Kevin Wall

TV Real Weekly, April 23, 2008

Founder & CEO

Control Room & Live Earth

On July 7, 2007, Live Earth held the largest global entertainment event in history—staging simultaneous concerts in New York, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro, and Johannesburg, along with special broadcast events in Antarctica, Kyoto and Washington, D.C. Through broadcasts across TV, radio, wireless and the Internet in 130 countries, as well as 30 PSAs, 60 short films and a book, the concert reached an estimated 2 billion people. The broadcasts themselves broke worldwide audience records. It has been touted as the most-watched online entertainment event in history, with some 15 million simultaneous streams that day and a total of 80 million streams on MSN in the three months following the event. Its purpose: to bring awareness to the climate change crisis.

The man behind the epic event is Kevin Wall, the CEO of Control Room, a producer and distributor of entertainment content and global producer of the Live Earth concert. After seeing Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth, first as a slideshow then as a feature film, Wall was “very moved by it,” he says. “Because I produce events and in the past have produced many global events, such as Live 8, I really thought I could help the environmental movement kick start by leading an event, which became Live Earth.”

Wall was introduced to the former U.S. VP by a mutual friend who was working at Viacom—which owns Paramount Vantage, the filmed entertainment company behind the Academy Award-winning doc—and once they met, “it was an easy sell,” says Wall. Gore, a recent Nobel Peace Prize winner, signed on with his organization, the Alliance for Climate Protection, and the result was a 24-hour, seven-continent concert series that broke new ground in the sector of solution-driven entertainment.

An integral part of the event’s success was its reach, using a multiplatform approach so that audiences around the globe could participate. Wall spoke in-depth about this “platform-agnostic,” 360-degree media architecture at the recent MIPTV, as a keynote for the Green Day. “Digital travels in a very free form across many platforms,” he says. “There’s a lot of conversation about it, but today it only really exists globally with sports and music projects,” the latter of which happens to be his forte.

It’s the shift in media consumption that has driven Wall so aggressively towards this 360-degree content model. He cites wireless as a key factor, noting that “in five to seven years [mobiles] will become the device [to] which content will be directed,” he says. Another area Wall is focused on is “spending a huge amount of time with sponsors to become a consumer brand,” noting that with music, a sponsor “can attach themselves relatively easily and stay with it�it’s going to continue to be driven by these strategic brands.”

Wall grew up with 11 brothers and sisters, in what he calls “a very competitive family. All 12 of the kids run and own their own businesses, so there must have been something very entrepreneurial in my upbringing.” After some 30 years and a string of successes, Wall proudly cites “Live Earth as a high point of my life,” adding, “so was Live 8. I am blessed.”

“It’s a little surreal,” he adds. “You just stand back and go, Wow! If I thought about it too much going into it everyday, it would probably become overwhelming.”

—By Kristin Brzoznowski