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The personal brand letters your arch nemesis hopes you never read.

It has the same effect as a crisp sip of champagne hitting the back of your palate the minute you walk into the after party. Your brain lights up, you start to feel tingly, your confidence flares and you glide through the room like it’s 1925 and you’re in the Great Gatsby. By Carolene Méli - the ghostwriter behind the personal brands of founders, executives and investors in entertainment, events and media.

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3000 followers gone

my ultimate goal is to build a community, not an audience, in the industry i love. in my early days as a ghostwriter, one thing i'd 'promise' potential clients was that we'd grow their following by 2-3x. for the most part i was able to pull that off, but i soon started noticing that more followers did not equal more engagement. think of all those stories we hear of influencers with millions of followers not being able to sell a tshirt. they built an audience, not a community. a few years ago...

Every week I hunt for the most interesting people in entertainment on LinkedIn. It's one of my favourite parts of my job. This week my search led me to these three awesome founders: Alicia Yaffe Co-founder of Living Album Experience, a company turning music albums into live walk-through experiences. She's building new revenue streams for musicians who can't or don't want to sell tickets and merch — so they can keep sharing their music without the gruelling life of touring. She talked about...

If you were at IMEX Frankfurt, I made you a promise... I promised to send you a chunky Q&A of all the questions you asked. I got so hyped up hearing how many of you wanted to start posting on LinkedIn... whether you were in a company, running a company or a solo operator. And your timing couldn't be more perfect. LinkedIn is going through an exciting change right now. It started, as you know, as a dead boring graveyard of job posts and corporate vomit. Then around the pandemic, creators came...

Welcome To The Pop Up No soft launches in sight. In 2024, HBO's Dune: Prophecy pop-up at Comic-Con sold out in under two hours. The show hadn't aired yet. Nobody knew if it was any good. Didn't matter. The pop-up created the moment. Curiosity turned into anticipation. Anticipation turned into 224 million impressions before a single episode dropped. That's what a pop-up does. It doesn't wait for permission. It doesn't wait for proof. It announces: something is happening here, right now, and...

The cost of letting your story sit unreleased For over 20 years, he made other musicians famous. Produced the hits. Built the campaigns. Sat in rooms where careers got made and quietly made them. Then last year, he put his own name on the door.He started his own company, announcing it with a single post. Hundreds of reactions. 20 meetings booked.People in the industry know him well but the room he needs next doesn't.Strategic partners. Talent. Investors. He has the expertise. The credibility....

The most important person no one has heard of Talent gets you in the room. Visibility builds the building. In 1971, a 28-year-old kid from Brooklyn launched a record label out of desperation. He'd been trying to get his client - an unknown singer-songwriter named Jackson Browne - a deal with every major label in Los Angeles. Nobody would touch him. So David Geffen did the only thing left to do. He started his own label. He called it Asylum. Named it, he said, because it was a refuge for...

Your Frost Covered, Missed Opportunity. A damn shame. Édith Piaf sang on the street corners of Montmartre and Pigalle - a small girl with an enormous voice that the city kept walking past. Nobody stopped. Nobody noticed. She was just another sound in the noise.Then a nightclub owner heard her outside his club on the Champs-Élysées. He stopped. He listened. He put her on a stage.Within weeks, Paris couldn't look away.The only thing that changed? Someone finally saw her.If you're an...

No One In Entertainment Creates Alone Not even Stallone 1975. Sylvester Stallone has $106 in his bank account. He just sold his dog for $40 because he couldn't afford to feed him. He's been rejected from every audition. His face is partially paralysed from a birth injury. His speech is slurred. Hollywood keeps telling him he's not leading man material. Then he watches Muhammad Ali fight Chuck Wepner - an underdog who went the distance against the greatest. Stallone goes home. Three days...

The New Executive Path Expertise → Content → Opportunities Seven years ago, Warner Bailey was an assistant at WME.To document the absurdity - the chaos, the wild requests, the sheer madness of that corner of entertainment - he started a meme account.Assistants vs. Agents.Anonymous. Honest. Funny. Therapeutic.A place where Hollywood assistants could finally vent secretly in public.Today, it's a full media company.100,000+ followers. Partnerships with Netflix, Disney, Warner Bros. A newsletter...

The Invisible Executive Four stories that turn executives into industry voices I clicked 'end call' and I knew. I knew I had just spoken to someone unique in our industry. Someone with a wild story, rich expertise and a brand new mission. She's been building world-class productions for decades. Behind the curtain. Now she's stepping into her next big role and everything's shifting. She wants to elevate the unsung heroes of live entertainment - the ones who make magic happen backstage. She...