Jenna Arnold

Age: 28

Company: Press Play Productions

Year founded: 2007

Site: pressplayproduction.com

What Press Play Productions does:Arnold’s company creates content that entertains and educates audiences about people, places, and ideologies beyond where they live. Press Play focuses on motivating youth to become aware of, or actively involved in, issues facing people on the other side of the planet. The company is the product of a combination of Arnold’s passions for education and foreign policy. She produces entertaining content for pop-culture venues to reach “the kid in Kansas who doesn’t turn off the water while brushing his teeth, or the soccer mom whose only access to the rest of the world is through US Weekly.”

How she’s changing the game: By creating “edutainment” for popular venues like MTV, Arnold has helped to create a form of activism infomercials. “It was an obvious strategy for me,” says Arnold. “I knew I couldn’t tap into every teacher in the world. I’ve spoken at conferences before, but those who come to hear me speak are already working toward the same goal. I was preaching to the converted.” By presenting the content in a format similar to globally popular reality shows, Press Play’s products aim to create empathy and understanding of foreign cultures, as well as creating empathy for the US around the world. Whether the content is about women in businesses and micro-finance, or swapping blue collar workers with people in the rest of the world, Arnold says, “it’s all about peoplebeing who they are, and experiencing the world outside of their bubble.”

Recent highlights: In the last year, Press Play Productions sold Exiled! to MTV. Exiled! is a reality show that sends privileged and ungrateful American teenagers to spend a week with the Masai in Kenya, a Thai family living off elephant tourism money, or Andean llama herders. The show is currently airing in more than 100 countries with a potential viewership of more than 200 million. The show is especially popular in the Middle East.

What’s next: Arnold currently has a few concepts for more reality-based entertainment with a soft underlying social theme in development with a few networks. Arnold also has a film in development that she’s hoping to produce out of the Middle East. For the next decade, Arnold says she’ll be in the content-creation space for the web, classroom, TV, and especially film. Arnold also plans to continue to devote time to philanthropy. She recently visited Haiti with Wyclef Jean a few months ago to shoot a piece about his organization, Yele Haiti Foundation, that was presented at the Clinton Global Initiative. She is also spearheading the Robin Hood initiative, a childhood literacy campaign in NYC. Additionally, she just won the Media Mogul Award for New York Cares for the work she's done to educate and engage people around local issues.

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