Milan, Cardinale on stage at the NYT with Ben Affleck: ‘This is how I intend to create value’

Subject of discussion: the future of entertainment, using the Hollywood experience as a starting point to be applied to other sectors. Yes, just thatentertainment which has long been one of the keywords in Gerry Cardinale’s working dictionary. A term that can be declined in many nuances and absolutely applicable to various corporate genres. Sports and football included, of course. So also Milan. The number one of the Rossoneri club spoke about it the other day during the New York Times DealBook Summit 2022, the prestigious annual event of the New York newspaper which brought together a parterre of world leaders including the Ukrainian president Zelensky, the former deputy US President Pence, former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, the CEOs of Amazon (Hastings), Meta (Zuckerberg), TikTok (Chew) and Netflix (Jassy). Cardinale was on stage alongside Oscar-winning Ben Affleck – an acquaintance born 25 years ago – invited to speak about the innovative production studio Artists Equity, to which RedBird has guaranteed a $100 million loan (and of which he is also a founder another Hollywood face decidedly known as Matt Damon).

Quantity and quality

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Password? “Content is king”, the mantra copyrighted by Bill Gates and adopted by Cardinale, in search of a business that creates “the next revolution”. A convergence between sport, media and entertainment in which Cardinale firmly believes and which also characterizes his strategic leadership for Milan. The goal is to leverage untapped revenue streams to make the football product ever more attractive and sustainable. “Technologies and the absence of intermediaries have created wonderful things” – highlighted the Rossoneri owner -. They are a great tool of democratization and we espouse it. Throughout my career I have chased the dictum ‘Content is king’. Today is the first time I’m starting to actually see the possibility. The first wave of streaming content was about quantity, the second is about quality.”

“Generate value”

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Affleck, in the role of director and with Matt Damon in the lead role, will tell the story of the birth and development of the Air Jordan brand, or rather the demonstration of how a sports brand can be transformed into a global and multi-sector brand. “It wasn’t just about setting up a production company like everyone in Hollywood does, and going around looking for funding,” Cardinale said. Rather, it was a conversation between entrepreneurs about how we can build a business that is capable of generating value, that takes advantage of technology and the absence of intermediaries, with the monetization of content and the ability to create the next revolution”. General guidelines on how Cardinale interprets his idea of ​​business. With Milan he has just started, but the recent agreements with some major players in the American entertainment scene are a clear calling card: the Devil declined in global terms. Geographical and corporate.