 There's
no denying that BGS lifetime members are very talented people.
Just earning invitation into the Society places members within
a select group. Beyond their commonality as the "Best
in Business," lifetime members are extremely diverse
with a wide array of talents, backgrounds and expertise.
Thousands will tune into the 2012 MTV Music Video Awards airing on television tonight. This month I’m pleased to introduce you to a member who used to be closely connected with MTV and who has an enthusiastic appreciation for all things music, television and media. Jesus Lara’s creative mind is currently developing a product to tie media and language learning together. You’ll see where he gets his inspiration by reading this month’s profile!
 BGS
Member Profiles
Jesus Lara
Founder and CEO, Amusse
For Jesus Lara, music and TV played an essential role in being bicultural and bilingual.
“Growing up in Latin America myself, I remember clearly buying and listening to U2 records and reading the lyrics to the songs as the songs were playing,” explained Lara, who is now the founder and CEO of a new language learning product called Amusse.
He grew up splitting time between Miami, FLA and Venezuela.
“I also had a lot of friends and family who improved their language skills by watching TV and going to the movies,” he said. “It’s really a phenomenon that happens widely across the region.”
Lara’s personal experience with entertainment couples with his vast professional experience in the music and TV industries at both EMI and MTV. His excitement about entertainment and the ever-evolving technological world generated an idea that Lara left his career with MTV to pursue.
Lara’s new project, Amusse, couples premium TV, film and music content with technology to create a product that helps users seamlessly and almost effortlessly learn new languages. The goal was to leverage a global audience’s emotional connection with American entertainment to teach English.
“People across the world don’t just consume American content for entertainment purposes. They consume it to informally learn the language,” Lara said. “Amusse will give structure to this informal process.”
 Lara’s project hinges on the explosive nature of American pop culture around the world, especially as he’s seen first-hand in Latin America and Europe. He plans to launch both a Spanish and Portuguese version of Amusse, which will target over 20 Spanish-speaking countries as well as Brazil.
“The digital landscape is mature enough, and broadband and mobile penetration ubiquitous enough, that an idea like this can actually become a reality,” Lara said. “What really motivates me is being able to play a leading role in what the consumption of entertainment across traditional and digital platforms will look like.”
Lara has a record of enthusiastically utilizing his creativity to weather transitions in both the music and TV arenas. His career in the industry began at just 20 years of age.
Lara became music manager for his cousin, Nil Lara, who broke into the music scene after being signed by legendary music executive, Blue Note/Capitol Records’ Bruce Lundvall.
“That was the first major moment that really changed my life,” Lara said. “I grew up in a family that had many musicians. I always gravitated toward the business aspect of my family’s musical activities, everything from booking shows to collecting money at the doors.”
Lara dropped school and toured across the US, Japan and Europe, learning how to negotiate the whole spectrum of labels producers, lawyers, TV bookers, promoters, publishers and talent agents.
“As a manger of a music artist at the time, the music industry was in great shape,” Lara noted. “It was before the digital disruption; labels were selling millions of records. Being the manager really exposed me to the entire ecosystem of the music business.”
Twenty-six-year-old Lara recognized what this quick-paced life had made him miss: getting a degree. He parted ways with his cousin and went back to school at Florida International University in Miami to study international business.
He hadn’t even graduated with his bachelor’s degree before he had an incredible job offer on the table.
“When I heard about the rumors of EMI opening an office in Miami, I went to see them,” Lara explained.
The visit allowed him to reunite with former acquaintance Rafael Gil, then the President/CEO of the EMI Latin American division. Gil liked what he saw.
Upon completing his degree, Lara launched his career with EMI as senior marketing manager heading EMI’s international music efforts in Latin America.
“I guess [Gil] saw in me someone who was young, eager and really passionate about what I was doing,” Lara said. “I continually tried to over-deliver on the responsibility level I was being given.”
“During that process, I became very close to Rafael Gil; I worked with him for a long time. I was really at the right place at the right time.”
Gil even offered to pay partial tuition for Lara’s studies at Thunderbird Business School.
Over time, Lara developed relationships with many well-known musicians and managers. He especially enjoyed working with the Beatle’s estate manager, Neil Aspinall, and artists like the Backstreet Boys, Gorrilaz and Blur. He held a lot of esteem for the popular British band, Coldplay.
“It’s a pleasure when you can work with an artist that understands the effort that goes into developing their career, because some artists just take that for granted,” Lara said. “[Coldplay was] super friendly and hungry; they really wanted people around the world to be excited about their project,” Lara said.
Though relationships with the artists were going well, Lara couldn’t help but notice new shifts in the industry and at EMI. After all, he had a front row seat.
“You could kind of see the cracks,” Lara said. “Napster was out there, and the whole talk of digital piracy was starting to flow in people’s vocabulary.”
Immediately following his graduation from Thunderbird in 2001, Lara was given expanded responsibilities at EMI. He was named Vice President of Marketing and A&R, and nine months into the job, he was relocated to the company’s Mexico operation. He and a small team of other senior executives were tasked with completely restructuring the struggling EMI Mexico division.
 During the next 18 months, his team fired, hired, restructured departments and reinstilled budgeting skills in employees. Soon after, the renowned Gil retired.
“It was very, very difficult--probably one of the most difficult professional experiences of my life,” Lara said about the EMI Mexico restructuring assignment.
When he was sent back to Miami and not afforded the chance to continue fostering the new division in Mexico, Lara reconsidered his future with EMI.
In the end, a new strain of the music business brought Lara to New York. MTV hired Lara as their leader of international music marketing and talent strategy.
“MTV was a very different place than EMI,” Lara said. “MTV was really a federation of cable channels. They had the same brand and logo, but I’d say 80% of their programming and creative decisions were made locally. It was very difficult to get cross-channel support for ideas that were generated at the center.”
Nevertheless, Lara was persistent; one of his biggest accomplishments was developing and executing the groundbreaking global multiplatform music initiative called MTV 5 Star, launched in 2005 with Shakira’s
Oral Fixation Vol. 2.
That same year, Lara was asked to join the strategic planning team for a new channel, MTV Tr3s, MTV’s U.S. Hispanic offering. Launched in September 2006, the channel’s music and talent strategy were added to Lara’s responsibilities.
When Lara became a father in 2005, his time was suddenly split between Miami and New York, and so was his enthusiasm.
Lara relocated to Miami in 2007 and refocused his efforts on MTV Latin America and MTV Tr3 as Senior Vice President of Music and Talent Strategy. He played a critical leadership role in the production of the MTV Video Music Awards Latin America and led talent negotiations for programming development initiatives including the MTV Unplugged franchise, which had been dormant for a few years.
Around that time, he also became a fellow of the American Business Council Foundation (abc*), a group of diverse Latin American leaders promoting social and economic impact in less-than-fortunate communities. He also became a voting member of the NARAS/LARAS Academy.
Yet with all of the new opportunities, Lara was getting anxious.
“I didn’t feel I had a solid grasp on how the digital disruption was going to affect the TV industry,” Lara said.
But he didn’t just want to survive the times.
After researching digital marketing programs around the world, Lara landed in the well-ranked graduate program at IE Business School in Spain. He traveled to Spain 3 times and completed the rest of his online work stateside.
The specialization gave Lara that needed link to the digital world, as well as new confidence in technology. It’s an advantage few of his other colleagues possess.
This degree also further equips Lara for his goals with Amusse, the project into which he is now putting all his concentrated time and effort. And given the spark he has brought to other ideas, Amusse will only pump up Lara’s creativity a few more notches.
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