News Story

Over coffee and bagels, Dreamworks’ head of global consumer products Jim Fielding shared his most important piece of advice with a group of students: “Be a lifelong learner. Push yourself out of your comfort zone.”

Fielding was on campus Sept. 23 to talk about China’s growing influence and ways companies such as Dreamworks are making inroads into its economy and culture. IU Cinema showed Kung Fu Panda 3 with Fielding addressing the audience afterward.

That morning, he made time for a small group of Media School students. He said he has taken his own best advice by continuing to learn and adapt, starting shortly after his graduation from IU in 1987 with a degree in political science. He worked in retail at Dayton Hudson department store (now Macy’s) for several years and then moved on to work at J. Peterman Company.

“I was basically the real-life Elaine from Seinfeld,” said Fielding of his time at there.

When J. Peterman Company went bankrupt, Fielding got a call from Disney, which wanted to completely reinvent the way it sold its products by ditching catalogues and moving to the internet.

During the 12 years he worked there, Fielding served at Disney’s executive vice president of consumer goods, marketing and stores. He oversaw the completion of the Disney stores in Times Square in New York and the switch from catalogue to digital consumerism.

Then came a call from Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of Dreamworks and Awesomenesstv, a media company that focuses on teenagers and young adults. Katzenberg wanted Fielding to run the consumer products at Dreamworks and help look into how young people use and consume media at Awesomenesstv.

During his time there, Fielding has had a front row seat to a lot of big changes, not just in Awesomenesstv and Dreamworks, but also in media companies all over the country. The biggest change, says Fielding, is that media has become much more globalized.

“Fifty percent of the people watching Awesomenesstv content are from outside the U.S,” said Fielding. “China has become the second most important film market, and I believe it will be No. 1 very soon.”

As a result, Dreamworks decided to make a Mandarin version of one of its recent movies, Kung Fu Panda 3. With that, it became the first American studio to create a movie in China. The company reanimated the movie so the faces would match the new voices and used a largely Chinese crew to help in the project.

The movie did very well in China. But more surprisingly, the Mandarin version attracted more theatergoers in the U.S. than the English version. “It absolutely blew people away,” Fielding said.

The company plans more projects like this in the future in not only China but also Brazil and Mexico.

Jennifer Venuti, a senior studying cinema and production, said she learned so much from Fielding and his talk.

“He was incredibly warm and brilliant,” she said. “He made me think about what I want to do in a whole new way.”