Anita Elberse

Anita Elberse is the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.

Professor Elberse develops and teaches an MBA course covering the "Businesses of Entertainment, Media, and Sports," which ranks among the most sought-after courses in the School’s curriculum, and chairs a short executive education program, also named "The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports." She chairs a semester-long mentoring program, "Crossover Into Business," that is specifically designed for professional athletes. She further leads the Summer Venture in Management Program for college students from minority backgrounds. Poets & Quants named her one of the world's best business school professors under the age of 40, and she has received teaching awards on multiple occasions from both the Harvard Business School and its students, including the Charles M. Williams Award for excellence in teaching, "Best of EC Year" honors (for top faculty teaching in the Elective Curriculum), and the Faculty Teaching Award. In 2016, she won the "Outstanding Case Teacher" award in The Case Centre's worldwide competition, also known as "business education's Oscars."

In her research, Professor Elberse primarily aims to understand what drives the success of products in the entertainment, media, sports, and other creative industries, and how firms can effectively manage products and talent in such sectors. She is acclaimed for her work on digital-media strategies, and frequently uses econometric modeling techniques to examine media-industry problems. Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review, Marketing Science, the Journal of Marketing, and several other journals. She was named a Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, and served on the editorial board of Marketing Science.

Professor Elberse has conducted case studies on dozens of entertainment companies, personalities, and other entities. These include record label A&M/Octone Records, cable operator Comcast, book publisher Grand Central Publishing, Broadway show Hamilton, online video provider Hulu, music streaming service Spotify, the campaign for Jay-Z's book Decoded by advertising agency Droga5, entertainment companies Marvel Enterprises, NBCUniversal and The Walt Disney Studios, nightlife business Marquee, the Metropolitan Opera, sports leagues MLB and the NFL, MRC's television series House of Cards, Shonda Rhimes' production company ShondaLand and Jason Blum's Blumhouse Productions, soccer clubs FC Barcelona, Boca Juniors, and Real Madrid, the ABN AMRO World Tennis Tournament, World Wrestling Entertainment, soccer coach Sir Alex Ferguson, Vogue magazine, fashion house Burberry, sports apparel brand Nike, and superstars Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, LeBron James, Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson, Maria Sharapova, and Dwyane Wade. Several of these case studies are described in her bestselling first book, Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment, which Amazon named one of its Best Books of 2013.

Prior to joining Harvard Business School, professor Elberse was a Visiting Fellow at The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. She holds a PhD from London Business School, an MA in Communication from the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, and an MA in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam (cum laude). A native of The Netherlands but now an American citizen, she was awarded a Netherland-America Foundation/Fulbright Fellowship.

Professor Elberse is one of the youngest female professors to have been promoted to full professor with tenure in Harvard Business School's history.

Areas Of Interest

• innovation
• marketing
• technological innovation
• value creation

Teaching

• Crossover into Business (for Professional Athletes)
• The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports (MBA)
• The Business of Entertainment, Media, and Sports (Executive Education)

Awards & Honors

• Named one of the 25 Most Illustrious Alumni of the University of Amsterdam in 2018.
• Received the inaugural "PlayMakeHers" award for "contributions within the sports and entertainment industry," voted on by female sports and entertainment industry professionals, in 2018.
• Won the "Outstanding Case Teacher" award in The Case Centre's worldwide competition, also known as "business education's Oscars," in 2016.
• Received the 2014 Robert F. Greenhill Award for "exemplary work on behalf of the Harvard Business School and its mission."
• Awarded Amazon’s "Best Books of 2013," Business and Investing category, for Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment (Henry Holt and Company).
• Named a TriBeCa Disruptor Foundation Fellow.
• Marketing Science article ("Demand and Supply Dynamics for Sequentially Released Products in International Markets: The Case of Motion Pictures," 2003, with Jehoshua Eliashberg) chosen as finalist for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science "Long Term Impact Award," awarded annually to papers published in the last ten years that are viewed to have made a significant long run impact on the field of Marketing.
• Received the 2012 Emerald Management Reviews Citation of Excellence Award, for Harvard Business Review article ("Should You Invest in the Long Tail", 2008) as one of the top 50 articles with proven impact since its publication date from the top 300 management journals in the world.
• One of three faculty elected by the HBS Class of 2011 to take part in the "Best of EC Year" Speaker Series, honoring faculty teaching in the second year, Elective Curriculum (EC).
• Selected as the 2011 Marketing Science Institute Young Scholar, "identified as a likely leader of the next generation of marketing academics".
• Received the 2011 Charles M. Williams Award for "outstanding and effective teaching" in the MBA program, awarded by HBS Dean Nitin Nohria.
• Received the HBS Class of 2011 Faculty Award for "excellence in teaching".

Journal Articles

• Elberse, Anita. "Number One in Formula One: Leadership Lessons from Toto Wolff and Mercedes, the Team behind One of the Greatest Winning Streaks in All of Sports." Harvard Business Review (November–December 2022): 70–78.
• Elberse, Anita. "Investing in Superstars: Lessons from the World of Football [¿Cómo Invertir en Superestrellas? Lecciones del Mundo del Fútbol]." Foreign Affairs Latinoamérica 14, no. 3 (July–September 2014): 19–27.
• Elberse, Anita, and Sir Alex Ferguson. "Ferguson's Formula." Harvard Business Review 91, no. 10 (October 2013): 116–125.
• Elberse, Anita, and Jeroen Verleun. "The Economic Value of Celebrity Endorsements." (pdf) Journal of Advertising Research 52, no. 2 (June 2012): 149–165.
• Elberse, Anita. "Bye Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital Channels." (pdf) Journal of Marketing 74, no. 3 (May 2010).
• Elberse, Anita. "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" HBS Centennial Issue Harvard Business Review 86, nos. 7/8 (July–August 2008): 88–96. (HBS Centennial Issue.)
• Elberse, Anita, and Bharat N. Anand. "The Effectiveness of Pre-Release Advertising for Motion Pictures: An Empirical Investigation Using a Simulated Market." (pdf) Information Economics and Policy 19, nos. 3-4 (October 2007): 319–343. (Special Issue on Economics of the Media.)
• Elberse, Anita. "The Power of Stars: Do Star Actors Drive the Success of Movies?" (pdf) Journal of Marketing 71, no. 4 (October 2007): 102–120. (Featured in HBS Working Knowledge.)
• Elberse, Anita, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee. "Superstars and Underdogs: An Examination of the Long Tail Phenomenon in Video Sales." (pdf) MSI Reports: Working Paper Series 4 (2007): 49–72. (Featured in HBS Working Knowledge.)
• Eliashberg, Jehoshua, Anita Elberse, and Mark Leenders. "The Motion Picture Industry: Critical Issues in Practice, Current Research, and New Research Directions." (pdf) Marketing Science 25, no. 6 (November–December 2006): 638–661.
• Elberse, Anita. "How Markets Help Marketers." Harvard Business Review 83, no. 9 (September 2005): 32–34.
• Elberse, Anita, and Jehoshua Eliashberg. "Demand and Supply Dynamics for Sequentially Released Products in International Markets: The Case of Motion Pictures." (pdf) Marketing Science 22, no. 3 (Summer 2003): 329–354.
• Dutton, William H., Anita Elberse, and Matthew Hale. "A Case Study of A Netizen's Guide to Elections." Communications of the ACM 42, no. 12 (December 1999): 48–54.
• Docter, Sharon, William H Dutton, and Anita Elberse. "An American Democracy Network: Factors Shaping the Future of On-line Political Campaigns." Parliamentary Affairs 52, no. 3 (July 1999): 535–552.
• Elberse, Anita. "Consumer Acceptance of Interactive News in the Netherlands." Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 3, no. 4 (1998): 62–83.

Books

• Elberse, Anita. Blockbusters: Hit-making, Risk-taking, and the Big Business of Entertainment. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 2013.