Dustin Blank
Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs
Dustin Blank
Head of Partnerships at ElevenLabs
Los Angeles, California
Overview
Work Experience
Head of Partnerships
2023 - Current
At ElevenLabs, I lead strategic initiatives and foster partnerships vital for our growth and the wider adoption of our advanced generative AI technology. Building Dynamic Partnerships: Focusing on collaborations with top platforms and creators to drive ElevenLabs subscription growth. Establishing Key Affiliations: Working with affiliates to broaden our reach and impact in the generative AI space. Licensing and Voice Integration: Managing the licensing of unique voices, ensuring a diverse and authentic range of options for our content. Monetization Strategies: Ideating and implementng monetization methods to provide value to creators and partners. Enhanced Distribution: Enhancing distribution channels to ensure wider accessibility and impact of our content across different markets and audiences.
Head of Creator Partnerships and Investments
2021 - 2023
Strategy Development and Creator Economy Investing: Directed the MrBeast creator investment fund, exceeding $50M, which included fundraising, spearheading talent acquisition, and content valuation. This fund resulted in over 400 invested creator businesses, generating more than 500M monthly views, and delivering a 30% annualized return. This was instrumental in getting Creative Juice to over $100M in valuation and earning recognition by Forbes Top 50 fintech and Fast Company's Most Innovative Company list. Partnership and Business Development: Managed and expanded relations with key distribution partners and negotiated significant partnership agreements including top streaming platforms, which led to substantial increases in traffic and revenue. Organizational Leadership: Built and scaled critical organizational teams, overseeing strategic hiring and direction for sales, analytics, and customer support divisions. Highlights included standing up the creator support program, which provides bespoke business consulting to creators, activations at key events, and a creator resources curriculum focused on growth and monetization. Sales and Go-to-Market Strategy: Scaled the go-to-market and sales operations by hiring key team leads and crafting onboarding and outbound strategies, reaching out to over 1M creators. Our open rates and conversion rates broke industry standards with our scalable yet customizable implementation. Revenue Growth and Monetization Innovation: Built the data analytics team and led processes that leveraged 5K+ channels of data for training financial prediction models. Brand Authority and Market Influence: Established Creative Juice as a leading authority in the creator space by developing a multi-channel promotional strategy—activating at events, sponsoring creator programs, and serving as the primary spokesperson; efforts led to a 100%+ increase in annual traffic, resulting in an uptick in subscriptions.
Director, Global Content Strategy, Planning, and Analytics (Acquired by Amazon)
2020 - 2021
Negotiated content licensing deals and built advanced analytical models (including pricing history, budgets, consumer behavior) to ensure pricing and terms that better align to division objectives and shifting consumer interests — resulting in 10% YOY increases in license fee per select titles Developed a new business development digital product to help a global salesforce efficiently sell MGM’s portfolio of more than 4,000 creator film and television titles — led to partnership deals with distributors such as: Hulu, Disney+, Netflix, Sky — yielded 200+ deals across 30+ clients. Led managers and worked closely with four departments heads — in full remote-work climate
Director Strategy and Operations, Advanced Ad Products (Ad Analytics, Ad Ops, and Ad Tech)
2018 - 2019
Streamlined content and monetization partnerships with marketing and ad vendors, and renegotiated contracts, establishing performance-based incentives, resulting in over $XXM in savings. Steered strategic collaborations with sales, marketing, and programming teams on content licensing and distribution across 5+ networks and 100+ series, substantially boosting company revenue. Led strategic financial planning, roadmap prioritization, and analysis for 100+ person organizations for advanced analytics, ad tech, and ad op units, which generated $XXXM+ in annual revenue. Part of both Fox and Disney.
Director Strategy and Operations, Advanced Ad Products (Ad Analytics, Ad Ops, and Ad Tech)
2017 - 2018
Founder | CEO
2015 - 2017
Built a first-of-its-kind creator economy advertising product that helped brands and influencers monetize their Instagram presence. #entrepreneurship #leadership #technology #creatoreconomy #revenuegeneration #brands #influencers #instagram #moentization
Manager, Strategy and Business Development | Go-to-Market Product Launch | Finance | Partnerships
2009 - 2014
Discovered and nurtured new content opportunities for Bravo Media's various media platforms, aligning them with market trends and our company's creative vision. Extensive collaboration with producers, shaping ideas from inception to align with strategic goals for Bravo Media. Highlights include: taking creative pitches, giving notes on cuts, working through production timelines, and coordination across departments, to ensure successful launch. Spearheaded the organization-wide strategic planning for the initiation and investment in digital entertainment ventures; assessed 50+ start-up proposals for potential collaborations and acquisitions. Contributed to the development and executing of a direct-to-consumer strategy and product, leading to a $1B+ investment in a global over-the-top (OTT) business.