When a half-dozen key CompuServe workers jumped to the Microsoft Network in September, Bill Gates wasn’t their only common link.
They shared another important force, agent Jim Rulfs, who brokered the groundbreaking deal luring an entire team of top talent from CompuServe.
Rulfs is part of a small but growing new force in the media and entertainment business: the digital agent.
Like those who represent movie stars and authors, this new breed of agent wheels and deals for writers, artists, Web site developers and others who want to make a splash in the wired world.
With the emergence of new technologies and the growth of the Internet as an entertainment venue, these agents are slowly becoming big players.
But it’s no easy feat.
Online salaries are nowhere near the $20 million that Jim Carrey rakes in per movie.
So digital agents have to scramble to make money beyond their usual 10 percent commission by coming up with creative and sometimes unusual deals.
“We’re doing whatever we have to, to earn a living while we continue to stay involved,” said Jerry Spiegel, a new media attorney at Frankfurt, Garbus, Klein & Selz who has brokered online deals.
But experts predict the age of the digital agent is here to stay.
“There’s no doubt five or 10 years from now that interactive is going to be a part of what agents do on a day-to-day basis,” said Charlie Fink, chief creative officer of America Online’s Greenhouse Networks.
Here’s a look at some top digital agents.
For Jim Rulfs, being an agent is just a part-time job.
An online veteran, the 44-year-old deal-maker started at CompuServe in 1982.
More recently, he has worked as vice president of business development at Wireless Services, a Bellevue, Wash.-based E-mail company.
Six months ago, Rulfs started hearing complaints from old friends working online about the industry’s low pay.
So he and a partner, ex-Microsoft exec Steve Wood, began recruiting clients and looking to bag lucrative deals for them.
One of those clients was Ron Luks, a 17-year veteran of CompuServe who had been running special-interest communities on the service with his wife, Dawn Gordon, and business partner Mike Schoenbach.
Rulfs won Luks a deal to create new forums for MSN, while still continuing his work for CompuServe–an unprecedented move for the Internet.
He’s already been approached by other forum leaders, Rulfs said. And he’s got an open door at Prodigy to bring them new blood, he said.
Looking to expand on its traditional base as a powerhouse for movie and TV deals, the venerable William Morris agency has gone digital, too.
The agency, which represents superstars like Whoopi Goldberg, brokered one of the biggest online deals when it signed programing guru Brandon Tartikoff, since deceased, to a top post at AOL.
“William Morris is probably the most active and the most successful agency in the interactive business today,” said AOL’s Fink.
Even so, the digital media business is still in flux, said Jonathan Trumper, 40, a William Morris digital agent based in New York.
“You make money. But it’s never been the same way twice,” said Trumper, a 16-year agency veteran who has worked with writers and actors such as Eric Bogosian.
The biggest money for people on the Net right now, said Trumper, is off the Net–for example, the book deal that William Morris landed for the local Web-based sex magazine Nerve.
“We’re going back into traditional media to generate revenue,” he said. “We’re using digital media to build visibility.”
In Los Angeles, Trumper’s colleague Lewis Henderson is advising CBS SportsLine, the sports Web site that’s branching out into radio.
“This is not different from any other business we’ve been into,” said Henderson, 32. “We want to make sure that we’re helping to build it and mold it and craft it.”
Five years ago, Stefanie Henning was like countless other agents in the entertainment business. She represented writers and directors for TV sitcoms and one-hour dramas–and was getting bored by the routine.
“I was desperately seeking a niche,” the 31-year-old executive said.
That’s when she started wondering whether she could make any money representing people who made the video games she loved to play in her spare time.
“Within three months,” Henning said, “that business started developing more money for me than my television business.”
Three years ago, she moved to International Creative Management, the Hollywood agency that represents stars like Julia Roberts.
ICM has cut some interesting online deals. It just finished a three-year run producing celebrity chats for America Online.
But Henning spends only a fraction of her time on Internet-related deals.
Mostly she is consulting with corporate clients like Mercedes-Benz, helping polish their brands, or setting up deals for game developers, like the company behind the forthcoming “Men In Black” spin-off.
But she’s just waiting for the time when TV gets more computerized.
That’s when the online business will really pick up, she said.
