Last year Erin McPherson was heard speaking on how she saw Maker Studios bringing in a new lease of life to Disney following a reported $500 mn merger, but now Maker Studios has parted ways with its content chief along with senior VP marketing Jeremy Welt, who have both left the Disney-owned digital media company.
Erin McPherson had joined Maker in November 2013 as chief content officer and in 2014 Disney acquired the company. Previously McPherson had led Yahoo’s video acquisition and development. Prior to joining Yahoo she was an entertainment attorney at Stone, Meyer, Genow, Smelkinson & Binder in Beverly Hills, where her clients included Halle Berry, Kevin Spacey and Zachary Quinto. She also served as inhouse counsel for LivePlanet, the transmedia company founded by Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Chris Moore and Sean Bailey, and Z.com.
A Maker spokesperson said that McPherson’s departure was made in mutual agreement with Maker and that the company doesn’t have any immediate plans to replace her in the role.
The company declined to comment on Welt’s exit. Welt had been Maker’s head of marketing from September 2010 to November 2011, before joining Sean “Diddy” Combs’ Revolt TV as chief digital officer and then returning to Maker as SVP of marketing in the fall of 2013. Earlier in his career he worked at Warner Music Group in various marketing and strategy roles.
The exec departure news was first reported by VideoInk and now Maker Studios reps have confirmed that EVPs Bonnie Pan and Gabriel Lewis will assume McPherson’s workload as acting co-heads of programming, while Glenn Frese, currently VP of Marketing, will absorb Welt’s responsibilities on an interim basis.
Disney acquired Maker Studios in 2014 for a cost of approx $500 million and the deal had performance benchmarks built into it that, if cleared, would inflate the cost to $950 million.
The termination might have been carried out by Disney owing to Maker’s apparent failure to hit target goals within Disney’s designated earn-out period.