(ILLUSTRATION BY EDWARD KINSELLA III)
Oliver Luckett, BA’96, never saw it coming. When he stepped off the curb to cross the busy San Francisco street, the taxi cab was moving much too fast for him to react. And in the blink of an eye, his life was never the same.
It was 1996, just days after his graduation from 91ĢĘ²®»¢, and Luckett was excited to be embarking on a new adventure on the West Coast. He didnāt have a job lined up, or really any solid prospects for that matter, but given his lifelong love of computers, he knew heād landed in the right place. He was near the heart of technological innovation in Silicon Valley, after all, and the Internet boom was just getting started.
But in that moment on the street, unbeknownst to Luckett, a frightening reality was hurtling straight toward him, and his promising future was in danger of being dashed. That is, until a strangerās hand pulled him to the safety of the sidewalk at the last second. It would prove to be a fortuitous turn of events in more ways than one.
āThis woman grabbed me and screamed, āWhat are you doing?!ā And I said, āIām just a dumb kid from Mississippi,āā Luckett explains, still in disbelief all these years later. āIt turns out the woman, Anne Pazarin, had spent her childhood in my hometown of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and owned a tech consulting firm in San Francisco. She ended up giving me my first job in the industry.
āIt was totally serendipitous.ā
That fateful day in San Francisco is perhaps the only time in Luckettās life that he got ahead by literally taking a step back. A tireless entrepreneur, he has made a career of diving headfirst into challenges, launching a string of tech startups all intent on shaking up the status quo in one way or another. His latest one, , is the worldās largest social media publishing company. Based in Los Angeles, it produces thousands of unique pieces of content on behalf of its clients each year.
In 1996, though, social platforms like Facebook and Twitter were still years from becoming reality, and Luckettās dreams of starting his own company were distant at best. Back in Pazarinās office, he was simply a 22-year-old kid looking to get his foot in the door somewhere.
āShe asked me what hourly rate I would want. I said, āI donāt know. I think I made $8 at Chiliās during college. She thought for a moment and then said, āHow about $78?ā
āWell,ā he laughs, āthat sounded a lot better to me.ā
DIGITAL IMMIGRANTS AND NATIVES
Of the 1.5 billion people around the globe who use social media regularly, most are familiar with content published by theAudience. They just donāt realize it. Thatās because the content comes from many different voices across multiple social platforms.
In one instance, it might be a celebrity who posts a message on Facebook, or maybe a well-known corporate brand sending out a tweet. In another, it might be someone less recognizable (at least to those over the age of 25), but no less capable of reaching millions of millennialsāperhaps a āselfie queenā posing for her followers on Instagram, or an up-and-coming band uploading their latest music video to YouTube.
Whatever the message, theAudience is the go-to company for crafting it and overseeing its distribution. āWeāre a little bit like the man behind the curtain,ā said Luckett, the companyās CEO, in an interview with Mashable in 2013.
If anything, this anonymity has been a crucial ingredient in theAudienceās success. When Luckett started the company in 2011 with talent agent Ari Emanuel and tech entrepreneur Sean Parker, they made a point of avoiding publicity. āWe didnāt talk about theAudience for nearly two years,ā says Luckett, ābecause anytime weād give an interview, three other companies would pop up and say they were just like us.ā
āWhether heās talking about his companyās growth from 10 to about 150 employees in three years, or his voluminous social circle of Hollywood power-player friends, or his fluorescent sneaker collection, or his insatiable appetite for street art, illustration and designāa collection that fills additional office space down the street, the London offices of theAudience, and his Hollywood Hills homeāless is not more in Luckettās world. More is ā¦ barely enough.ā āLos Angeles Times, May 2014
The idea for theAudience may have begun with a simple enough planāto capitalize on the untapped direct-to-consumer potential of celebritiesābut it took a forward-looking vision and a network of powerful connections to set the wheels in motion.
āIt started when Ari sent me a list of 440 celebrities he represents,ā Luckett says. āI ran an algorithm looking at Facebook and found 110,000 fake pages for those 440 people. Those pages were already connected to 1.2 billion Facebook users, but none of the pages was being operated by those celebrities.ā
At the time, Luckett was a senior vice president at The Walt Disney Co. in Burbank, California. In 2008, Disney had purchased DigiSynd, a digital media startup heād co-founded a year earlier, and turned it into its consumer-facing brand on social media. That deal put Luckett in charge of expanding Disneyās social presence through its popular line of animated characters.
āIām proud of my time at Disney,ā he says. āI got to make fundamental changes to how they do their copyright and their content, and the way they interact with their consumers.ā
Before the DigiSynd deal Luckett already had an impressive tech rĆ©sumĆ©. In the late ā90s, for example, heād helped develop the first voice-over-IP network in the U.S. at Qwest Communications, which effectively introduced flat-rate pricing to the phone industry. And in 2005 heād co-founded Revver, the first video-sharing website to monetize user-generated content through advertisingāyears ahead of YouTubeās similar Partner Program.
As Luckettās reputation grew within the tech world, he met Parker, a like-minded entrepreneur best known for being the co-founder of the file-sharing service Napster, as well as Facebookās first president. Parker, in turn, introduced Luckett to Emanuel, co-CEO of talent agency William Morris Endeavor.
āWhen Ari and I first met, we realized there was enormous potential for these artists,ā Luckett says, explaining that Emanuel was seeking expertise in helping his clientele take ownership of their online personas. āYou canāt reach millennials if youāre not on any of the social platforms. How will they know that youāre there? They ²¹¾±²Ōāt watching TV, thatās for sure.ā
Soon thereafter Luckett left Disney to launch theAudience and began managing social media accounts for A-list actors like Hugh Jackman, Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron, as well as best-selling recording artists like Usher. Even President Barack Obama relied on theAudience to handle his main Facebook page during the 2012 campaign.
It didnāt take long, though, for Luckett to realize the limits of working strictly with famous personalities. āCelebrities often come with baggage, and creating their online personas is a lot of work,ā he says. āThey may be good on TV or the big screen, but most are not digital natives. Like Sean says, theyāre ādigital immigrants.āā
Out of this realization came the next stage of theAudienceās evolution. Luckett turned to āinfluencersāāeveryday people who already have a robust social media presenceāand began pairing them with ad campaigns for particular brands. For instance, he brokered a deal for teenager Acacia Brinley, who boasts more than 1.6 million followers on Instagram, to endorse McDonaldās during the 2014 Winter Olympics. Other brands, like Ford Motor Co., American Express and Dove, have used this approach as well.
What Luckett appreciates about Brinley and other so-called āmicrocelebritiesā like herāaside from the fact that they offer more distribution power than many traditional media outletsāis that they express themselves in creative ways that resonate with their audiences.
āI work with more than 6,000 different artistsāāinformation artistsā is how I think of them,ā he says. āSome people donāt view them as artists, but I do. For instance, take Acacia, who has mastered the selfie. Anyone like her who has an idea and puts a frame around it is an artist to me, regardless of the field theyāre in.
āUltimately, itās how you express yourself. Itās about the way you look at things and how you build an abstract layer on top of what you see.ā
ENEMY OF THE STATUS QUO
When Luckett was just 6 years old, his grandfather John Booth Farese presented him with a choice of gifts. He could pick either a three-wheelerāsomething most boys his age would likely give their right arms forāor a somewhat primitive (at least by todayās standards) Tandy TRS-80 computer. Not surprisingly, Luckett opted for the latter.
āI chose the computer, of course,ā he says. āThat was in 1980. Iāve now had a computer for 34 years. Thatās scary to think about.ā
The TRS-80 and its eventual replacements helped unlock Luckettās innate talent for technology. At first he taught himself how to use a coupling modem to access dial-up bulletin boards (precursors of todayās chat rooms) in different cities across the country. In the process he ran up a whopping $600 phone bill.
āAfter my parents found out, that lasted all of one month,ā he laughs.
Not long after, though, he was learning to navigate the burgeoning Internet before most people even knew what it was. It was during these teenage years, when he was coming to terms with being gay, that technology became an invaluable escape hatch for him. His computer allowed him to see beyond the confines of small-town life to the wider world waiting on the other side.
In time, Luckett found his way out of the Mississippi Delta, but for all the distance he has put between himself and Clarksdale, he still talks fondly about his upbringing and the hometown that made him who he is. In particular he credits his parents, Bill Luckett and Kay Farese Turner, for cultivating his intellectual curiosity and encouraging his interest in the arts.
Bill, the current mayor of Clarksdale, is both a lawyer and an entrepreneur, and has helped reinvent the town through cultural tourism promoting blues music. Kay, meanwhile, is a high-profile divorce attorney in Memphis, Tennessee, who also happens to be a sculptor. She instilled a passion for art collecting in Luckett, and heās now one of the leading patrons of the arts in Los Angeles.
Luckett, however, is more than just a patron or a collector. Heās arguably an artist in his own right. Like his team of influencers at theAudience, he frames ideas in unexpected ways, offering his own abstract perspectives on the social networks that shape our modern lives.
āI deal in ideas,ā he explains. āI try to make concepts into mass reality, whether theyāre political or societal or entertainment concepts. And as we become more interconnected, I view the world more and more like a social organism. If you think about it, weāre all connected via a network that has no time or distance. In biological terms, itās pretty much like a cell, and the artists are the ones who create the genetic variance.ā
(See the sidebar below to learn more about Luckettās ideas regarding the social organism.)
As it turns out, this novel way of looking at social media owes a lot to his 91ĢĘ²®»¢ experience. Luckett started out studying molecular biology in college and was planning to enter medical school after graduation. But after two years of working in a lab, he was burned out and decided to switch his major to French literature.
While neither major seems a likely path to becoming a tech entrepreneur, Luckett would argue differently. āIāve learned so much from molecular biology but also from studying Renaissance literature,ā he says. ā91ĢĘ²®»¢ had such an amazing French lit department. What really stuck with me was learning about the major changes in society that occurred after the invention of the printing press.
āIt has a lot of bearing on what I do today. Just as French literature emerged after the printing press, social media emerged after the invention of the Internet.ā
In many ways Luckett embodies this eraās historic upheaval. At Disney he was referred to (affectionately) as āthe insurgentā by CEO Bob Iger, and Luckett still embraces that nicknameāand mentalityāin the work he does today. Quite simply, he has made an art out of challenging conventional thinking.
āChange is inevitable, and I figure I might as well be part of the acceleration of that change versus the other way around,ā he says. āThereās no worse fate than the status quo.ā
For that reason Luckett isnāt content to let theAudience stand still for long. He and his employees are now embarking on what he considers the companyās third stage. āThe next step is really getting behind the content,ā he explains, referencing a recent viral video that theAudience produced for The Chainsmokersā song ā#SELFIE.ā
āWe donāt want to just service people. We want to own the pieces of content. Thatās really been my goal: to be able to create a media company out of this and use that direct connection we have.ā
Whatever the future holds for theAudience or any other venture he undertakes, itās safe to say that Luckett will continue riding the waves of technological change. And if the past is any indication, heāll probably make a few waves of his own in the process.
āLook, a switch has been flipped, and weāre just now beginning to reverberate from it,ā he says. āWeāre a microsecond into this year of change thatās happening to our society. That excites me.
āI donāt care what happens to the big industries that canāt keep up. Theyāve had their time. I say letās create new ones.ā
Seven Rules That Drive Social Media Success
āFacebook architecturally looks very similar to living organisms,ā Luckett says. āSo, I started thinking that if this looks like life, then maybe it acts like life, too. Maybe these social networks are actual living organisms.ā
Drawing upon his 91ĢĘ²®»¢ background in molecular biology, he developed a list of seven rules that define all living organisms, including the biggest of them allāwhat he calls the āsocial organism.ā The more closely one abides by these rules in social media, says Luckett, the more successfully one can connect with audiences.
1. Life must be nourished. āThe social organism is nourished by our livesāby the images we take, by the music we consume, by the ideas we share.ā
2. Life reacts to stimuli. āEmotions are what trigger the movement inside the organism. Everything that works in the social organism is sharing some emotion, whether itās fear or love or anticipation or excitement.ā
3. Life exchanges with its environment. āLiving organisms react to their environment. Every day the sun sets, and thousands of images are uploaded, expressing the emotions people feel about that sunset.ā
4. Life rids itself of pollution. āOne of the most important things about life is that it gets rid of waste. In this analogy, bad marketing is really the excrement of the social organism. Nobody wants to be spammed.ā
5. All life has the ability to flow and move internally. āAn organismās evolution is based on flow dynamics. If Iām a company that blocks content from being available, then Iām actually thwarting the ability for change. You must allow content to flow.ā
6. Life evolves through reproduction. āIf you look at genetics, the very script of our lives is a meme. The word āmemeā means that our ideas replicate through sharing, but they evolve when you add your voice to those ideas.ā
7. Living things become larger and more complicated as they grow. āThe social organism is changing every day. Weāre seeing the rise of people who are native to these environments, and theyāre taking advantage of the newness of these systems.ā
The seven rules are adapted from a presentation given by Luckett at the 2014 Festival of Media in Los Angeles.