For this third blog entry, I thought I would stray a little bit from what I have been talking about in previous posts concerning education and professional logistics of entertainment management. For this installment, I want to profile a man that all of us college students looking to break into this industry should study and look up to for inspiration: Ari Emanuel. Today, Emanuel is strongly considered one of the top two most influential and powerful agents in the entire entertainment industry. With A-list clients like Mark Wahlberg, Oprah and Martin Scorsese, it is not difficult to understand why it is vital for us students hoping to graduate soon to learn about how this man came to be what he is today: a titan of the industry.
Emanuel cultivated a modest path to where he is today, with no special education or professional connections to vault him to the top of the food chain. Instead, he attended the very small Macalester College in Minnesota for his undergraduate degree, and did not pursue higher education. Instead, he decided to pursue his goals quickly and moved to Los Angeles where, like all other agents starting out, he began working in the mailroom at CAA, one of the biggest agencies in the world. After becoming an agent after 3 years, he bounced around from various agencies including CAA and ICM until leaving and starting his own management agency known as Endeavor in 1995. All of Emanuel’s professional and educational history up to today are recorded on his Linkedin page, provided here.
Emanuel (right) with Hollywood actor Mark Wahlberg.
While all this above may seem ordinary and uninteresting, Emanuel’s true genius began with the creation of his own agency: Endeavor Talent Agency. Known as an aggressive and goal-oriented man, Emanuel decided to do anything he could to become the “King of Hollywood“. In 2004, this hope was on its way to becoming a reality when Emanuel, already with one of the most powerful agencies in the world, decided that he wanted to expand and merge with IMG, which had a large sports representation base. It took over ten years to do so, but in 2014 Emanuel helped purchase IMG for about 2.5 billion dollars and became the co-CEO of the largest talent representation agency in the world.
An article documenting this merger and the background behind it was written by Vanity Fair in March 2015 and can be found here.
“Last spring’s $2.4 billion dollar merger of WME and IMG could be Ari Emanuel’s dream come true.”
-Vanity Fair, March 2015
I feel that it is vitally important for college students like us to truly understand and appreciate what Ari Emanuel was able to accomplish. It goes to show that even with no special or extreme higher education, and an ordinary start, anyone can rise to become one of the most important people in this industry. Hard work, a concrete goal and an innate desire to achieve that goal are all things that can push us towards our ultimate desire of success in the entertainment management business. Though we still have a little bit of time left in our undergraduate lives, it is never to early to create a set of goals that we hope to achieve in our professional futures.
Angad Kanwal 