Emails from a week in the life of an Acquisitions Manager
In the fast-paced world of entertainment, acquisitions executives play a vital role in sifting through a barrage of content pitches, press releases, and internal updates. With their inboxes brimming with unsolicited submissions, the challenge lies in separating the signal from the noise.
Each Monday morning, an acquisitions executive might find approximately 212 unread messages waiting, a number that swells to nearly 700 by the end of the week. This surge of content encompasses films, series, animation, documentaries, and more, at various stages of development, production, post-production, slate, and pre-buy.
However, the process for filtering pitches is far from random. The entertainment industry has developed a highly structured and gatekept system designed to ensure only vetted and relevant projects reach the executives.
Pitches must come through established intermediaries such as agents, managers, producers, or lawyers, preventing executives from being overwhelmed by unvetted ideas. Once received through these channels, projects are routed internally, aligned with the executive’s specific interests and departmental focus, streamlining evaluation.
For music or content pitches, executives and their teams look for detailed contextual information such as the story behind the work, target audience, promotion plans, and precise metadata (mood, genre, instrumentation). This helps the team understand fit and potential impact.
Agents or intermediaries often vet submissions carefully before forwarding to executives, ensuring higher quality and relevance of pitches. Clarity upfront is crucial; provide details about the content, available rights, and one's identity in initial communication. Smart subject lines are effective, using specific and clear phrases instead of vague ones.
Midweek meetings focus on catalog gaps and territory overlap, with the goal of solving for missing pieces in the content library. Deals can either be fast or take months to close, and the decision to move forward with a title is based on audience and commercial fit, good packaging, and a clear, timely release strategy.
Thursday is characterised by a large number of follow-up messages. The good follow-up refers back to previous communication, offers something new, and is polite, short, and well-timed. Building relationships is beneficial; one good interaction can open doors for future collaborations.
The platform provides access to profiles of key executives, decision-makers, and dealmakers across 100+ countries, offering services for finding partners, financiers, vendors, commissioners, co-pro studios, licensing, streamers, networks, and more. Market intelligence is available on the platform, including trend insights, competitive analysis, and strategy briefs.
The platform tracks content trends by genre, format, and language, identifies hot markets, active companies, and new entrants, and explores innovations in AI-based workflows and media tech. A pro tip for creators is to link their content pitch to audience trends or performance data if available.
However, even a show that "feels right" might be rejected if it doesn't fit the platform's audience heatmaps or release pipeline. In the end, the acquisitions executive's role is to ensure the platform's content library remains relevant, engaging, and profitable for its audience. The inbox resets by Friday evening, and the cycle begins again.
An acquisitions executive, in their quest for potential content, might find interest in projects that cross paths with the realm of finance, specifically those proposing viable and profitable business models for movies, series, or documentaries. In the realm of entertainment, when pitching content, it's crucial to provide clear, detailed information regarding the story, target audience, promotion plans, and precise metadata, much like an investor would demand when considering a business proposal.
