Yeah.

And ultimately, both Ilkka and his number two, a wonderful guy named Greg Harper, who was running North American operations and the creative studios from the West Coast, the way they started to think about it is that actually they were trying to do two jobs with one organizational model.

One was, of course, managing these fabulous global billion-dollar franchise games, as you say, with huge fan bases and engaged players, but the other one was originating new games.

And the fact that the cells were essentially tasked with, especially for the ones involved with the franchise hits, were essentially trying to do both jobs at the same time.

That is what led to this sense that if we don't make a change, meaning if we do not find a way to bifurcate the organization around what in the management literature we talk about exploration, exploration as in looking for the new opportunity, versus exploitation, meaning develop the commercial value of the opportunity you have.

Yes.

They were like, "Wait a second.

If we have middle managers, that means we have hierarchy.

Mm-hmm

... th- their intellectual property rights.

So the Method App was one way to distribute a collection of about 1,000 copyright-cleared songs, along with methodology, lesson plans, and a bunch of things that would, in a sense, standardize the educational approach across these 300 schools that School of Rock runs.

What, what for me is just so fascinating about this is, uh, as, as Rob was saying a moment ago, um, uh, last time I checked, rock was about rebellion.

Yeah, yeah.

So this whole issue of on one hand the goal in any franchising business is to gil- build something that supports a common brand so that the experience achieves a certain consistency and level of excellence across all of the franchise units.

You need some kind of standardization and consistency to do that.

But what do you do it... how do you do that in a creative industry? Especially one built around rock, where standardization or getting corporate to show up and tell you how they're gonna help is, like, anathema to the very soul-

Let me ask you to start by telling us, when you step into the classroom, what would your cold call be to start the case on TikTok?

Well, Brian, you said it was a really fun case.

I completely agree with you, and the cold call, I think, and maybe this is just a faculty member's point of view, is really fun, too.

You know, there's this interesting kind of question in every media business that is the trade-off between growing audience and driving the business model, and TikTok, for all the reasons you just mentioned in your intro, the fact that there have been a lot of video player sites, Vine being maybe the most obvious, that seem to be similar, kinda short-form, virally distributed video content that have come and gone.

So the presenting question in the case for our students and for our executives is here you are a global phenomenon.

Of course, this is 2020, and TikTok has recorded over two billion downloads, the fastest spreading app in the history of the app economy starting in 2008.

It has a vast global audience by anyone's standards, but less than 2% of its global revenues are generated in the United States.

One is, is TikTok a disruptor? Have they really changed the landscape such that they sort of meet that definition of, of a disruptor? Coupled with that is, why do other platforms fizzle out?