Michael Nyman had been to the mountaintop. After a long career in marketing, PR and communications, he was chairman and CEO of communciations and PR powerhouse PMK-BNC in 2018 when he decided to step down to start over.
On the latest episode of Variety podcast “Strictly Business,” Nyman explains the motivation and the vision behind Acceleration Community of Companies, which is the umbrella “architecture,” as he details, for a collection of firms with distinct and complementary specialties. Among his acquisitions over the past half-dozen years include experiential marketing firm MKG; Pink Sparrow, a design and fabrication studio; Event Marketer; New York PR powerhouse DKC and PR firm Trailblaze; influencer marketing agency Pixly; data and analytics firm Stripe Theory; and creative agency Hangar Four.
“I felt the virtues of being in a community or with a group of companies was a good thing, and I felt that for certain clients, there was some benefit if you could find a grouping of companies that could help you. But what I was trying to do was look at a different spin on it. What I was thinking was the future would be focused more on specialization,” Nyman says.
“That’s where we are in our society, and a lot of this is enabled through technology and this idea of instant gratification. So I thought, if I could go out and build a community and acquire, assemble, build a series of complementary agencies, each that had a superpower — one group focused on communications, one group focused on influencer, data and analytics, experiential — that when we put it together, it could be something really special,” Nyman says. “And with the complementary powers, these agencies would begin to really want to collaborate with one another, because they each did something different, and people get along really well when you can be complementary.”
Acceleration has invested significantly in research and analytics to help its firms, and by association clients, understand the depths of the disruption in traditional media and entertainment. The changing behaviors, norms and expectations for Gen Z and Gen Alpha will radically influence the evolution of entertainment in the coming years, Nyman predicts.
“Gen Z has a self awareness about putting the phone down. Gen Alpha — it is a little scary out there. Gen Alpha is a little challenging, because you’re talking about a society now where, at this young age and stage, these kids are getting in their hands answers to everything. Everything is unlocked, and they don’t have to go far, because they’re holding it in their palm of their hand,” Nyman observes. “The mix of entertainment in 10 to 15, years is going to be different. I think film will survive. I think the streaming as we know it survives, but I think we’re going to see a lot of new iterations or versions of these things. Maybe the theatrical experience will will be there, but who is starring and creating [content], I think it’s really going to be very different.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.