Franchise Overview and Elements: Person of the Year is an annual issue of the United States news magazine and website Time featuring a person, a group, an idea, or an object that "for better or for worse ... has done the most to influence the events of the year". Time's 2022 Person of the Year is Volodymyr Zelenskyy and the spirit of Ukraine. Time honored the Ukrainian president as its 2022 person of the year, citing his leadership at home and on the world stage.
The launch of this year’s franchise included several large scale executions, inclusive of unveiling of the Person of the Year on NBC’s The Today Show, the ringing of the Closing Bell at NASDAQ, a digital hub and magazine launch, an event at The Plaza in NYC and several branded content executions.
My Franchise Conductor Responsibilities and Program Hurdles: For this program, I wore two hats: franchise conductor and branded content studio producer. As the franchise conductor, I worked directly with all teams across the company who had their hand in the program, along with their vendors, to coordinate the executions. Person of the Year offers especially challenging situation as the franchise conductor as the honoree that the editorial team has selected is top secret - meaning that all teams are working with only partial information. We aren’t made aware of who has been selected until hours before the announcement. Despite this challenge, I am tasked with ensuring there is as much transparency as possible across all departments, managing timelines and deliverables and finding efficiencies to make the launch as smooth as possible.
My Producer Responsibilities and Branded Content Elements: As the branded content studio producer, I worked on a program titled Dreamer of the Year in partnership with American Family Insurance. Dreamer of the Year included a video, print ad and digital landing page which all highlighted Donnel Baird, BlocPower’s influential founder and CEO. Production of this program included coordinating with our external production partners to set up a multi-day shoot, working with TIME’s editorial team teams to ensure we were within TIME’s tone of voice and TIME’s design and creative strategy team build the landing page and print ad - all within a condensed timeline of four weeks. Even with the timing challenges, the video was a success. A cutdown of it ran as a commercial during NBC’s The Today Show and also as a segment of the Person of the Year event’s programming.