Eisner Returns to Scent of Crime at Aquent PDF Conference
By Don Fluckinger
2008-04-30


PDF Version
Media mogul: In 20 years, web content will reign, while networks will serve to rerun shows first shown on Internet.

ORLANDO, FL: The room was electric with bittersweet irony as ex-Disney CEO and board chairman Michael Eisner delivered the keynote address at the Aquent CRE8/PDF Conference this morning. While the jet-setting speaker and--at this point in his career, media entrepreneur--is no stranger hotel rooms, here at the Disney Coronado Springs resort he wasn't staying in just any room: He conceived this facility for smaller conferences and handpicked the architect, Graham Gund, as part of his broader plan for Disney to create its own profitable hotels and resorts around its Orlando parks instead of contracting them to large chains, which had been the plan when he took over in the 1980s.
That's the sweet part. Previously as an ABC programming exec he'd helped get Happy Days and Laverne & Shirley on the air; while at Disney, he bought the whole network, along with ESPN. They were spoils of an extraordinary run where Eisner, fresh off of overseeing a run of monster hits for Paramount, turned Walt's stagnating company into a theme-park empire with an animation division that could not fail, cranking out hit after hit from The Little Mermaid to the Lion King, and then later with Steve Jobs' Pixar, everything from Toy Story to Finding Nemo.

The bitter part was the 2005 boardroom revolt led by Roy Disney Jr. that threw Eisner, who was chairman as well as CEO, out of the company after more than 20 years at the helm. The company had seemingly lost its way after the Internet boom went bust, and Eisner's tactics of fostering seemingly constant discord in upper management--described at great length by author James Stewart in the book Disneywar--finally caught up with him. Interestingly amid today's discussion of media and how the Internet will drive the future of entertainment, it was a web innovation--a dissident shareholder site--that fueled the revolution and helped bring Eisner down.

ADVERTISEMENT
Here at the Aquent conference, Eisner seemed to have integrated the lessons from his old-school media hard knocks and folded in more from the current down-economy entertainment landscape by running contrary to industry chestnuts: He praised the virtues of thinking inside the box, admonishing creatives to come up with effective means to stay within budgets. To illustrate what he meant, Eisner hauled out the oft-told tale of the Raiders of the Lost Ark street fight where Harrison Ford's character shoots a sword-waving assailant after horsewhipping scores of others into submission: It was a budget matter where the crew needed to finish, and Ford was ill and not available for extended shooting. Yet it became one of the funniest moments in the movie. He also made a case for managers taking a strong hand in content creation, something in his own Disney tenure contributed to soaring successes as well as the opposite.

"Micromanagement equals effective management," said Eisner, whose company Vuguru now is developing web programming in two- to 10-minute episodes, including the video series Prom Queen as well as the uncensored All-for-Nots, a wryly witty 2008 twist on The Monkees. So far, micronmanagement is keeping costs down and getting companies like Dodge into sponsorship roles. He also described a fascinating marketing project Vuguru's doing for the upcoming Foreign Body by superstar novelist Robin Cook: Vuguru will release 50 tiny "prequel" video episodes dealing with aspects of the characters' lives, leading up to the release of the book this summer.

Eventually, Eisner believes, web content will overtake television as the main medium for first-run shows as technology supports longer episodes and advertising protocols develop. He believes the present landscape of TV networks will serve as syndication outlets for first-run web content, which will premiere at the future equivalents of today's Yahoo!, MSN, and Veoh--a company in which Eisner's invested. As for now, he said Prom Queen is in the black--barely--and the other shows haven't turned a profit. But it's coming.

"The Internet's been driven, so far, by technology," Eisner said. "Moving forward, it will be driven by creativity."

Following Eisner's mountaintop view of technology and media--which was highly entertaining and at points quite funny but in the end had little to do with Acrobat, PDF, and the other Adobe-based creative tools attendees had some to learn about--PDF guru Max Wyss of the Swiss firm Prodok got into some rock-solid PDF nuts and bolts, offering a 10-year retrospective of the evolution of PDF forms, demonstrating his trademark flashy, cutting-edge-yet-lightweight, complex PDF catalogs tailored for web use.

Wyss said that, while a lot of the features with which most forms and catalogs can be created have been in Acrobat since version 5, subsequent Acrobat revs have shown improved stability and performance, as well as further integration of XML functionality, which expands the palette for people creating data collection systems.