Joey Carson's Secret to Influencers Signing MILLION Dollar Contracts 🤑 E70

This episode delves into the business strategies behind influencer marketing and the entertainment industry's transition to digital platforms.

1. Evolution of Monetization: How influencers and reality stars have evolved their monetization strategies from simple episodic fees to comprehensive personal brand expansions.
2. Digital Transition in Entertainment: Insights into the shift from traditional TV to digital platforms and its implications for content creation and distribution.
3. Entrepreneurial Spirit in Media: Examples of how entrepreneurial thinking in media has led to innovative content formats and revenue streams.
4. Importance of Social Media for Creators: The critical role of social media in building a viable brand and securing opportunities in the modern digital landscape.
5. Investment and Growth Strategies: Discussion on the strategic investments and partnerships that are shaping the future of media and entertainment.

1. Introduction to Joey Carson

Overview of Joey Carson’s career and his role in transforming traditional media practices. Dan Fleyshman: "Joey has managed budgets from $50 million to $300 million and has been instrumental in guiding our agency’s transition into a venture studio."

2. The Shift to Digital Media

Discussion on the transition of media from traditional TV to online platforms and its impact on content production. Joey Carson: "We were the first to put video content on phones during 'The Simple Life', which fundamentally changed how we think about media consumption."

3. Monetizing Personal Brands

Exploration of how influencers leverage reality TV and social media to build and monetize their personal brands. Joey Carson: "Paris Hilton was the pioneer of using a reality show to springboard into a multi-faceted brand."

4. The Business of Influencer Marketing

Insights into the operations and strategies behind running a successful influencer marketing agency. Joey Carson: "At Elevator Studios, we've transformed influencer collaborations into significant investment opportunities."

5. Future Directions and Advice

Carson shares advice for upcoming influencers and content creators about navigating the complexities of the industry. Joey Carson: "Focus on authenticity and consistent engagement to build a brand that resonates with audiences and attracts business opportunities."

• Establish a Strong Social Media Presence: To build and leverage your brand, cultivate a significant following and engage actively with your audience.
• Diversify Revenue Streams: Explore various monetization methods beyond traditional advertising, such as merchandise, memberships, or exclusive content.
• Network Strategically: Build relationships within the industry that can lead to collaborative opportunities and potential partnerships.
• Stay Informed About Industry Trends: Keep up with changes in content consumption and platform algorithms to optimize your strategies.
• Embrace Entrepreneurial Thinking: Always look for innovative ways to expand your brand and enter new markets.

Joey Carson, CEO of Elevator Studio, has 25 years of experience in the television industry and is hailed as a trailblazer in unscripted programming and a trailblazing force in digital entertainment. Having helmed the production of over 6,000 hours of broadcast television, his expertise is unmatched.
He presently leads Elevator Studio, renowned for its groundbreaking influencer marketing strategies that help them sign million-dollar contracts and brand campaigns for global corporations. Additionally, he spearheads Elevator Rolling Fund and Elevator Syndicate Fund, fostering early-stage enterprises and startups.

People

Joey Carson, Dan Fleyshman

Companies

Elevator Studios

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

None

Content Warnings:

None

Dan Fleyshman
What does it take for someone as an influencer or just a character, you know, person sitting at home to actually go out there and make a show and actually get it signed? So here's my answer to them. Every agency in town, they have scores of assistants, and their sole job is to scour all of TikTok, Instagram, everything, looking for that little thing. That's why I say, if there's something special about you, television will find you.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to a very, very special edition of the Money Mondays. Because I have the CEO of it all. Not just my agency, but all. When I say all, we have the elevator syndicate. We have elevator nights, we have elevator rolling fund, we have elevator speakers, all stemming from elevator studios, our agency that spent over $60 million with influencers doing 110,000 paid posts over the years.

But what you're intrigued for is this gentleman has a 30 year long tv career before joining me half a decade ago. So how did I convince him? I have no idea. It took me five months of negotiations to get him over here. So if you guys have ever watched in the past, real world road rules, keeping up with the Kardashians, simple life with Paris Hilton, you can blame this guy sitting 2ft to my right because he was the original CEO for the first eight years of Bun and Murray.

So remember when you watch those reality shows, at the bottom it said bun and Murray. That was his fault, too. After that, he worked with Sony, he worked with Fox, worked with doctor Phil and some amazing people during the course of his career focusing on the tv and film industry. So how did I get him to come over to a social media agency back in 2019 2020? Well, he saw the overarching vision.

I wasn't just focused on influencer marketing, and because he had that three decade long career and, you know, managing $100 million budgets and $300 million budget and $50 million budgets, it was a big leap for me to say, can you come here to work with my social media agency? I want to become what's called a venture studio. A venture studio is when we go into, invest, or take equity of companies, whether our clients, our friends, or people that inbound come to us through our live events or through our social media. Over the course of time, as you guys have heard, I've done 43 angel investments or venture studio investments through elevator studios because of this gentleman sitting next to me along the way, we have what's called the elevator syndicate. You can check it out@elevatorsyndicate.com.

That is for accredited investors. We have 846 accredited investors and growing in that group. And we've raised $44 million over the last three years for food and beverage brands and consumer products. What we do is we put in three to $6 million per deal into companies doing two to 20 million revenue. You guys see me post about those type of companies all the time.

Everbowl, icon meals. It'll take too long to list all the companies, but you guys hear me talk about them throughout the podcast because it's important to me. We find companies doing two to $20 million because we want companies that we can help pour gasoline on the fire. And these companies have gone on to do some great things. And so without further ado, make sure you listen carefully because this is the one human on the planet that I listen to.

Cause he is my CEO, Mister Joey Carson. Well, thank you very much. I can't believe we're actually sitting together on the same couch in the same. Place at the same time, right? That never happened.

Okay, so, Joey, typically I say give us the quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money. But if you need a little bit more than two minutes because of your career, go for it. Well, I think you covered a lot of it there. Been very blessed with my career. I came out here in the late eighties after I graduated from college, actually, to pursue a music career.

Joey Carson
Last thing I wanted to do was get a job. So I spent the first ten years of my career working in the studio system. I worked for Columbia Pictures television first, and then I worked for Fox, which was really the big leap in my career early on because it was the early days of Fox when the network was just getting going and we were doing everything. We did all of the daytime syndication shows, all the talk shows. We did cable television shows.

That was back in the days for the older people in your audience would remember movies of the week. We did that. So we had a lot of fun and I had great mentors in that job, and they gave me a lot of leeway. So I was, before I had joined Fox, I had never been to New York in my life. And suddenly now I'm flying there almost every other week.

Yeah. Doing all the production in New York and that sort of thing, which was really good. And I went about as far as I could go at Fox. And then that's when I met the folks at Buena Murray, John and Mary Ellis. I had actually known of them and worked with them at Fox.

I'd actually given them money for a pilot at the time. Yeah. And it was a really nice experience working with them. And then I found out through an agent friend of mine that they were looking to kind of take this company to the next level and that sort of thing. So we met and I joined them, and we did a lot of really cool things together.

We did. We did a lot of things for the first time that people had never done. You know, when we did the simple life, that was the very first network prime time reality show, which you just don't see. Like, all the network shows that are on now, they're all game shows and that sort of thing. So we did that, and obviously that changed the landscape a lot.

We were the first people on that show to put video content on the phone, which was kind of an idea that I had had. In fact, a lot of the things we did that I did back then and we did together, and I've done since, really basic entrepreneurial things, like how do we create a new revenue stream? And so, like, when we did, you know, MTV's big popular show, the challenge, well, that original originally was the real world road rules challenge. So we got cast again. It was like, how do we come up with something?

So we said, well, let's take people from real world and road rules and more. It's like Marvel versus DC, right? And it had been going on for a little while, and it was like, and it was popular. So we thought, you know, how do we turn this into something else? So that's when we, as a group, we were like, well, what if we had men versus women?

And what if we did a theme around this where we had the gauntlet or the inferno? And so we turned that one show into like five different franchises, but again, which, again, we're all great. It's still going now, but, like, bigger than ever. And. But that really just came out of a basic entrepreneurial need of, like, how do we, you know, get more money in the door and do different things at the.

Around the same time? I did. I was fortunate enough to work with Steve Lipscomb when he started the world poker tour. So I was a founding board member of that. And we went through that entire process, actually, from getting the show up and running to being sold, which is a great story, probably too long for this.

And then we took the company public, and then we sold it again. And I think it was 2010, so I did that. Actually, after I left Buna Murray, I had a spent a couple of years in Silicon Valley, which was really interesting. And I didn't know at the time. I had an idea with some other people to create an online virtual world or a massive multiplayer online game, as they call them.

And I did a $4 million series, a raise straight off the deck that we did, which to me, I was like, okay. To me, it was almost like selling a show. Like, okay, we sold a show. I've kind of found out later, like, how rare that is. So that was a really fun experience and did that for a few years.

Ultimately, that company didn't survive due to the 2008 financial crisis. And then after that, some time after that, I went to work with Doctor Phil. He and I had been friends since he moved to California. I was the first person that he met when he. Yeah, and he's from Texas.

I'm from Texas. He played football. I played football. He was a huge tennis player. I'm a huge tennis player.

So we just started hanging out, spending a lot of time together. And we're just, you know, the best of friends for well over a decade before I ever went to work for him. And actually, after I left doctor Phil is when you and I met, which, by the way, I just realized this next week it'll be six years. Six years that I actually started. So we were already having lunches and talking.

But, yeah, I think next week is the six year anniversary of us being together. That's when this episode comes out. So it's coming out on our 6th anniversary. Yeah, this comes out next Monday. There you go.

Dan Fleyshman
Okay, Joey. So we cover three core topics here. How to make money, how to invest money, how to give away to charity. On the make money side, how do tv stars, or especially reality stars, make money? Well, it's different now than it was 20 years ago when I first started.

Joey Carson
Originally, pretty much the only way a reality tv star would make money is by getting an episodic fee, which back in those days is really small. Maybe $3,000 an episode, maybe $5,000 an episode. Sometimes, in rare cases, $10,000 an episode. And that was it. It was just, you know, so if you're in ten episodes and you got 10,000 an episode, you made, you know, 100 grand.

That was it. Later on, actually, honestly, I think really, Paris Hilton was the first one to really break that boundary. Like, when we originally did that show, she had this vision of becoming everything that she is today. But back then, it was just an idea for her. She was like, I want to have a fashion brand.

I want to have a fragrance brand. I want to, you know, all these things. And no one had really done that before. And so she used the show to kind of springboard herself into that stratosphere these days. Now, it's still pretty much the same.

It's very hard for a reality star to carve out.

The only thing they can really carve out is, like, whatever their existing business is. But by being on television, like, I remember even back in the simple life days and even with world poker tour, what we used to say at world poker tour is the show is the commercial for the tour, right? So if you're on a reality show, it's really a commercial for the ventures that you're doing. And because where are you going to get that airtime, right? Like, you know, a 32nd spot cost, you know, tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of dollars a minute, and it's a commercial here, you're just, your brand is on television, right?

So it's, there's a lot of free promotion there. So the smart, and again, since Paris was really the first one to do it, I mean, obviously you've seen what the Kardashians have done. I mean, there's multi billion dollar companies going on there strictly as a result of that. So it's. You're not really going to, I always tell people if they're going to be on a reality show or whatever, you're not going to make money.

In fact, it's probably going to cost you money by the time you get a lawyer to review the contract and all of that. But think a little bit down the road of how this benefits your personal brand. A lot of kind of what you talk about in personal branding, right? Okay, so I need you to do a reality check for people. Okay?

Dan Fleyshman
We're in Hollywood, we're in Los Angeles, where people from all over the planet fly in with visions of grandeur, that they're gonna be a star, whether it's a music star, an acting star, a tv star, or social media influencer, etcetera. Walk us through what it takes to actually land at full, not a little cameo take to land a tv or a movie role. Well, if you're an actor, it's, it's very, very difficult. And the competition that you are up against is staggering. So think about it.

Joey Carson
If you have been in plays all your life, and maybe you went to college and you got a BFA in college, and then maybe you even got a master's, you got an MFA from a prestigious school like Yale or something like that, that's still no guarantee that just because you have that education, it does not really matter when it comes down to a casting session. It just. What? So what you want to. I have a very close friend who's, like, a very well known, famous acting teacher.

Her name is Leslie Kahn, and she has a line that I think is really good. And she says, I don't want your acting to be the problem. Right. So when you walk in there, your acting is nailed. And so then it really just becomes about your interpretation of what's on the page and how you read for that role.

I'll give you an example. Think about it. Most people watch any tv show and they think, how hard can it be? Right? I could do that.

I mean, how hard is it? I just memorized some lines. That's not the case. Damon. No problem.

Dan Fleyshman
Tom Cruise, whatever. Yeah. They're just. And these guys are so good, and they've been around for so long, they, and this is the sign of a true master. It looks like they're not acting at all.

Right. And they're not in a cap. Yeah. It looks like they're not doing anything, but that's because. But if you take any pro athlete, pro musician, and when they're doing, like, if you watch, you know, Michael Jordan, LeBron, it's like, you know.

Joey Carson
Right. But they don't realize, like, what's behind that. Right. Yeah. The 200,000 shots beforehand.

Exactly. And so I think, and the same thing is true for writers. A lot of people want to be writers again. It's like, how hard could that be? I'm funny, right?

Yeah. I mean, or everybody wants to write a script. How hard could that be? Well, it's really hard. And so with acting, I tell people, you know, treat it like, you have to think about it.

You're coming out here competing against professionals that have been doing it for a long time. That would be like me saying, you know what, I'm going to go play on the ATP tennis tour now. I'm a really good tennis player. I'm nationally ranked in my age group. I have been, like, my whole life.

But that's a far cry from being. Go fight with Federer. Right? I wouldn't even get a point. And so people what they, when they think about it, when they say, I'm going to come to Hollywood, I'm going to be an actor, that's literally like saying, I'm gonna go be in the NFL.

That just. So that's the reality check. But the way to mitigate that is just like LeBron or Steph Curry or anybody just, you know, shoots a thousand balls a day, you have to do that with your acting. You have to be practicing every single day doing scenes like you and I would do a scene for at least an hour. Think about it.

If you want to be a professional athlete, what's better? If you're gonna train 1 hour a day or 2 hours a day or 3 hours a day, right? Or be like Kobe and train all the hours of the day? Yeah, you have two a days. You have, you train in the morning, you train in the afternoon.

So people think. And it's hard. Look, you come out here, you gotta work. So most people have to get a job. When are you gonna have time to.

Well, you actually do have time to practice and rehearse and do scene work and those sort of things, but, you know, then you go on the audition. The other thing that's different about here's the other reality check for everyone out there is that in the old days, if you got called in for a role to read, you would go down to the casting director's office and wait in line, almost like the doctor's office. And then you would go in and read in front of the casting directors, the writers, the other, you know, studio executives, whatever. That's all gone. Everything's on Zoom now.

Dan Fleyshman
Wow. Yeah. So look at it this way. If you're a casting director and before you might see 1012, maybe call it 20 people a day. Those are appointments, people coming in, doing all that.

Joey Carson
Now you're on Zoom, and you're seeing over 100 people a day. So if you're an actor. And so now every actor has to make, we call them self tapes. And so an actor will make a tape. Well, your tape has to be good, like within 3 seconds, or else, boom, you're out onto the next person.

So it's that much harder to break into it as an actor. That's not saying you, it's, you can't do it. A lot of it also depends on what you look like. Like, what is the role like? You and I would never be cast for the same role, right?

I'd get some old guy role. So that's a huge part of it. So. And remember, if they're looking for somebody that's in my age group that looks like me, there's probably seeing 300 other people that look exactly like me and might be better than me, probably are better than me. Okay, so there is a lot more platforms now for people to work with compared to back in the days when we, we can name the channels before MTV, BET, VH One, ABC, like, we could literally name the 30, 40 channels, and there was 99 total.

Dan Fleyshman
Right now there's a thousand plus channels that we can't even think of, never even seen in our lives. And there's Hulu. Apple has their own platform. YouTube has their own platform. I can't even name how many platforms are.

And then there's sub platforms with Peacock having over here, HBO go change their name to this thing over here, and Cinemax changed their name to this. And there's just like a whirlwind of platforms, and each of them need content. Some of them have gotten hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars in funding to create these platforms to fight against the holy Mecca, which is Netflix. With so many shows that are out there, there are a lot more roles. But how do you stand out once you land a role?

So now you've gone on to a tv show, now how do you stand out when there's thousands of other shows? Well, depending on what your contract is with the show and confidentiality and all the things surrounding about that, it can actually help you enormously because, and actually, as the studio, if they're like, if they're bringing you in and you have a following of two, 3410 million people, that's actually, that actually helps the studio. So they're also looking at that as well. And that's really true in the book space. Like, I've had.

Joey Carson
Think about it, how many authors have come to me in the past couple of years with good pitches for books, good outlines, and they've gotten the meeting with, say, Simon and Schuster or somebody like that, and ultimately they've been turned down because, and the note always is, go build up your social media following and come back because they need help getting it out there. So it's almost incumbent upon you, if you're in your brand, especially in these areas, to really work on that, because it's only, it's just going to be one more reason why the studio is going to choose to work with you. Like, let's say you're on the edge and you're really, it's close or whatever, but if you have an active, engaged following and are popular, for lack of a better word, that's going to help you. Conversely, though, a lot of people think that because, like, let's just say somebody has a big social media presence. I can't even count the amount of times people have come to me in these last several years, especially since you and I've been together and saying, hey, you create a reality tv show around.

How many times does that happen? That was my next question. Yeah, that was my next question. I'll give you, let me ask you. The question that was legitimately the next question.

Dan Fleyshman
So we're also in LA and Hollywood and we are bombarded, you and I with elevator studio. We have 3500 influencers that we've w nined. We've actually physically have their tax information and paid. Yeah, that was just last year. And all of them, not all of them, but most of them think that they could have their own tv show.

What does it take for someone as an influencer or just a character, you know, person sitting at home that think that their household is funny, their family's hilarious, they should have a show. Cause everyone seems to think that. What does it take to actually go out there and make a show and actually get signed? Everybody thinks they are a reality show and the truth is you're not. And so here's my answer to them.

Joey Carson
If you're worthy, for lack of a better word, of having a reality tv show based around you, television will find you. I always tell people that. And here's why. Every agency in town, every production company, so think William Morris, CAA, UTa, on and on, every production company like Buena Murray, my old company, all these other companies, they have scores of assistants and interns and their sole job is to scour all the TikTok, Instagram, everything looking for that little thing. And so that's why I say if there's something special about you, television will find you.

Because the leap from social media to television, it's not like from here to here. It's from here to the moon beyond. It's back in the day. This goes back as far as my fox days in the nineties. And even Buena Murray, we would have celebrities, especially after the Paris Hilton simple life thing happened.

We took pictures from countless celebrities, which I major names, major, major household names that, you know, and they would come in and they would say, we would say, okay, like, what's going on? And they would say, you should do it. You should do a show about me. And we're like, okay, what's the show? Well, I lead a really interesting life and I do this and I travel around and I have crazy kids and this and that.

And we'll just say, yeah, that's not a show. We're all pretty similar in our lives to a large degree. Right? So then I'm not saying that to discourage you. It's like you say, this is a reality check on reality.

So the best thing you can do as an influencer or as a personal brand or any type of entrepreneur, if you're a business guy is just do what you do and be great at it. Look at the people that have broken out. Guys like Gary Breca. Right. Or Andrew Huberman.

Right. Even Joe Rogan. I mean, Rogan was back. The fear factor guy. Yeah, that's who he was back in the day.

Dan Fleyshman
Yeah, he was fighters. Yeah, he was, he was the host of that show for a long time. Great show. Super nice guy. Work decades before we even think about it.

Joey Carson
Right? And his podcast, you know, he's the first one to say, I just started it off as, you know, I just kind of thought it was fun to. Do and talk to people, smoke weed, talk to your friends. But that became the brand. Right.

And his own personality stood out in that. That's which what makes him so huge. Okay, last question. Because we actually have to host the money Mondays, our weekly Zoom call. By the way, you guys can register for that.

Dan Fleyshman
Themoneymondays.com comma. We go live every Monday, 04:00 p.m.. PST. Myself, Joey Carson, and some of our business friends will hop on there, actually. Wow.

I gotta go. So final question, because we're gonna have Joey back on because we talked all tv, this time I want to bring them back on to talk about the agency influencers in that whole world and all of our craziness and our investments. So Joey Carson, out of all the guests, I've never had the same answer. And again, I don't think I'm going to have the same answer right now. Uh oh.

Okay. 100 years from now, when Joey passes away, you're going to be many, many years, 100 years, 120 years from now, you're going to have robot arms and biotechnology and keep going. And let's say you've got $100 million at the time, what percentage of the $100 million do you leave to your two daughters?

Joey Carson
All of it. Because I trust them to carry the values that I hopefully instilled in them, to do the right thing with it, both for themselves and for other people to create opportunities to give to various charities, whatever. But I would trust them. He said, it's so clean, so powerful. Alright, guys, we're gonna bring Joey back on.

Dan Fleyshman
I might even film it tonight. For all I know. We are bound by our responsibility to you guys that are part of the moneymondays.com. It's really important to us. So I'm glad to see a bunch of you guys there.

100% of the profits goes to the wild jungle. So if you want to go on there, it's $200 a month. All that money goes to the wild jungle to help support our 209 animals because they are very hungry, as you guys can imagine. Over at wild jungle, you can check us out on social media. Wildjungle Wyld.

But as you guys know, we grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. And our guests here think it's rude to not talk about money. So it's really important for you guys to talk about it with your friends, family, followers, staff, etcetera. Because it's real life. Legal, accounting, finances, IR's, tax debt, borrowing money, your FICO score, your credit score, all these things are real life stuff.

Nothing I said is evil. All of it is reality. And we have to be able to have these discussions. Thank you guys for keeping us. We've been number one to number two for, I think, 66 out of the 72 weeks we've been live.

That is all due to you guys. So it's really important for you to like, comment, subscribe, etcetera. As you notice, we don't do ads here. We are running this out of passion. We want you guys to have these real discussions.

We have a 93% listen through rate because of you guys and because we don't sit here and read a bunch of two minute, five minute commercials. Not that I'm against commercials, obviously. We are an agency, so we like that concept. We just don't want to do it here. We're going to hold out as long as we can.

We've been holding out for 70 plus weeks now, so we're going to keep fighting the good fight, just paying for this ourselves. Because we want you guys to talk about money. We want you guys to be out there investing, understanding it, having open discussions. So check out Joey Carson. Check out our company called elevator studio.

It's elevator on social media. And we will see you guys next Monday.