By the time Peacock’s VP of Title Creative Marketing, Eric Jones, graduated from Syracuse University with a B.S. in Television Radio, and Film Management, he already had nine years of experience in the television industry.
A self-described troublemaker in his youth growing up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where burning cars and drug dealing were part of the everyday tableau, Jones credits the programs at his school for redirecting his energy and helping him discover his passion for storytelling.
In a recent Leadership Talk with FUTURE NOW Founder & CEO Peggy Kim, Jones shared how it all started with a tour of the Showtime offices when he was in middle school.
“A bunch of people from different departments came and spoke to the class. At the end of it someone asked, ‘Does anyone have any questions?’ And I shot my hand up in the air, and when they called on me, my first question without skipping a beat was ‘When can I get a job here?’ And this one lady…her name was Faith…with her little Jamaican patois accent, she said, ‘You know what? When you get your work in papers, why don't you call me.’”
A few months later, Jones turned 14 and got his working papers. “And I called her the next day, and I called her the next day, and I kept calling her, because, you know, kids don't know etiquette, so I just kept calling her.”
His persistence paid off. “That summer was my very first job ever. At that time all I did was make xeroxes and send faxes.”
Jones worked at Showtime for several summers.
“I worked in operations, providing service to the creative team,” he explained. “So I would hand deliver tapes for edit rooms for producers for their edit sessions.
One day, he dropped off some tapes and overheard Spanish in the background.
“I got curious. I had never heard Spanish in an office before. I followed the voice, and there was a team of producers watching a monitor, listening to a boxer speak Spanish. As they were listening, the VP of Creative said ‘What is he saying?’
Standing at the door, Jones answered, “He said, ‘He’s gonna get in the ring.’”
Surprised, the executive invited him to stay and help them with the translations.
”That was my first time in an edit room. I helped them produce this piece - I must have been like 16 at the time. I did all the translation for Spanish.”
They were so impressed that they asked Jones to join their team the next summer, and then, the next three summers after that.
Two weeks after graduating from college, Jones started a full-time job as a production assistant for Showtime’s boxing broadcasts. He rose through the ranks as an Associate Producer, Writer-Producer, and eventually Senior Writer-Producer.
“I worked there for eight years… It was amazing. I was traveling the world, a kid from the Lower East Side who’d never been on a plane. I went to Vegas–my very first fight was Mike Tyson vs. [Evander] Holyfield when he bit him in the ear.”
After 16 years at Showtime, Jones decided it was time for a change. “One day as I was putting my reel together, I realized every single spot and piece of creative that I had was boxing. I was concerned I would get pigeonholed as a boxing guy. If I continued working in boxing I’d only be able to work in boxing.”
Jones wanted to expand his horizons. “So I made the decision to leave Showtime, which was a hard decision for me. I had known people there for 16 years. I made a lateral move as a Senior Writer-Producer at Showtime to Senior Writer-Producer at Spike TV.”
The move from sports to unscripted programming and reality shows was challenging, but Jones quickly learned to apply the storytelling skills he’d learned at Showtime to his new role.
“End of the day, what we do is tell stories. Given I’ve been working in boxing for so long, storytelling is very important. At the end of the day, you have two guys fighting. You have to find the heart, the purpose, the reason they’re fighting, and that in itself is the creative challenge.”
At Spike, Jones was soon promoted to Executive Producer, and then, to Creative Director. After five years, Jones got the itch again to make his next move.
“When I started to put my reel together, I had a lot of boxing and now a lot of unscripted. If I stay where I am now, I’m gonna be pigeonholed when my passion is scripted [content]. So, I made a lateral move, from creative director at Spike to creative director at Sundance TV, overseeing scripted, unscripted, films, and branding.”
Jones worked at Sundance for five years until he heard that Peacock had picked up Bel-Air, a re-imagination of the beloved sitcom "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.”
“I was hell-bent on working at Peacock to work on Bel-Air. So much so that after making a bunch of phone calls and getting an opportunity for an interview, in the interview I told my [future] manager, I told them, ‘I want to work on Bel-Air.’”
Jones got the job. “And on my very first day at Peacock, I had five Bel-Air meetings.”
As the Vice President of Title Creative Marketing at Peacock, Jones oversees promotions and creative marketing output not only for Bel-Air but for all of the streamer’s titles.
“Whether they’re series, scripted or unscripted, film, or our library content if we’re promoting [a single] title, that’s under my team’s purview.”
Jones and his team have their hands on everything from movie trailers to 30-second promos on social media to creating key art, secondary art, and graphic designs, for various needs throughout a marketing campaign. They collaborate closely with the company’s marketing, operations, press, and activations teams.
Jones described his 32-person creative team and their day-to-day. “So I have a team of creative directors and they lead the creative campaigns. Working with them is a team of producers, designers, and art directors. Throughout the course of the day, we’re working closely with our marketing counterparts and creative operations to really develop a strategy for the title and the creative brief and the creative execution for each of those. We work really closely together to get that done. We work really closely with showrunners and EPs. The way we usually kick off a campaign is we sit in a Zoom room and listen to the showrunners and EPs so we can hear what their vision of a particular show is. We take their thoughts and the scripts and the visuals and the episodes and we start to pull marketing hooks and themes that are unique and important to the series. And from those marketing hooks and themes, we start to develop the creative strategy, and based on that creative strategy, we start to develop creative tactics that ladder up to the strategy.”
Jones cites his contributions to Bel-Air as his proudest work. “It was the first time in my career I was able to work on a title with people that looked like me...I hadn't been fortunate enough to have that experience where I could work on titles with people who looked like me, who’d gone through the same experiences that I had gone through, who had similar stories that I had. So it was a dream being able to work on that and it ended up being one of Peacock’s most successful shows of all time.”
“I loved being able to bring my culture and my background into the creative myself. There were a few times when I had to say to a room full of people who didn’t look like me, ‘Listen, Black people are going to love this. We should do this.’ And God bless them, they listened to me.”
Jones attributes his success to passion. “I was just so passionate about the job, I would do anything and everything. Even if people didn’t ask, I would write scripts, I would help with edits. Not for the sake of getting a promotion. I was just excited about it. They saw that excitement and effort. I went from a PA to an AP because of that passion.”
To Jones, passion matters and sets someone apart from the pack. “We don’t talk about passion enough in our field. Yes, skills are important, but I do believe that there are many people that can do what we do, but we don’t want to work with just anyone. I’ve seen many people in this business who are creative geniuses but not the easiest to work with. I’ve seen people who are super collaborative and have positive energy, and I’ve seen how they’ve excelled. I’ve been more of the latter than the former.”
Jones’ reverence for passion translates to his hiring practices as well. “If someone’s passionate about the job or the work, or entertainment, that I always gravitate towards. Someone approaches me with interesting questions or someone’s excited – I can teach you to write stronger, but I can’t teach passion. So if you start with that, ultimately I’m gonna want to work with you.”
Jones imparted some final words of wisdom. “I encourage everyone to live by their core values. By doing so, you can rest assured that you are true to yourself and the work that you’ve done, and people will see that. I personally live by my core values. I discovered them within the last eight years. The irony is that I’ve had several career coaches and in each instance, my goal was to get a promotion. But with the last career coach I had, I told him, ‘Every time I did this, it was for a promotion. I want to create a work life where I’m happy with the work I’m making and the person I am.’ Through that journey with him, I leaned into four core values: relationship, collaboration, love, and success. Those are the four core values I live by. Finding what success means to you will help you in the long run.”
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