The studio executives are being difficult. Paul Feig, Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively are trying to pitch A Simple Favor, and the people on the other side of the desk seem determined to misunderstand them. Fortunately, the executives are fictional. Unfortunately for the dignity of the profession, they make quite good comic material.
The 2018 sketch was a piece of promotion with its own entertainment value. It gave viewers the director and stars, a joke, and a film title to remember. Amanda Lundberg was leading the 42West initiative that produced it. A publicist’s team had stepped into the business of making something people could watch.
That small production offers a useful entrance to Lundberg’s working life. Her career includes the publicity machinery of MGM and Miramax, a partnership with Leslee Dart, the sale of their agency to Dolphin, and the job of running 42West. The thread through those changes is the introduction: how to help someone else’s work find its public.
A pitch with a punch line
The A Simple Favor video appeared across People and Entertainment Weekly platforms. The company reported that it reached more than two million users in its first week. A separate earnings-call account put that reach at the end of opening weekend. Either way, this was a promotional object with an audience of its own.
There is something pleasingly economical about the idea. A film pitch becomes the premise of a sketch advertising the film. The performers get to perform. The director participates in the joke. Viewers receive a few minutes of comedy before anyone asks them to spend an evening at the cinema.
Lundberg described producing content as a necessity for public relations in a digital age. The team was dedicated to developing and making that material for clients. Her statement was practical rather than philosophical: the agency needed this capability because the work had changed. The joke arrived inside a business decision.
“The ability to develop and produce content for clients is a PR necessity in this digital age.”Amanda Lundberg, 2018
Before the agency, the studios
Lundberg had already worked inside two studios before joining the partnership that became 42West. At MGM, she was senior vice president of worldwide publicity and one of the executives involved in reinvigorating the James Bond franchise. At Miramax Films, she served as executive vice president of worldwide public relations.
Bond is a useful name to encounter in a publicist’s biography. A franchise arrives carrying memories as well as a new film. The audience knows something before the campaign starts. Introducing another installment means working with that recognition while giving people a reason to see what has changed.
Her subsequent work included release campaigns, festival launches and awards campaigns for studios, distributors and production companies. These are related jobs with different calendars. A festival offers a first encounter. A release asks a wider audience to make a choice. An awards campaign asks people to look again, often at details they might have missed.
The variety is part of the interest in her career. A publicist working on a release has to introduce a particular production. A publicist representing a filmmaker has a relationship that continues after that production leaves cinemas. Lundberg’s work has included both. Looking at her studio positions alongside her later client representation shows how those two responsibilities came together in the agency she helped build.
Joining a company still finding its name
Leslee Dart launched The Dart Group in 2004. Lundberg joined a few months later, in 2005. Allan Mayer subsequently joined the partnership, and in 2006 the firm adopted the name 42West. Lundberg arrived near the beginning, when an established publicist’s new venture was becoming a company with a broader identity.
The chronology matters because Lundberg’s CEO role grew from a long involvement in building the business. She had helped run it well before she ran it alone. The agency developed campaigns for films, television and digital productions, represented individual talent, and advised corporate clients. Those activities put different kinds of conversations under one roof.
A director, a studio and an executive may all need help explaining themselves, but their needs arrive at different speeds. A film has a release date. A career continues between releases. A corporate issue can disregard everyone’s calendar. Helping build an agency serving those clients means making room for each kind of work.
The sale did not end the working relationship
On March 30, 2017, Dolphin Digital Media acquired 42West. The transaction was structured in stock: approximately $18.7 million in consideration, plus the potential for another $9.3 million tied to financial targets. The often-cited $28 million figure described the agency deal, including that contingent portion.
Lundberg, Dart and Mayer remained co-chief executives. The agency kept its name and continued from its New York and Los Angeles offices. For Lundberg, the sale changed the ownership around a business she was still helping lead. The existing management team remained responsible for the work.
Acquisition announcements tend to make every future possibility sound available by Monday. The concrete point here was continuity. Clients still had an agency, the agency still had its leaders, and Dolphin had entered entertainment public relations through a company with established relationships. Lundberg’s next chapter would unfold inside that larger group.
A promotion with fifteen years behind it
In March 2020, Dart moved into a senior advisory role at Dolphin, and Lundberg became 42West’s sole CEO. She would run the agency’s day-to-day business from New York. A leadership arrangement shared for years now had one person holding the chief executive title.
Dart’s description of Lundberg supplied a warmer detail than the organizational chart could manage. She called her “the sister I never had.” It was an affectionate account of a partnership that had lasted through the agency’s formation, expansion and change of ownership. In a business built around representing people, the partners had their own durable relationship.
The change also put greater responsibility on the team around Lundberg. An agency’s client roster may get the attention, but its senior publicists carry the work across projects and cities. The CEO has to keep that structure functioning while dealing with individual relationships that cannot simply be handed to an interchangeable department.
The audience was moving to streaming
By the end of 2020, 42West’s streaming work included clients such as Amazon, Apple, HBO Max, Hulu and Netflix. The agency had served as agency of record for HBO Max’s launch. Its clients also took home more than half the prizes at that year’s Emmy Awards.
Those are agency results, shared across many teams and clients. They also describe the business Lundberg was leading in her first year as sole CEO: entertainment publicity extending across platforms, programs and individual creators. The audience had more doors through which to enter a story, and the agency’s work had to meet it there.
Lundberg ranked No. 11 in the 2020 PR Power Players list. Recognition arrived alongside an internal task force, the appointment of a diversity and inclusion manager, and milestones for company leadership. Running the agency included examining who worked inside it as well as whose work it promoted outside.
The people who carry the next campaign
In September 2021, Lundberg appointed Annalee Paulo president of 42West’s West Coast Entertainment Marketing division. Paulo had joined the agency in 2005. In accepting the role, she thanked Lundberg among the colleagues who had mentored her. The appointment brought a long-serving member of the team into a larger leadership position.
It is an instructive episode because the familiar Hollywood version of publicity is all famous faces and hurried arrivals. Here, the important action was a personnel decision. Experience accumulated inside the agency was being given responsibility for what came next.
Today, 42West’s leadership includes presidents working across Entertainment Marketing, Strategic Communications, Talent, and Fandoms & Franchises. The arrangement reflects the range of people and businesses the firm serves. Lundberg leads a company whose introductions now extend well beyond a film’s opening weekend.
A wider meaning for impact
In July 2024, Dolphin acquired Elle Communications as a division of 42West. Elle brought expertise in social and environmental impact communications, serving mission-centered brands, nonprofits, philanthropic foundations and other organizations. Danielle Finck and Silvie Snow-Thomas continued to lead it.
Lundberg welcomed the opportunities for collaboration, explaining that 42West’s entertainment and media clients, talent and brands were looking for ways to increase their positive impact. Her stated ambition was to explore work together on existing and future projects. The agency was adding another set of relationships and another kind of expertise.
That development sits comfortably beside the earlier content initiative. In both cases, the company expanded what it could do for clients. One added a production capability. The other added specialists in communicating social and environmental work. Each required people who knew the subject, rather than a new label on an old service.
Making the introduction worth accepting
Lundberg’s career is usually visible through someone else’s project: a franchise, a film release, a performer, a director. Even her film acknowledgments belong to that supporting position, with thank-you credits on making-of productions for Kill Bill and Cold Mountain. The publicist turns up near the work without becoming its star.
The A Simple Favor sketch lets us see that supporting role with unusual clarity. A team used the talent already involved in a film to create another small piece of entertainment. The invitation came with something enjoyable attached. Hollywood’s fictional executives were slow to understand; the audience had rather better manners.
From studio executive to agency partner to CEO, Lundberg has kept working on that moment of introduction. The medium has changed, and the company has grown around her. There is still a person on the receiving end, deciding whether to watch. A good campaign gives that person a reason.