One Day Immersion in NYC Brings Together Top TV Execs

On Friday, October 24^th at 3 AM, more than 50 SU students, including myself, loaded a coach bus to head to New York City. A combination of S.I. Newhouse undergrads and graduate students, and Whitman undergraduate and graduate students slept the five hours down to the city, as we were all on our way to the One Day Immersion conference.

The full conference title is One Day Immersion in TV, Cable, and Digital Entertainment, and the day consisted of workshops and panels with some top media executives. As an advertising graduate student with an interest in media, I was excited for the day but I wasn’t sure what to expect. I have an interest in media strategy in advertising, as do a few of my peers, so the few of us decided that it could be worth it to make the trip down.

The conference was free and was held in the heart of the city in the McGraw-Hill Conference Center. The bus was 20 minutes late, but they had waited for us to arrive to start the first panel. This seemed extreme until the first panel started and we found that two panelists were SU alumni, Andy Goldman, the Vice President of HBO, and Gary Hahn, Vice President of Media and Marketing at Elvis Presley Enterprises. The panels continued with even more executives claiming their status as SU alumni, all met with cheering. I had been told dozens of times that New York City was home to plenty of SU alumni, many of them in top executive positions, but until this conference it had been harder to notice.

Six panels interspersed with two workshops covered a variety of topics. As an advertising student, there were some things I simply didn’t know about television like the specifics of television programming and how networks work, but overall the panels were very interesting. Although I am an advertising student, I believe that with an interest in media and as a communications student it’s important to understand what’s going on within media industries outside of your own.

A panel right before lunch was particularly relevant and discussed the importance of research in the media industry. Understanding your audience and finding insights regarding that audience has become crucial in television, according to the panel. This is something that I have been understanding in my own advertising classes and it was really interesting how similar this research was, even the way they handled insights was similar.

The conference ended with a panel on leadership in the workplace, once again full of top executives, giving advice on how they lead in their positions. This panel was followed by keynote speaker, Michael Davies. Typically, few people would recognize this name, but as he began to talk about his major TV moments and the shows he has spearheaded, you’ll know exactly who he is. The moment when the first person ever won a million dollars on ‘Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?’ was overseen by Davies. ‘The Man Show,’ which ran on Comedy Central, was originally supposed to run on ABC, but as Davies was pitching the show to ABC executives, he realized he was watching his job slip through his fingers. He retold the story during his keynote, saying he had left the meeting and immediately called Comedy Central and sold them ‘The Man Show,’ and was fired from ABC within the week. He is now president of Embassy Row and some current television credits include ‘The Talking Dead’ on AMC, and ‘Watch What Happens Live’ on Bravo.

It was a very long day, as we all boarded the bus after the conference to head back to Syracuse, but I’m so glad that I go to a school that would offer an opportunity to attend an event like this. Having the opportunity to meet these people, ask them questions and just hear them speak about things they know so well from inside the industry are things I’d have to really work to find as an individual. The conference is annual and although it is geared towards students, there were plenty of other young professionals in attendance and I would highly recommend anyone with the availability to go to next year’s conference.