environment, (b) not asking for exclusivity and (c) paying generously and sharing in profits.”Creative influences: Reich’s love of magic, escape rooms and social deduction games have influenced Game Changer episodes, including one show where three comedians had to literally escape their green room. —Jameson Fleming Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner, Creators, showrunners, Fallout A win for Vault-Tec: This past year, Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Graham Wagner brought one of video game publisher Bethesda's hottest franchises to the silver screen. Fallout premiered on Amazon Prime Video and saw 65 million viewers in its first 16 days—the second most-watched title in the platform’s history. Fans and critics alike sang the series’ praises, with Rotten Tomatoes giving it a 93% approval rating and calling the show “an adaptation that feels like a true extension of the games.” Tim Cain, one of the video game’s creators, applauded the series for matching the quirky yet dark mood of the games. Existential threat: "Film and television have both been facing one existential threat after another for our entire careers," Robertson-Dworet and Wagner told ADWEEK. "The challenge there is for writers to try and not be overly reactive to those threats. Just try to do what genuinely interests you in the moment you find yourself in, and hope that you’re not alone in that." Advice to aspiring creators: "If a director wants to practice directing, they have to spend a lot of money to do that," they said. "Writers have the advantage of low overhead. Buy Final Draft. Buy Fade In. And find yourself some free time to write. That’s all you need really." —Aleda Stam Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz, Co-directors, executive producers, Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV Dark history: Mary Robertson and Emma Schwartz shook millennials across the country this year with the release of Quiet on Set; the documentary series showed what was going on behind the scenes on children's TV programs in the 1990s, with a particularly damning focus on producer Dan Schneider’s tenure at Nickelodeon. The series led to conversations around treatment of child actors and Schneider releasing an apology video. On the hunt: Following the #MeToo movement, Robertson saw a string of viral videos from Schneider’s shows featuring underage stars doing innuendo-heavy things that she thought evoked pornographic imagery. The idea for the documentary began to form as Robertson teamed up with Schwartz to reach out to cast and crew who worked on Schneider’s shows. Personal mantra: Robertson, founder and president of Maxine Productions, a part of Sony Pictures Television, said: “Stay at the table.” —Aleda Stam Francesca Sloane, Creator, producer, showrunner, Mr. & Mrs. Smith Remake this: Francesca Sloane has a history of writing for television greats. She wrote and produced for the Fargo television series, then wrote for Donald Glover’s Atlanta. Most recently, she partnered with Glover again to create Mr. & Mrs. Smith, the spy thriller TV show based on the 2005 film of the same name. The show quickly became one of Amazon Prime Video’s top five new series debuts ever. Candidly critical: When the show launched, Sloane was openly honest about skeptics wondering what she and Glover were doing working on a spy show. But the goal was to “subvert” the spy genre, she wrote in an open letter. “No one would need a show that retold the same blockbuster movie,” she said. “But what we set out to do was to make something wholly original.” —Aleda Stam Christopher Storer, Creator, director, showrunner, The Bear Delicious TV: After storming the Emmys with FX series The Bear, Christopher Storer is one of the most in-demand talents in TV and filmmaking. Season 3 of the show, which follows a renowned chef and his team overhauling a family restaurant in Chicago, is one of the most anticipated premieres of 2024. New guy [in advertising]: For Coca-Cola, Storer directed the ad “New Guy,” about a man who meets his girlfriend’s family for the first time. The ad was inspired by the hit series, featuring a similarly spirited and chaotic family. To ensure the commercial had the same look and feel as The Bear, the crew even borrowed the same lenses that were used to film the show. The pressure of time: “Part of the reason why I even wanted to make [The Bear] in the first place was I probably become unhealthily obsessed with time in a lot of instances, and it can create anxiety, and there’s no better setting than a restaurant for the pressures of that,” Storer said at the Television Critics Association press tour last winter. —Brittaney Kiefer Emily Sundberg, Writer, consultant, documentarian, Feed Me Business meets culture: Equally interested in stories about bars where Goldman Sachs interns spend their weekends and the new formulation of Glossier's lip gloss, Emily Sundberg has you covered with her daily missive Feed Me, a sharp blend of business news and culture. Born two years ago, Feed Me was a product of Sundberg’s hunch while working at Meta that there’s an appetite for daily business news combined with aggressive coverage of New York culture. The right place: Growing up in Long Island exposed Emily to “some of the subcultures I'm fascinated by (the world of finance, frustrated teenagers, people who are close enough but not quite in New York City).” That location also allowed her to study at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, which she credits as probably the most important step in her career path. Current creative side projects and hobbies include poker and filmmaking (she's made a film about Gardiners Island, America's oldest privately owned island), and she's just finished a fragrance certification course after finding herself regularly writing about the business of perfume. Personal mantra: “Winners don't sit on the bench.” —Lucinda Southern Lulu Wang, Creator, director, executive producer, Expats Expats: Building on the success of her 2019 comedy-drama film The Farewell, Lulu Wang's next project, Expats, was released earlier this year. The miniseries, which premiered on Amazon Prime Video, was based on the 2016 novel The Expatriates and follows a forlorn and depressed American woman—played by Nicole Kidman—living in Hong Kong with her family when tragedy strikes. Two doors: The show spends the first four episodes chronicling three American expat women dealing with grief in Hong Kong, but in the fifth episode, Wang turns the story on its head. At the Toronto International Film Festival last year, she explained her desire to “create two doors” into the show: The first is the pilot, while the second is this fifth episode, which steps away from the protagonists to put their lives into context among the tertiary characters living in the same spaces. —Aleda Stam Check out Adweek’s full Creative 100 list for 2024 here.

The Creative 100

Creative 100: Media, TV and Streaming Innovators Changing the Storytelling Landscape

ADWEEK's 2024 honorees are carving their own paths

Barrie Gruner, Executive vice president, Hulu marketing and publicity

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