New-media agent Jonathan Trumper remembers how quickly it all began - and ended. He had been working in the advertising division of William Morris until 1992, when "all the hype hit" and the new-media division became a fait accompli. "Everybody in the CD-ROM business knew their business would take off, but they were hiring their own staff to appear in the CD-ROMs," he recalls. "Inevitably, their lawyer was the bad guy."
Trumper's career took off when he started casting movie stars on the discs. "People thought of it [the CD-ROM market] as the be-all and end-all." But the market bust quickly followed, and suddenly agents had lost their glamour and their place.
"I used to have journalists on the phone all the time and they stopped calling because they said [the industry] sucked," says Mark Evans, a new-media agent at ICM. The reasoning was simple: With less money at stake, Trumper says, "people just didn't need our services."
Now, a handful of new-media agents are coming back full force. From brokering the AOL-Brandon Tartikoff deal to launching extreme-sports site Charged, to Tom Clancy's CD-ROM group, new-media agents like Trumper are becoming a critical segment in the evolving multimedia food chain, but very quietly. Don't talk about them, they say, talk about the deals they're doing.
"Money is on one side of the table and talent on the other. Agents are now sitting at the side and trying to create a dialog," says Ken Jordan, creative director at Icon, the Silicon Alley company that produces Charged. The appearance of agents, Jordan adds, "is a sign that the new-media business is growing up."
Clients can include game developers, software providers, even online writers (like Scott "The Spot" Zakarin). According to Trumper, new-media agents play a variety of roles, "switching from lawyer, to networker, to consigliere" for a varying percentage of the clients' return.
But new-media "producers" are already used to wearing all kinds of hats (say, programmer and publicist), so what can agents really offer? "Access to all of the players and the business people," says Trumper, but it's the frequent miscommunication between visionaries and venture capital that has made agents more and more necessary.
"We know intuitively the business structures to make successful creative product," Trumper says, and finding them "has been a consistent problem for [major companies]."
To some, the idea of a new-media agent goes against the original ethos of the Web, where the medium itself renders middlemen unnecessary. Ian Kerner, writer and professor at NYU's Interactive Technology Program, cut a deal with M3P without an agent, and views them as unnecessary catalysts.
"In theater ... you really need an agent because ... you can't meet producers without them," Kerner says. "But in new media, that's not the case. It's such a small community that it's pretty easy to access the talent, and there just aren't nearly the revenue streams [to attract agents]."
Kerner attributes the relative fluidity between talent and producers to the "vibrant" and "spontaneous" culture of New York's relatively indie new-media scene.
"If Microsoft or AOL take off, they get entrenched. But here, the financial stakes are much lower and the creative stakes much higher." He admits that agents are valuable insofar as they can mine hidden sources of revenue. For Kerner, the mining has already begun - Trumper will be dropping by his office tomorrow.
From the Wired News New York Bureau at FEED magazine.
