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Lublin brings his passion, curiosity to IMG College role

Editor’s note: This story is revised from the print edition.

WME-IMG’s Jason Lublin knows what it’s like to routinely clash against other firms for clients, considering his background in the hypercompetitive Hollywood agency world. But his new position as president of IMG College is admittedly very different — different styles, different clients … just different.

In the two months since stepping into Ben Sutton’s former role, though, Lublin is finding that the competition isn’t really all that different.

“We’ve got to make sure we’re not standing still.”

Jason Lublin, President, IMG College
 
Photo by:
WME-IMG
“We’re not going to look at competition as a bad thing,” said Lublin, who for the past eight years has served as finance chief for Endeavor and William Morris, two pre-eminent Hollywood forces that he helped merge into one. “At WME, we come from a place where we’re in competition every day. We have to keep innovating.”

In the 18 months since WME closed its deal to acquire IMG, the pursuit of multimedia and licensing rights has essentially grown from a two-horse race — IMG College and Learfield — to a full field of challengers. In fact, six media and marketing companies showed up at Auburn University for the initial round of talks for the Tigers’ rights earlier this month.

Such conversations bring out the intensity in Lublin’s eyes as he leans forward from the edge of his chair. He’s sitting in a quiet courtyard outside a charming eatery in Winston-Salem, N.C., home to IMG College’s headquarters, and a long way — literally and figuratively — from Lublin’s main office on Wilshire Boulevard, in the heart of Beverly Hills.

After lunch at Bernardin’s, an old house transformed into a restaurant, Lublin talked for an hour about growing up on Long Island, moving to Los Angeles, his love of college sports — he’s a Wisconsin graduate — and his vision as the new president of the $500 million college division. Media and college divisions are the top two moneymakers at IMG.

Lublin wants IMG College, which has largely been described as a sales agency in the past, to broaden its identity. While sales will always be the driving source of revenue, Lublin sees a distinctly brighter future as a service organization that works with schools on everything from weekend programming around football games to entertainment and hospitality.

It’s not unlike, he says, the way WME treats its Hollywood clients like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, who signed with WME in 2011 and has since broadened his acting career to also include producing and digital projects with the agency’s help.

“At the end of the day, we’re a client service business,” Lublin said of WME. “And I view the college business as a client service business. We’re used to striving to be the best in the service area, especially in terms of providing our schools with resources. It’s very analogous to how we view our WME clients.”

Lublin, 44, spent the first three years of his life on Long Island. His father, a goalkeeper on the Hofstra University lacrosse team, became a certified public accountant, and it was a CPA job that led the family west to Los Angeles.

Lublin picked up his father’s knack for numbers and studied accounting and economics at Wisconsin. A job at Coopers & Lybrand was the first of a handful of jobs in finance before Lublin landed at Endeavor in 2007 as chief financial officer.

Two years later, Endeavor merged with William Morris — the new WME led by co-CEOs Ari Emanuel and Patrick Whitesell. While they were appropriately credited as the masterminds who brought the two agencies together, Lublin became an influential, behind-the-scenes figure who spearheaded the integration of the two businesses.

“I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a great preview of things to come,” Lublin said. “There was the integration of finance systems and back-office functions, real estate, all of the things that go into a merger.”

So when WME acquired IMG last year, “I understood exactly what it was going to take to integrate,” Lublin said. “We knew the process.”

Lublin and WME-IMG  co-CEO Patrick Whitesell
Photo by: WME-IMG
These days, the integration process continues with Lublin, who also serves as WME’s global COO, taking oversight. But when it became apparent that Sutton, the former IMG College president, would move into an emeritus role, Lublin was assigned the college division as well, a clear sign of the trust he has earned from Emanuel and Whitesell. Whitesell, a former college basketball player, took an immediate interest in the college business and he remains involved, traveling a few weeks ago to the University of Mississippi with Lublin to take in a Rebels game.

Installing Lublin as president, though, also enabled the co-CEOs to have a member of the WME family in charge of one of the largest producers of revenue within WME-IMG.

Sutton described Lublin as “immediately curious about the college business.”

Ross Bjork, athletic director at Ole Miss, an IMG College client, saw the fan side of Lublin at the Final Four, where Lublin’s Badgers lost in the title game.

“What made Ben so good is that he really cared,” Bjork said. “I see the same passion in Jason.”

Lublin estimates that he’s now spending 60 percent of his time on IMG College business and 40 percent on WME. Emanuel and Whitesell brought in new heads of finance, legal and business development for the IMG side so that Lublin could focus more of his energy on the college division. They also hired former Rutgers AD Tim Pernetti as president of multimedia, a role that didn’t exist previously under Sutton.

That has freed Lublin to travel to a campus practically every week to visit one or more of the 85 schools that have their multimedia rights with IMG College. Auburn, Arkansas, BYU, California and Georgia are among his most recent visits, not to mention UCLA in his backyard, where the school recently closed a 10-year, $144 million extension with IMG College.

“It’s a lot of travel, a lot of meetings, educating myself on this business,” Lublin said. “It’s a lot of listening to ADs at our partner schools — some of the good things we do, some of the not-so-good things we do. I’m hearing feedback on what works, what doesn’t work. It’s really been about listening and trying to respond with how we get better. … We’re also trying to figure out how to take the full assets of WME-IMG and bring some of those assets to college. We’ve talked about the Brad Paisley tour, but there’s so much more we want to do with music and comedy and getting people educated on how that can work for him.”

Understanding the shifting competitive landscape is part of the education. Since WME acquired IMG in May 2014, JMI Sports, Van Wagner and Fermata Partners have entered the college space; CBS Collegiate Sports Properties has re-emerged under new ownership and resources as Outfront Media; and Fox Sports has gone on the offensive. It had to be particularly troubling that IMG’s licensing arm, Collegiate Licensing Co., just lost the business at Wisconsin, Lublin’s alma mater, to Fermata.

Overall, Lublin said, IMG College has seen what he called “some margin compression,” but there remains plenty of room to grow. He didn’t get into financial specifics.

“We’re very happy with the forecast for the college business,” he said.

As part of that forecast, several of IMG College’s biggest clients — Arkansas, Auburn, Cal, Georgia and Oregon — have deals that expire in the next two to three years, so the challenge to maintain an elite client base is front and center.

“We have seen some new entrants come into the market. They’ve gotten some business,” Lublin said. “We’ve got to make sure we’re not standing still, that we’re pushing ourselves all the time. We’re going to be competitive, we’re going to bid for business, but I also think our service offering is completely different than the competition’s.”

With that, Lublin cited a recent nine-college tour that WME client Paisley performed at IMG College schools before and after football games. It’s those kinds of events that Lublin hopes will amplify what a talent agency and a college business can do together, no matter how different they may seem.

“We’re still the same people [at IMG College] that our clients have been working with for the last five, 10 years,” Lublin said. “Our clients know what we can do. Now it’s up to us to let them know what else is possible with WME.”

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