Going into lunch with Karl Eller, I wanted three things:
1) To talk about his time as President of Columbia Pictures
2) To talk about how he wakes up at 3:00am
3) To talk about business opportunities in an evolving media marketplace
The majority of the time was spent talking about the latter.
My takeaways with Karl Eller:
1) He liked my idea of employing a Twitter team in a movie studio.
2) He agreed with me on the idea of having all these outdated forms of media- radio, television, newspapers- need to find a new distribution channel. This conversation stemmed from my idea of reserving Facebook URL’s and building audiences to control the distribution.
3) His life, at 81 years old, is still active. He’s working on a deal with Coca Cola that he says will transform the way advertisers advertise. It’s digital distribution. Marthya’s in San Francisco is the company he’s going through to get this digital distribution organized, and it will allow Coke to run digital ads to mobile phone users and any place there is a digital interface. Interesting.
4) Persistence and connections get you farther than anything else. Karl Eller’s last words of advice to me.
5) The Ritz is a playing ground you can put someone on to make them feel a bit uncomfortable.
6) Eller can laugh about the carrier pigeon now. Laughter says it’s okay to mess up and fail if you try new things because when you’re an old guy, you can laugh about the stupid stuff you did.
Read a full interview with Karl Eller here: https://pursuethepassion.com/interviews/2006/05/16/karl-eller/