Everyone, we're going to get started. I'd like to introduce Bill O'Dowd from Dolphin Entertainment. Welcome.
Oh, thanks. Well, it's a small room, so I'm going to stand here. I don't think I need the mic. You can hear me. And we have a show and tell today. It's kind of exciting, but I never know how far back I should go, because in every one of these rooms that I'll be mic'd, right, I see four or five faces I know pretty well, and then I see a bunch of faces that I don't know at all, so.
You might use the mic for screaming now.
Okay. I'll stand back here. How will you see me over? All right. Sorry for kicking over the light there. Dolphin, well, after the, oh, thanks, Kayla. After the obligatory cautionary note on forward-looking statements, which is fascinating, Dolphin, today is, we, we uplisted to NASDAQ in 2017, so you can see that it's a company I started out of a second bedroom in 1996. And for the first 20 years, we financed, and produced content coming out of law school. And, we're probably most known for our 10- or multi-year, I don't know exactly how many years, partnership with Nickelodeon. We made family content, but we produced television in partnership with a wide variety of networks. And, and in 2013, we got into feature films with a Justin Bieber documentary, if you or your younger siblings or children know who that is.
And then, we did a movie with Mattel, that was released in 2016, that we put up the marketing money for. And in doing that, that led to an insight that we thought there was a future in creating a super group of entertainment marketing companies. And as you can see with our uplisting, we went out to buy about a company a year. So on other PowerPoints, we switched it up this time. I would take you through each of the companies with pretty pictures of our clients. Instead, I'll do it quickly so I can get to any questions and just talk about, really, the future of Dolphin, because 2016 to October 2nd, 2023, we completed the journey to build the group that we discussed we wanted to build at LD Micro in December of 2016.
So we knew the types of companies we wanted, and we went out and got them. It starts with PR firms. 42West on the far left, this is possibly the most well-known PR firm in all of Hollywood. We have a celebrity division with Tom Cruise and Tom Hanks and others. We have a content division, which is the definitive market leader. We market big movie franchises like James Bond and Top Gun and Mission: Impossible . We have marketed countless Best Picture winners, independent films. We do, and we have big television business, big streaming business. I think probably the highlight of that was the year that they ran the Academy campaigns for Schitt's Creek when it became the first comedy to sweep the Emmys. We had a year where we had 150 Emmy nominations. So they're pretty good. Shore Fire came in.
It was an introduction made by a mentor of mine at Harvard Law, Don Passman, who's probably the most well-known music attorney working today. He's got small up-and-coming acts like Taylor Swift and Adele, and he recommended Marilyn Laverty and her company, and it's the largest music PR firm in the world. We have about 600 acts, starting with Mr. Springsteen, who I saw last Thursday in LA, but across all genres. So Chance the Rapper, Dave Matthews, Cyndi Lauper—I don't know what your music preference is, but hopefully we represent somebody in that category. Shore Fire is just a gem of a company and usually a few dozen Grammy nominations every year. The Door, culinary PR. Anybody in here a foodie? Show your hands. Do it. Do it. Do it. Nice. So we have celebrity chefs like Rachael Ray, Robert Irvine, Emeril Lagasse, Jean-Georges, Molly Yeh.
If you like the Food Network, we probably have some clients that you would know. The Door and Shore Fire, they do PR for large music events. We've done Super Bowl Music Fest, for, with Shore Fire, Summerfest , if you're out of Milwaukee. We do New York Food and Wine for, since we're in Manhattan right now, with The Door, South Beach Food and Wine. You get the sense. So once you have these PR firms, in 2024, America, Earned Media is PR and it's influencer marketing. It's peanut butter and jelly. And influencer marketing, we, we acquired in 2020, going back to that timeline. You can see methodical. We, brought in Be Social, an influencer marketing agency out of Los Angeles. 2022, we added Socialyte out of New York.
We combined them together last September to create The Digital Department , and our goal is to have The Digital Department become to influencer marketing what our PR firms are in each of their respective fields of PR. The Digital Department has two divisions. We rep over 200 influencers, where we bring them brand deals and, and take a commission on the money they earn. And then we have a brands division where we represent brands, Keurig Dr Pepper, Molson Coors, H&M, and we design influencer marketing campaigns for the brands, whether they use our influencers or not. And so, of course, with influencer marketing, it's almost impossible. I would say it's impossible to launch a consumer product today without a pretty large and hefty influencer marketing campaign. You can't open a hotel without having influencers come and check it out. It certainly touches entertainment, but it touches any consumer product.
Special Projects was our last acquisition. We did it in October. This gave us the third leg of a three-legged stool of Earned Media, of marketing with Earned Media. Special Projects designs or activates celebrity events. So we do everything from the Motion Picture Academy, right, the Academy that gives out the Oscars. They do a gala every year in L.A. We would bring Special Projects. They'll curate the guest list and organize it. So when Oprah gives Meryl the Icon Award this past October, that was them. Or Timothée Chalamet and Kylie Jenner are working with Martin Scorsese. That's them. They'll do the Wall Street Journal Innovator Awards. Since I'm at a financial conference, I imagine Wall Street Journal's more up to speed for this group.
They do the Innovator Awards every year at the Met, and they bring the people that are the celebrities that get the Innovator Awards, and then those people become the cover of Wall Street Journal magazine, that type of thing. So at the Oscars Week, they ran five different events. At New York Fashion Week, they did the Chanel store opening, Gucci event, Valentino event. You get the idea. Events that have celebrities attend them. And no, James Carbonara does not count as a celebrity. Sorry, James. Yeah. Our IR rep. But he's special to us. He's a celebrity in the Dolphin family. We do have a boutique. Viewpoint Creative is a boutique, creative agency, so we can create our own trailers, our own videos, our own brand materials. And then Dolphin Films is the legacy business that we had since 1996, where we can create content. All right.
So you build this group. It takes you seven years. You get all these companies together. Why? What's the point? And is life better as a public company CEO? Would make the.
Most likely influence success. Makes sense, right? So why would we want to own a piece of an electric car vehicle? Yeah, I don't know. Or a biotech company, or a medtech company, or quite frankly, anything to do with science. The answer is we don't. Well, what assets does entertainment marketing traditionally influence success? Well, they fall into three buckets, and we want to own assets in those buckets. One, content, obviously, right? Content. Entertainment marketers market content. Two, live events. And live events, New York Food and Wine. Do you see a lot of commercials for New York Food and Wine? I would argue no. What do you see? PR and influencer marketing, right? So live events. Coachella? Came Coachella because of TV commercials? Radio ads? Mm-mm. Right? So you think music festivals. You think food festivals.
These are all things that are marketed with Earned Media, PR and influencer marketing. Third bucket. I promised you a third bucket. Here you go, right? Because you're following me. I know. Content, live events. What's the third bucket? Consumer products. And certain consumer products, for lack of a better phrase, the marketing of the product is more important than even the quality of the product itself. And you say impossible. American consumers discern the quality of the product. So what would be a category of those types of consumer products? Liquor. How many of my friends - let's by, by show of hands - how many here have heard of Casamigos, [audio distortion] How many here think you heard of it because of Clooney? Oh, you're not going to tell me it wasn't because of Clooney?
Now, do we all have a friend that only orders Casamigos when he goes out and with a little bit of an attitude, right? "I want Casamigos." Now, we all can picture that person, right? Now, if you think we put 10 tequilas, five tequilas, three tequilas in front of that friend, who wants to take the over/under, or who wants to bet if they would be able to pick out Casamigos? I will bet against. 50/50? I'd bet 50/50. The point is it's about the market, and that category has had tremendous success with entertainment marketing it. So but so have others. How about cosmetics? How about skincare? How about fashion, right? These are all categories wherein entertainment marketing has influenced success. So now, if you could launch products where you own 10% hypothetically, not saying anything that could be interpreted as definitive, but let's say you own 10% of something.
You put up no money. I, I should probably repeat that one. You put up no money. You take 10% of a consumer product. You get paid cash to market it within the group, and you build it to exit. Exit in two or three years. Now, put a portfolio of that together of eight or 10 of those call options over the next 18 months across different categories, giving each one of your companies that specialize in it different leads. So not one, one company's not burdened with marketing eight to 10 new products. They each market two or three. What's that worth? But you say, "No, Bill. Are there any examples of products that your companies have marketed or that in general I'm like, 'All right. Well, let's see.'" We brought in a skincare group in January to our influencer marketing company.
That would have been a pretty slide. You would have loved it. Let's just pretend it's there. And it's a group of 15 dermatologists led by a non-dermatologist named Susan Yara. Susan Yara is the hero of this next story. Susan's an OG YouTube influencer in the skincare world. OG. She's 40. She has a YouTube channel called Mixed Makeup. And she did have both a following, an online following, and kind of an authority in the space. And she said, "I got a shot to launch a product." And she did. In June of 2020, she launched a product called Naturium, product line. No paid media. Only PR and influencer and her own influencers, right? So this is the new world we're now in. You can launch consumer products, the great democracy of consumer products.
You don't have to work with Maybelline or pick whichever one you want. You don't have to work with a handful of the giants. An influencer or celebrity can or entertainment property can launch a consumer product. The question is, can you market it? Can you get people to want to buy it? Starting a storefront on Amazon is free. Distribution is free. You have to make the product, granted. But distribution's free. Susan marketed it. Influencer and PR. Three years later, last summer, she sold it to e.l.f. Beauty for $355 million. She and her group just joined Dolphin in January. Why? Susan can retire. Susan's kind of retired, right? Why would they join Dolphin?
Well, you could say, "Because we're really good at blowing out TV screens." You could say, "It's the, let's be honest, the hype of the CEO." Or you could say, "Hey, you got a group here. That's pretty cool. Why don't we launch products together? Skincare products. What if by 2025, we're launching a product a year in skincare, and with that group marketing it, you think we'll do better than average? Will we increase the likelihood of success?" Cool. We're at that point. And I'm speaking at New York LD Micro after seven years of building this company. May not sound like a lot to you. Feels like a lot.
Seven years of building that group with those clients, with that prestige, with that ability to use pop culture to market to the American consumer, arguably the best way to reach the American consumer, and quite frankly, possibly in this quasi-fractured world, the one commonality of the American consumer. Are you young or are you old? Does it matter? Are you male or female? Are you Republican or Democrat? Are you Northerner or Southerner? Chances are you're watching Showtime. You're a James Bond fan. You know what Succession is. You probably have heard of Bruce Springsteen, right? So with that premise, we're at the point now where we're going to stop talking at LD Micro about, "Hey, Bill. Great job. You got your fourth company. Three more to go. Go get them, Tiger." That was 2020. Five companies was 2021. Six companies. You see the point, right?
Seven companies finished in October. So where are we at now? Now we get to go to market with the stuff we're going to market with. I'm like, "What?" I'm glad you asked. So in content, we entered into a 50/50 deal with IMAX to make documentaries and put them on an IMAX screen. Pretty cool, right? First one up, we announced two years ago, was going to be because we had Top Gun going to Cannes to premiere, is Blue Angels, the Flying Squadron. You all are familiar with. You can imagine that, though, and to be fair, it's a partnership with a very, very well-known director/producer called J.J. Abrams, who and his team got the permission from the Navy, Secretary of the Navy, to put an IMAX camera in the cockpit. Well, that's what's different, right?
Because instead of filming from the ground and looking at these planes going crazy, you're in the cockpit of a Top Gun jet, the same F-18 or Hornet. Well, that's pretty cool footage. And when you're in an IMAX screen and seeing these jets flying 12 inches apart, well, that's a pretty cool piece of content. Now, why would IMAX go into a 50/50 deal with Dolphin? Back to the same. Hire the CEO. Or you own the very best film marketing company in the business. Dolphin has done 50/50 deals for 20 years before it, and we can promote. So we did. We put up $2 million. They put up $2 million. And we've reported that we expect a very, very we made a sale to Amazon that, for streaming rights said is significantly more than the combined $4 million.
Now, we go into theaters May 17th in IMAX. I know what you all are doing. It's a Friday. Cancel all plans. And as you do, please remember that we own 25% of those ticket sales. And the other benefit of an IMAX partnership, multi-year, multi-project 50/50 deal that we have with IMAX, the only one in the market, the only deal that exists in the market to put documentaries in theaters, Dolphin Entertainment with IMAX, is that IMAX owns 150 what we call institutional theaters. So you may know at the Museum of Science or the Smithsonian or whatever. This movie, cut down to 44 minutes so it can play every hour, will run for the we expect decades, no exaggeration, 20, 25 years, 25% of all ticket sales. Pretty cool. So that's a piece of content. It's catalyst force four and a half weeks from now.
But you say, "That's too long. I don't want to wait four and half weeks." No problem. So our first consumer product hits stores May 1st. Well, what is it? I'm glad you asked. It's a gin. It's a liquor in partnership with Rachael Ray. Now, we are very excited for this. Liquor will be, no pun intended, a staple of our consumer products business for the next 20 years because it's a category that has multiple examples of success with entertainment marketing. I gave Clooney earlier. Ryan Reynolds exited his gin for over $600 million, right? So the point of why Rachael as I was making in a few of the one-on-one meetings earlier today, and I'll stop and take any questions, is not only is she obviously a very, very well-known personality and a chef.
Gin, as you may know, is based on a recipe. I didn't know that. I learned a lot owning these companies. And she wrote the recipe for it. And you can write recipes to cook with gin as well, but she wrote the recipe for the gin itself. She had her own daytime talk show for 15 years, 17 years, some extraordinary amount the last eight years. So she's extremely well-known. And she's got so many other products in market: pots, pans, cooking utensils, lifestyle products. You say, "Why does that matter?" That matters because if you got 1,000 SKUs in market, where, where are those other products sold? Like, why, why Rachael and not who's your favorite celebrity that we don't represent? Why not Margot Robbie? Now, maybe Margot Robbie will start a gin, and she probably has a chance to be successful.
But Rachael, I would argue, may even have a better chance for the two reasons I just said and this one. If you've got 800 products in market, and where are they selling? Target, Costco, Kroger. Where's the gin going to sell? And do you think if you're Target, do you think you'd want the gin? And would you cross-market the gin with the other products? Would you create an end cap that, by the gin, get two pots free, whatever you're doing, right? You have scale from the beginning that you just can't do otherwise. So we're pretty excited for that. It's just one example of what we're doing. And, hopefully, we're a story that interests you now that, you know, we showed all the pretty pictures. And what we were going to do was show the trailer.
I'll say this, you know, again, please remember this was a documentary. We dropped the trailer on the Today Show for a documentary. You've seen a lot of those in your life. And we got 9 million views in the first week for a documentary. Did I mention it was a documentary? That doesn't premiere for another five weeks. No paid media behind it yet. And if you want to see the trailer, it's up on YouTube. And thank you for the time. I think we're done.
We got a couple minutes. We started late, Bill. In.
Nah. Hey. So I'll take any thoughts, questions. I did pick you, Con. Okay.
A quick question. You know, so influencer marketing is great when it works, when it's positive. If you've seen a disastrous all that with Bud Light, why won't you make that same mistake?
Well. An easy question.
Why won't? Well, I certainly don't want to comment on, on Bud Light, who's not a client? And, and I don't know the facts well enough to know who probably would be, would claim responsibility for success or not success in that case. I think, when you put together influencer marketing, I guess I'd say we can look for things that didn't work out as well as others would have hoped in anything, right? You make a movie. Why didn't it work, right? Or you made a TV show that doesn't work. And I hope for the best for everyone that's in business because it's hard. So as I say all that, what I would say with influencer marketing, it is undeniably in our core businesses before we get to the, the ventures, it's our growth engine.
Then you say, "Oh, but isn't hasn't influencer marketing been growing for a while?" Huh. Haha. It's we're still in the early innings. And you say, "Why?" Because of all that category expansion. How many here follow college sports? How many here know that now college athletes can get paid? Right? Supreme Court ruling not even three years ago. A business that was zero is worth $3 billion today. Great. It's $3 billion of influencer marketing. The kids are being paid a salary? No. A bonus? No. How do the kids get paid? They get paid to do influencer campaigns. Only. So there's a category you if you suggested Dolphin should get into athlete representation, let's see if we take that up this year, right?
And you say, "That's zero to what?" So for us, influencer marketing has just tremendous reach and potential because it's now it's still growing on a top-line mass influencer marketing. And what we're now starting to see are the starts of niches. You've got we had a 74-year-old grandmother last year make over $5 million baking. The grandfluencer category is actually a category. Let's talk about athletes. Let's talk about TikTok stars. Let's talk about, you know, it just goes on and on. It's beyond female Instagram today. And that's exciting for us. We should hope to be able to double our influencer marketing in the next two to three years.
We got enough for one quick question. Our next presenter starts in about three minutes.
I just had a quick question, Bill.
When you do a content deal with someone like Rachael Ray and a for a consumer product, how much of capital do you have to put up at first? And do you have enough capital to?
I love that question because we put up zero capital.
In every even for any consumer product. So you're just going to a distillery and saying, "Make us a special blend of Rachael Ray's and, and."
And so two years from now and I say I'm not waiting two years. Like, if each quarter we announce a new consumer product, well, then next quarter, we got two. And next quarter, we got three. Three by the end of the year. Seven by next Christmas. At some point and, and you're built for two or three-year exits. That's the phase we're in now.
So seven years of buying the companies, two to three years of building the slate, and keep and it's going to be perpetual. And then we exit. Well, something exits, right? And then we start and because the next phase will be, "Oh, where are we going to be at LD Micro in three years?" Oh, we just exited. Well, what does exiting Rachael Ray's gin mean for our company? Well, I'll let you all do the math, right? So, that's, that's the next phase for us. And it's, you know are they all going to work? No. One of them works. We have a market cap today of $25 million.
So, so thinking back on that question, the IMAX deal, you got your money out, it sounds like, plus a profit.
Yeah. Double profit.
And now the 10-year recurring revenue, when it's in the theaters, museums, science centers, you get $0.25 on the dollar. Every dollar in sales, you get $0.25 hit your bottom line.
Yep. So there's something that's our world. That's the world I did for 20 years. So we felt comfortable putting in $2 million to match IMAX's $2 million, right? So we're partners. We, we yes, we're doubling our money. And whatever's in the theaters is upside. And it'll be an annuity for us for 10 years.
So if we are officially out of time, Bill, you are more than welcome if you guys want to use the speakers lounge to take any additional questions.
Oh, the speakers lounge. Nice.
Go ahead, Bill. Go answer.