How to make a mint in the media and marketing world
This has been the summer of the billionaire. Barely a day passes without news of Philip Green's bid for Marks & Spencer, the Barclays' purchase of the Telegraph Group or signings at Roman Abramovich's Chelsea. These stories have the added frisson that comes when the acquirers are not faceless corporations but colourful individuals with almost absurd amounts of personal wealth. What would it take to make ￡1bn in industries where, instead of high-street stores, property portfolios or oil stocks to peddle, entrepreneurs only have their ideas and talent to exploit?
The bad news is that of the 30 UK billionaires on The Sunday Times' Rich List only Clive Calder, former owner of Britney Spears' record label Zomba Music, comes from the creative industries. The rest made money in property, retail or heavy industry, often starting out with hefty inheritances. The good news is that if you are only slightly less ambitious, substantial fortunes can and have been made. Creative sector types who regularly feature high up the rich lists include Viscount Rothermere of the Daily Mail and General Trust, Paul McCartney, Richard Desmond, adult entertainment magnate Paul Raymond, and Felix Dennis, the consumer magazine publisher. Below these are dozens more with assets only the very rich would describe as meagre. While there is no formula for success, there are recurring themes in the lives of the rich and infamous.
If one set out to make a modest pile - say, ￡50m - from creative industries, and excluded those sectors such as technology which have a well marked-out route to riches, what should be your rules?
Have a Hit
The most attractive way to make a fortune quickly in the creative industries is to devise a highly popular, scaleable and multi- platform piece of entertainment and then sell the rights around the world. Simple, really. It could be anything from the beat that anchors the Rolling Stones' rhythm section, a monopoly that netted drummer Charlie Watts his fortune, to a quiz format which can be replicated on screens, board games, pub machines and games consoles around the world, as happened with Celador's TV hit Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?
It could be done over generations, and a whole oeuvre, as in the case of Paul McCartney. On the other hand, J.K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter books, has done it in less than a decade through a series based essentially around a single premise - the adventures of an orphaned boy wizard.
The creator erects barriers to entry for rivals by registering and enforcing his or her intellectual property rights. The problem with this approach to getting rich is that it is akin to buying a lottery ticket for your pension. The very fact that the costs of writing a book or recording a music track are relatively low means that supply outweighs demand, and the ratio of hits to output is extremely high. And in film or video games entry costs are not even low.
"These are highly competitive industries and many people want to go into them. There is absolutely no way of guaranteeing that you will get your hit," says Calum Chace, a director at KPMG.
Even when you appear to have a hit, longevity is not guaranteed. Anne Robinson was well placed to exploit the success of BBC show The Weakest Link, when it transferred to the US. NBC later axed it.
Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 took $21.8m in its first three days at the US box office. It is now thought that it will eventually enjoy a worldwide gross of several hundred million dollars when overseas cinema, TV, DVD markets and merchandising tie-ins are added up. This is even after the marketing and distribution costs are deducted. Not bad for an initial production budget of $6m.
Then again anyone who sets out to make their ￡50m by plotting links between the White House, the Saudi Royal family, Iceland and international terrorists, will probably find the path a long and lonely one.
Get a Gimmick
Repeatedly, successful people start their careers by spotting small, tightly defined but underserved markets. Philip Brown of PJB Publications saw that some medical disciplines were under-exploited and moved in with titles such as Scrip and Clinica. "They were of little interest to anybody other than their readers but rapidly became indispensable to them," says Alex Noton of the corporate finance media team at PricewaterhouseCoopers. Brown sold out to Informa for ￡150m in 2003.
Michael Heseltine made marketing communications the hub of his privately-owned Haymarket operation. Richard Desmond started by publishing titles for musicians and Felix Dennis made his initial fortune in publishing out of minority interests such as skateboarding. The key point about these businesses is that they dominated their relatively small hinterlands.
Noton says: "Once you have cornered even a small market, you can leverage your powerful little brands against your well-defined audience. This should allow you to generate lots of cash and form the basis for growth out of your market into related sectors." Ironically it is usually at this point that entrepreneurs learn whether or not they are simply in it for the money. If money is their main motivation, having created a thriving business they often cash in their chips and enjoy the proceeds. If they are doing it for other reasons - job satisfaction or self-justification, for example - then they will be more likely to persevere. This leads to a paradox of wealth; the super-rich tend not to be particularly motivated by money whereas the merely affluent are.
Mug a mug
Looking at the careers of many super-rich creatives, it is surprising how often a generous corporation unwittingly comes to their aid.
Steve Barber, head of the Entertainment division at Ernst and Young, says: "Very often smaller entrepreneurs get a helping hand from major corporations that do not have the appetite to take the really hard decisions and with hindsight sometimes sell assets for less than their potential value.
"Conversely history shows that they can pay substantially more than the true value for their own acquisitions," he says. Examples include Reed International's sale of Mirror Group Newspapers to Robert Maxwell for ￡100m in 1984 (which included a large number of Reuters shares). Richard Desmond bought Express Newspapers from Lord Hollick's United News & Media for ￡120m in 2000. It was regarded as a low price at the time, though the cost-cutting at Express Newspapers and the turnaround at The Star have subsequently underlined the value of the deal.
Of course, in retrospect almost all these deals look like steals for one of the parties. At the time however entrepreneurs such as Desmond often had to gamble their entire operation on the acquisition.
"It shows that not only do you have to have the judgment to know when to bet the whole shop, you have to have the courage and balls to actually do it," says Barber.
Stuart Watson, a partner at Ernst and Young, says: "The obvious time to go on an acquisition spree is when profits and multiples are low. But for some reason acquirers often wait until the top of the market before making their purchases." The result can be that the "mug corporation" pays two or three times the lowest possible price.
The sale in 2000 of Endemol the Dutch TV company behind programmes such as Big Brother, to Spanish telecoms giant Telefonica in a deal valued at E5.5bn is often cited as an example of a big company paying too much during a bull market. The deal made leading Endemol shareholder John de Mol a billionaire overnight even though a year later Endemol profits were just ￡100m on revenues of ￡616m.
Advertising group Cordiant's ill-fated move into branding and corporate communications saw it pay ￡259m in July 2000 for Lighthouse Global Network, the US marketing giant which owned city PR firm Financial Dynamics and design agency Fitch. SMG was judged to have over-paid for Ginger Media Group in 2000. In both cases, buyers later went on debt-reduction drives. Cordiant disappeared altogether.
Avoid the Agency model
The one thing you should do if you really want to get seriously rich, say the experts, is avoid the marketing services sector, despite its reputation for ostentation. There are exceptions, including Sir Martin Sorrell, the Saatchis and Chris Ingram. And as the Lighthouse example shows, the same rules as other industries apply when it comes to selling out.
But unlike entertainment, which has the potential to scale up a hit novel, film or computer game quickly, agencies operate with a lower definition of success. Their income is capped by clients' budgets. And even before last week's news that MC Saatchi had suspended its plans to float, it was clear its partners would make less than ￡10m each from any float. Not a figure to be sniffed at, but well short of our ￡50m target.
"If I wanted to make serious money in the creative industries I would avoid them (agencies). They are just too scary and volatile," says Rupert Shaw of venture capital firm GMT Communications.
Bob Willott a financial commentator on the marketing industry, warns: "Its an over-supplied industry with low barriers to entry. The people are highly individualistic and tend to want to indulge their creative talents, so unless you have very solid management skills, it's unrealistic that you will make a fortune."
And because in advertising, PR and allied businesses, the value of most firms resides inside the heads of their owners and depends upon one or two client relationships, they make unattractive targets to outside investors, says Tim Lyle, managing partner at M&A specialist Livingstone Guarantee.
He adds: "The quality of earnings they provide is just too poor to be really attractive. They are worse than almost any other service industry."
Besides, the returns from selling out for the entrepreneur are relatively poor, say those who have run agencies. Rupert Howell was a partner in HHCL, widely regarded as one of the best ad agencies of the 1990s. He walked away with ￡5m when the agency was sold to Chime in 1997, a decent but hardly opulent sum. "I would probably have made more if I had stayed as an employee. But then money wasn't really our main motivation." he says.
Then again, that is the kind of comment only the (relatively) rich can afford to make.
如何在创意产业钓大鱼
今年夏天是个亿万富翁之夏。几乎没有哪一天听不到亿万富翁的新闻：菲利普?格林(Philip Green)竞购玛莎百货(Marks & Spencer)、巴克莱兄弟(Barclays)买下《每日电讯报》集团（Telegraph Group），或者罗曼?阿布拉莫维奇(Roman Abramovich)的切尔西(Chelsea)俱乐部的各种签约。这些故事令人特别激动，因为买家不是些公司，而是活生生的个人，他们的私人财富多得不可思议。在一些行业，创业者们能利用的只有点子和才干，而不是出售商业街店铺、房地产资产组合或者石油股票。在这样的行业中，他们凭什么来赚取10亿英镑呢？
坏消息是，在《星期日泰晤士报》(Sunday Times)的富豪榜上，只有布兰妮?斯皮尔斯(Britney Spears)所在唱片公司Zomba Music的前老板克莱夫?考尔德(Clive Calder)一人来自创意产业。其他人则是在房地产、零售或重工业领域赚的钱，而且常是依靠一大笔遗产起家。好消息是，只要你少一点点野心，就可以(或者已经)赚到大把财富。经常在富豪榜上排名领先的创意产业代表人士包括Daily Mail & General Trust的罗瑟米尔(Rothermere)子爵、保罗?麦卡特尼(Paul McCartney)、理查德?德斯蒙德(Richard Desmond)、成人娱乐业巨头保罗?雷蒙德(Paul Raymond)，以及消费者杂志出版商费利克斯?丹尼斯(Felix Dennis)。在这些名字之下有几十个人，只有非常富有的人才会称他们的财产为“微薄”。虽然成功没有定式，但在富人和声名狼藉者的生活中，总有重复出现的主题。
如果想着手赚一笔不大不小的财富，比如5000万英镑，而且是在创意产业，并排除高科技之类有一条规划清晰的致富之路的行业，那你该采取什么规则呢？
一炮打响
要想在创意产业迅速致富，最有吸引力的方法，是设计一个非常受欢迎、规模可放大、多平台的娱乐作品，然后在全球售卖版权。真的很简单。它可以是任何东西，从滚石乐队(Rolling Stones)节奏部分采用的节拍（这个节拍的垄断权为鼓手查理?瓦茨Charlie Watts带来了财富），到可以在全世界的屏幕、棋牌游戏、酒吧赌博机以及游戏机进行复制的测验格式都可以，塞拉多(Celador)一炮打响的电视节目《谁想做百万富翁？》(Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?)就是如此。
它可能要花费几代人的时间，直到全部作品完成后才能做成，比如保罗?麦卡特尼就是这样。另一方面，《哈里?波特》(Harry Potter)的作者J.K.罗琳(J.K. Rowling)在不到10年的时间里通过一个系列小说就做到了。这些小说其实都围绕单一命题――一个父母双亡的小男巫的冒险。
创造者通过注册和执行他（或她）的知识产权，给对手设置了准入壁垒。这种致富方式的问题是，它和用你的养老金买彩票类似。但写一本书或录制一段音轨的成本相对较低，正是这个事实意味着供应超过了需求，而成功作品与产出之间的比率极高。在电影或视频游戏上，进入成本并不低。
“这些都是高度竞争的行业，很多人想进入。绝对没有什么办法能确保你一定成功，”毕马威会计师事务所(KPMG)的一位董事卡勒姆?切斯(Calum Chace)说。
即使你看起来会取得成功，也无法保证成功能长久。当BBC节目《智者生存》(The Weakest Link)被搬到美国时，安妮?罗宾逊(Anne Robinson)有很好的条件去充分利用该节目在英国的成功，但后来，美国全国广播公司(NBC)却把它砍掉了。
迈克尔?摩尔(Michael Moore)的纪录片《华氏9/11》(Fahrenheit 9/11)在美国影院上映时，头三天就获得2180万美元的票房收入。现在人们认为，加上海外影院放映收入、电视、DVD市场的版权收入，以及相关商品的收入，它最终将在全世界获得几亿美元的总收入。这还是扣除行销和发行成本之后的数字。相对于600万美元的初期制作预算，这样的结果真不坏。
但是，若有人再在白宫、沙特皇室、冰岛和国际恐怖主义者之间的关联上做文章，并打算以此赚取他的5000万英镑，那么他或许会发现，这是一条漫长而孤独的旅程。
拥有绝妙的主意
屡见不鲜的是，成功人士的生涯始于发现小规模、严格界定，但服务不周的市场。PJB出版公司(PJB Publications)的菲利普?布朗(Philip Brown)发现，有些医学学科还没有得到充分开发，于是他创办了《Scrip》、《临床》(Clinica)等医学杂志。普华永道(PricewaterhouseCoopers)企业财务媒体小组的亚历克斯?诺顿(Alex Noton)说：“除了特定的一些读者，这些杂志同其他任何人都关系不大，但读者很快就离不开它们了。”2003年，布朗以1.5亿英镑的价格将股份卖给了Informa。
迈克尔?赫塞尔廷(Michael Heseltine)将营销传播变成他私人拥有的Haymarket业务的核心；理查德?德斯蒙德以出版音乐家的作品开始创业；费利克斯?丹尼斯靠出版滑板运动等少数人感兴趣的图书掘得第一桶金。这些业务的关键之处在于，它们主导了各自相对较小的地盘。
诺顿说：“一旦你专注于一个哪怕很小的市场，你就能巧妙利用你强大的小品牌，为你明确的受众服务。这应会让你创造大量现金，并为你在市场中成长壮大并介入相关行业打下基础。”具有讽刺意味的是，通常就在这个时候，企业家们才开始思考，他们置身这个行业是否就是为了赚钱。如果赚钱是他们的主要动机，那么在创造了一个生机勃勃的企业后，他们通常会把筹码兑现，享受成果。如果是出于其它原因置身这个行业，比如工作满意感或自我证明等，那么他们将更有可能坚持下去。这就导致了一种似是而非的财富现象：超级富豪往往不是那些特别受钞票驱动的人，而那些仅仅称得上富裕的人。
掠夺傻瓜的财富
看看许多超级富豪创意人员的职业生涯，令人惊讶的是，经常会有一家慷慨的公司无意中助了他们一臂之力。
安永(Ernst and Young)娱乐部门的主管史蒂夫?巴伯(Steve Barber)说：“小企业家经常得到大公司的帮助，这些大公司没有兴趣做出真正困难的决定，而事后看来，这些大公司有时候将资产以低于潜在价值的价格贱卖。”
他说：“倒过来看，历史表明，它们自己收购时会支付比实际价值多得多的价钱。”这样的例子包括：Reed International在1984年将镜报报业集团(Mirror Group Newspapers)以1亿英镑卖给罗伯特?麦克斯韦(Robert Maxwell)，这其中包括持有的大量路透社(Reuters)股份；2000年，理查德?德斯蒙德(Richard Desmond)以1.2亿英镑的价格从霍利克(Hollick)勋爵的联合新闻媒体公司(United News & Media)那里买下快报集团(Express Newspapers)。当时那被认为是低价，但随着快报集团降低成本，以及《星报》(The Star)经营好转，已大大突显了该交易的价值。
当然，回顾过去，几乎所有这些交易看上去都像是从相关当事方那里偷来的。但在当时，德斯蒙德等企业家经常得把全部家当押在收购目标上。
巴伯说：“这表明，你不仅得有能力判断什么时候可以孤注一掷，你还得有勇气和胆量去真正这么做。”
安永的一名合伙人斯图亚特?沃森(Stuart Watson)表示：“当利润和市盈率很低时，显然是进行收购的时机。但出于某些原因，收购者经常要等待，直到市场到达顶部，然后才进行收购。”结果也许是，“傻瓜公司”支付的价格可能是最低价的两三倍。
2000年，制作了《老大哥》(Big Brother)等节目的荷兰电视公司安德默(Endemol)作价55亿欧元，出售给了西班牙电信巨擘Telefonica。该交易经常被引用，作为大公司在牛市期间支付过高价格的例子。该交易使安德默的大股东约翰?德?摩尔(John de Mol)一夜之间成为亿万富翁，即使是一年后，安德默在6.16亿英镑营收的基础上，仅取得了1亿英镑的利润。
广告集团Cordiant向品牌建设和企业传播领域拓展，但时运不济，公司2000年7月以2.59亿英镑收购了美国市场营销巨头Lighthouse Global Network。这家美国公司拥有城市公关公司Financial Dynamics和设计公司Fitch。有人判断，SMG在2000年收购Ginger Media Group时价格过高。在这两个案例中，收购方后来采取了减债行动，而Cordiant则彻底消失了。
避免广告公司模式
如果你真的想发大财，你应该做的一件事是，避开营销服务产业，尽管这个产业有喜欢卖弄的名声。但有些例外，其中便包括马丁?索雷尔(Martin Sorrell)爵士、萨奇(Saatchi)家族和克里斯?英格拉姆(Chris Ingram)。正如Lighthouse一例所显示的，就出售公司而言，其他行业的规则同样适用。
但娱乐业有迅速将畅销小说、电影或电脑游戏做大的潜力，与娱乐业不同的是，广告公司运营成功的概念不是那么清晰。它们的收入受到客户预算的限制。上周有消息称，MC Saatchi已暂缓上市计划。但即使是在这个消息传出前，很显然，该公司合伙人每人从上市中获得的收入也低于1000万英镑。这个数字不可小觑，但远低于我们5000万英镑的目标。
风险资本公司GMT Communications的鲁珀特?肖(Rupert Shaw)说：“如果我想在创意产业挣大钱，我就会避开它们（广告公司）。它们实在太可怕，太变幻无常了。”
营销业的财经评论员鲍勃?威洛特(Bob Willott)警告说：“这是个供给过度的行业，准入壁垒很低。从业者具有高度的个人主义色彩，一般会纵容自己的创意人才，因此除非你有很扎实的管理技巧，否则发大财是不现实的。”
并购专业公司Livingstone Guarantee的常务合伙人蒂姆?莱尔(Tim Lyle)表示，由于在广告、公关和同盟行业中，大多数公司的价值留在公司所有者的头脑中，还取决于一或两个客户关系，因此对外部投资者而言，这类公司不是有吸引力的目标。
他补充说：“这些公司提供的收益，质量实在太差，真的没有什么吸引力。它们几乎比任何其他服务行业都要差。”
那些经营过广告公司的人表示，此外，替创业者出售企业所获的回报比较差。外界广泛认为，HHCL是上世纪90年代最出色的广告公司之一，鲁珀特?霍威尔(Rupert Howell)是该公司的合伙人。当1997年该公司出售给Chime时，他得到了500万英镑。这一数额已经不错了，但说不上丰厚。他说：“要是当初我继续当雇员的话，赚的可能还要多些。但在当时，赚钱的确不是我们的主要动机。”
还是这句话，这种话只有那些（相对）富有的人才说得出。
