How to Become a Media Company of One with Larry J. Namer

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As an entrepreneur you must build a personal brand and here’s how. Unless you hire someone you must become a media company of one. I discuss how to do that in this episode with my guest, Larry J. Namer.

Larry J. Namer is a media entrepreneur and co-founder of E! Entertainment Television, the groundbreaking network that helped redefine how entertainment and pop culture are covered around the world. His career spans more than 50 years across cable television, live events, new media, and international entertainment.

Succeeding in Hollywood long term is a rare occurrence; I seek out working actors and Hollywood Personalities that have “made it” in Hollywood on a big scale and interview them for this podcast to give business advice to today’s entrepreneurs.

If they can make it in Hollywood you can make it as an entrepreneur!

We dive into topics including:

Larry’s origin story in the Hollywood media world.
The difference between an audience and a community and how to build your own community.
Once you build it how to foster and grow a community of like-minded people.
The importance of having your own podcast to reach and stay in front of niche communities.
How your brand and community grow each other as you grow your media footprint.
The importance of social impact and why it should become part of your personal brand.
The obligation Larry believes media personalities have to address some aspects of social impact.
How to build a successful media brand and not end up as just a blip on the public’s radar.
Ways to build deeper relationships with your community.
How to market your community and grow it after you’ve created it.
What entrepreneurs can do to create meaningful interactions with their communities.
Larry’s definition of a “successful” personal brand and how to know when you’ve been successful with personal branding.
How to be accessible to your community and not put yourself on a pedestal.
The importance of staying in one lane with your personal brand and not diversifying too much.
How to know what media channels to embrace when you’re building your personal brand.
How to attract audiences and build communities across generational gaps.
The importance of building a support system for and great team around your personal brand and how to do it.
How to keep on keepin’ on during the rough times in your career and life.
How to know which media trends to embrace.
The one thing, above all else, that you need to do to become a media company of one.

…and more golden nuggets of advice!

A Brief Media Origin Story for Larry

Larry has always seemed to have a knack for the media world. It’s obviously been financially successful for him. His parents were immigrants and their aspiration for their children was to get a civil service job to be able to retire at 65. For whatever reason, Larry didn’t take that route in life. He jumped into the media world right after college for what he thought was going to be a summer job and, according to him, here he is 50 years later still trying to figure out what to do when he grows up.

Larry says he doesn’t really draw a line between his personal life and his business life. For him, it’s all one thing. It’s who he is, it’s what he does, and he loves it.

Where does it start as far as getting into and embracing media? Where should people start these days?

Larry believes that you have to take a close look at media and make some assumptions about where it’s going and what the latest trends are. One of the things that he realized early on is that you can’t fight technology; you can’t fight changing industries. Life happens.

When Larry got involved in the media business right out of college, it was given that if you wanted to make visual content you had to come to a place called Hollywood. You needed big sound stages and expensive cameras and things like that. But, as technology kept bringing down the cost and the barriers to entry, it became cheaper and less expensive to make media anywhere. People don’t have to come to Hollywood anymore.

Now we’ve got vibrant, creative worlds in every part of the planet. Larry tells people that he could take his iPhone to Nigeria tomorrow and make a movie on it. Hollywood has become a place where there is, let’s call it a measure of creativity, a measure of quality, but it’s not the geographic place you have to be anymore if you want create visual media.

How would you advise someone to start building a personal brand that would cut through the noise, since there’s so much of it?

Larry believes you must look at what’s new and what’s there out there on the horizon. For Larry, he’s always looked for, and this may sound a little silly, opportunities that he can compete with the likes of Rupert Murdoch.

You must look at what’s out there now, and it’s a great opportunity to jump into the media world today because things are changing so dramatically. That includes the way things are being created, the way they are getting financed and so on.

Now you’ve got what everybody is calling “the creator economy”. It doesn’t take a lot of money to create media properties these days. Social media is a great place to start and test your ideas out and see what resonates with audiences. You can turn audiences into communities of like-minded individuals around whatever your concept is.

Technology moves on. Now everybody is talking about “verticals”, or micro dramas. They’re very inexpensive to create and to test. You don’t have to do TV pilots that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. You can do little micro dramas which only cost you a few hundred dollars.

The landscape is changing!

How do you intentionally build an audience of like minds, not just a bunch of random people?

Larry believes what you need to do is build a community of people that are interested in your subject matter, so every time you come out with a new piece of content you don’t have to market it specifically to new people outside of your community.

Just look at what happens with Steven Spielberg. Spielberg has built a community of people that know and love him. When he comes out with a new movie, he doesn’t have to tell everyone what the movie is about or spend a lot of money marketing it.

When it’s from Steven Spielberg, Larry says he’s in a movie theater the next day. Ideally you want to build a community to be like that. The key word these days is authenticity. You need to look at yourself as a creator of authentic content that resonates with your community’s interests. Then they will follow you and support and share your content.

What’s the difference between an audience and a community?

Larry believes an audience is more about a single project. An audience is about, “Here’s a new show I did, you know, watch it tonight at 8:00 or stream it on your favorite platform”. Somebody will watch a show, but how do you get them to watch the rest of the content you create? By interacting with them. To Larry, that’s a community built around your sensibility, your morality, your interests and things like that.

It’s about continuity and it’s blind acceptance. With Spielberg, for example. You don’t have to know what the movie’s about. If his name is attached to it you know you want to see it.

Spielberg doesn’t have to spend any money telling you what it’s about. When someone tells you it’s a Spielberg movie, you’re there because you know what you’re going to get. You know the level of quality you’re going to get. You know the level of storytelling you’re going to get.

That means you want to start by at least building a small community. That’s not an audience for a project but rather what we just defined as a community.

And that’s just the beginning of the story!