Jeffrey Harmon may be the most unlikely person to become a key player in the television industry. “We grew up on a potato farm in Idaho,” he told American Essence. “We had a tube TV that got three channels. We could get PBS with an antenna.”
Harmon didn’t watch a lot of TV growing up. Instead, he and his brothers spent their teenage years selling potatoes door-to-door in Utah before moving on to the landscaping business. But when he studied marketing and advertising at Brigham Young University from 2006 to 2008, his thinking began to shift.
”I roomed with a few film majors,” he said. “Spending time with them opened up my thinking in a lot of ways.” Harmon said he pioneered the YouTube ad agency Orabrush, Inc., which generated 20 million views for its clients in 2009, well before YouTube’s popularity exploded.
From there, Jeffrey and his brother Neal Harmon co-founded VidAngel, a service that gave parents the ability to filter explicit content on streaming video services like YouTube.
“It’s like a remote that skips sexual scenes, rape, and swearing,” Jeffrey said. Around that time, he and Neal began thinking that they could help make programming that didn’t require censorship. While that may mean less business for VidAngel, it also meant the potential for a new, untapped market for “stories that amplify light.”
“We were inspired by Pixar,” Jeffrey said. “We began to seriously think that if they could do it, so could we.”
