Howard Draft: “If you can change a behavior, you can drive a brand into the stratosphere.”

If there’s anyone who deeply understood the power of bringing together brand and performance marketing well before its time, it’s Howard Draft. We talk to the visionary entrepreneur about building DraftFCB (today known as the powerhouse global advertising agency FCB), lessons he’s learned from the highs and lows of running a company, and how he’s betting on democratizing access to experiences using the metaverse through his newest venture, Vysical. We also talk about the art of changing behavior and how that’s played out at companies like Peloton and HBO.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good Company is a production of I Heart Radio. But
if you're a brand, you need to understand what behavior
you want to change in that consumer interaction. And if
you can change a behavior, you can drive a brand
into the stratosphere. Hi, I'm Michael Casson. Welcome to Good Company,

(00:23):
where I'll explore how marketing, media, entertainment, and tech are intersecting,
transforming our lives and the way we do business at
a breakneck speed. I'll be joined by some of the
greatest business minds and strongest leaders who will share how
they build companies from the ground up or transform them
from the inside out. My bed is you'll pick up
a lesson or two along the way. It's all good.

(00:47):
I'm excited today to welcome to Good Company a long
time and wonderful friend, Howard Draft. Let me take a moment,
Howard and give our audience a little bit of history.
When we met, you had taken Draft Direct to a
level that really kind of changed the world of direct marketing,

(01:08):
and later in that journey actually joined Draft with one
of the vaunted names in advertising, foot Cone and Belding
to create Draft FCB, which was not only one of
the best agency configurations in the history of our industry,
but really brought together the direct marketing capability that you

(01:28):
so well understood with an illustrious history of foot cone
building and really was a precursor to what we talked
about today. And it's really bringing together performance marketing, which
in earlier days was called direct marketing and brand marketing.
And you know, I guess if I look at it,

(01:48):
draft FCB might have been one of the first places
you brought that together or the industry brought it together.
So that's my long winded introduction. Welcome Howard, Thank you
for having me. What I'd love to do is just
kind of have you riff a bit on your background
and the story of how you create a draft direct originally,
and you know, just your understanding of marketing from that perspective,

(02:11):
and why draft direct was something special and different in
its time and even more so if it existed today,
how special it would be. But give us a little history.
I started my career in nineteen seventy seven. I was
an assistant account executive at an agency called Stone and
Evert and Stone and Ether back then was really the

(02:33):
competition against Wonderment. It was the Chicago based leading direct
marketing company, believe it or not. Back then in nineteen
seventy seven, it was considered the second or third largest
direct marketing agency with only a twenty employees, but it
had a brilliant man named Bob Stone, and it just
was a great agency. You learned a lot. I was

(02:54):
there in my eleventh month and a gentleman named Jim Cobbs,
who was the general manager that agency, asked me to
come into his office and, Uh, it goes, I'm starting
an agency. Do you have any interest in coming with?
So I looked at my watch and I asked him
what time we were leaving. That's how long it took
me to make that decision. We left. Two weeks later.
I started an agency with about thirteen people. Jim Cobbs

(03:17):
was one of the gurus of direct marketing at the time.
So even at that time, from Jim and what I
learned from Bob Stone and people like that, and over
the years from great people like Leicester Wonderman, was you know,
the principles of direct marketing. And within weeks of starting
the agency, we had Michigan Bell then it kept rolling
Southern Bells, and before we knew it, I had eighteen
of the four Bell operating companies as clients of the

(03:39):
agency early on in its creation. So now let's fast
forward from nineteen seventy eight to nineteen eighty two. Night two,
This gentleman named Don Zucker comes to see us in
Chicago and he was the president of ted Bates. Ted
Bates was the third largest holding company in advertising at
the world, and they realized they need to have a

(04:00):
direct marketing as part of the portfolio. So he comes
to buy the agency, and after a few weeks of
discussions with him, we realized that wasn't a good idea
a four year old agencies, so we decided I would
move to New York and start the New York office.
I can remember Phil Doherty writing the story in the
New York Times house a twenty seven year old kid

(04:20):
from Chicago going to be successful opening an office in
New York. And within the first few months I picked
up the HBO account, Prudential Insurance, the US Navy, and
all of a sudden, two months after I'm in New York,
I'm almost as large as our Chicago office. So we
stay and I kept building out the New York office
to be a very sizable direct marketing agency. And then

(04:43):
in n s we decided to sell to Ted Bates,
which at the time was also another pretty infamous story
because ted Bass was acquired by Sachi and Soaky. Back then,
Sacchi was the seventh largest, ted Bass as the third largest,
and all of a sudden, Sacchi and Sacchi wanted to
be a are just holding group in the world. With
the acquisition of Ted Bates, they got there. Well, what

(05:04):
happened was all of the clients of Ted Bates realized
that all of a sudden, all these executive EPs and
presidents were now richer than the president of J and
J Warner Lambert, all these great brands realized because Howard
just to inter up for a second, my recollection was
at that moment, the guy who ran Ted Bates, Bob Jacoby,

(05:26):
was paid like close to a hundred million dollars, which
back then was real money. Hundred eighteen million. To say
I was five hundred forty million all cash. The SAGI
started at four fifty. They kept going back and forth
at the bar in New York and a cocktail napkin
until it was five hundred forty million all cash. So
now most of the clients walk out and like seventeen

(05:50):
of the top twenty guys at the agency leave and
basically Sachi and Sachi bought the third largest agency with
no clients weeks after having acquired it. So they brought
in a gentleman named Robert Louie Dryfus to run Sachi
and Sachi because they were basically done at that point
because having paid all cash, they didn't use stock. They

(06:11):
were basically what they call caput. So Robert Louis Dryfus
shows up under thirty years of age at the time,
I'm still running Draft Erect at the time when it
was Cobbs in Draft and became Drafted Advertising. When Mr
Cobbs left and then dry Fus shows up, I fly
to London. I meet dry Fus. He realizes I have
a good business that's still making a ton of money.

(06:32):
None of my clients left from this one caveat On
the point before when I sold my agency to Ted Bates,
I took stock in Ted Bates, I didn't take cash,
so I was three times in debt from what I
had sold my company for. And when Bates was acquired,
I was lucky enough to be a stockholder. So now
I'm in London with Robert Louie Dryfs smoking cigars. He's

(06:54):
driving around in many coupon were at the time, he's
dating Kim Basenjur. I'm a thirty ye old kid from
chicag We're going, Wow, this is cool. So I'm hanging
out and Dryfuss had handed me seventeen companies that the
Sachis had bought, and drivers says, you go figure them out.
So I took my team and we went to look
at all these companies and we either sold or gave

(07:16):
back the seventeen companies that Sacchi acquired to other people.
So during that period, I'm in going back and forth
between New York and London, and Dreyfust is having me
continue to build out draft and expand the business globally.
And then comes along, which is nine years after the
acquisition by up Bates and dry Fust decides to buy Adidas.

(07:37):
So when he goes to buy Adidas, I say to Robert,
I said, I'd like to buy my company back. He goes,
I have no interest in selling the company back, and
the board has no interest in selling the company back. However,
Michael and I, being the salesman that we are, eventually
I convinced Bobet that he should sell me the company back.
In the meantime, he had offered me the job to

(07:57):
become the CEO of SACI and SA, replacing at Wax.
You know what, I worked under Wax for a year
with Merge draft in and I would over time take
over SACHI. Well. As I explained to him, I've never
met the Procter client, I've never met the Toyota to clients,
so I think that would be a really bad idea.
So he gave me the company back. If I sold

(08:18):
the company within two years, they would get a percentage
of the sale. So the day it's announced, this gentleman
named Phil Guyer and Gene Beard show up in my door.
Now I've owned it twenty four hours, and Phil goes,
we'd like to buy your company. You're the only independent
global direct marketing agency in the world. I said Phil, Gene,
I've only owned it a few hours. I can't sell

(08:39):
it to you. First of all, I believe in capital gains.
I'm not going to do an Ordiner income deal. So
they go ahead and do a contract with me that
closes twelve months to a day later. So twelve months
to a day later they had bought my company from
multiple of what I had just brought it back from.
So now employee of the Inner Public Group, working for

(09:00):
Phil and Jean, having a wonderful time, and then they
go through tough times. Maybe it's me, but they started
to ask, no, I don't think so, Howard I was.
I was there, It wasn't you. But so then I'm
sitting here with the wonderful people I love working for
Phil and Jean. They were great, great people. And then
they started to have problems, and you had a number

(09:21):
of other CEOs come in place, until finally Michael Ross
took it over and really did a wonderful job cleaning
it up. So now we fast forward to the year
two thousand and five from I've been there two years.
Draft is in thirty seven countries, excuse the expression, making
a ton of money, growing very quickly all over the world.

(09:44):
And they had this agency foot cone and building that
came in. The merchant foot cone was bigger than me,
you know, by the tune of a couple hundred million
more in fees. But they didn't make as much money.
So what they did was they decided that they would
merge f CB and to draft, which was something that
I've leaved in. Going back to your point about performance marketing,
I pounded on the table back then that the first

(10:06):
agency that is media neutral against all disciplines will win.
So I believe that any client should come to an
agency for a media neutral solution. We should be business partners.
We should understand their business model. We should work on
a understanding of what a cost for them to acquire
a customer with the lifetime value of that customers. And
I don't want to care whether we're doing brand advertising, branded,

(10:28):
direct advertising, promotion, digital, whatever. It needs to be. The
first agency where a client could come and have a
media neutral solution, wherein one agency you had quality services
across all platforms would win. Michael agreed with that strategy,
and he and Philippe came along and we did this
wonderful merger for our audience. Philipp Krakowski is the current

(10:51):
CEO of Interpublic, and you know, as Michael retired, Philippe
stepped into that role. So now we do the merger
and the funny next step in my career, which was
probably the highlight of the low life of my career.
Sam Walton dies that wasn't the highlight of the low life.
But they for the first time put out an RFP
for an agency. We don't even have credentials, We don't

(11:16):
even know what we stand for. We didn't even have
a logo draft f CD at the time. We just
had done it. But since we were the largest agencies
in the world at the time, Walmart wanted us in
the review. And as you all know, or some of
you know, I went from a thirty two agency review
down to six. We ended up winning it totally legitimately,
but a number of things happened at Walmart after the fact,

(11:38):
and I went from winning the Walmart account to losing
the Walmart account about three months. Well, Howard, I do
want to stop there for a moment, because that was
a tough moment, and I remember it well because you know,
along that journey, you and I, as I said, have
stayed very close. And I watched it and I applauded
the success, and I kind of gave you a shoulder

(12:00):
and we shared shoulders to cry on in the aftermath
of that success. From a career building perspective, from a
character building perspective, to go from that high to that low,
and you know, the space of a month or maybe
even less. Talk about that moment for a moment, Howard,
because what I want to do is bring that history

(12:20):
to the four and talk about Howard draft in. But
talk about that moment from a you know, and and
it's easy to say this when you're not the person,
but from a character building perspective and humility and and
all the things that come with that high and low
in the same sentence. Almost well, let's put it in perspective.
First of all, Michael, since we were such good friends,

(12:42):
you'll remember five years ago we were having lunch at
Avenue with a woman who had actually did the research
and said, in all the review of Walmart, and she
clearly stayed, you guys clearly won the business based on
your work, and I out of ten votes, she said,
one agency got one other vote. First of all, I
love new business, so pitching an account was fun. We

(13:04):
spent two and a half million dollars out of pocket
shooting finished commercials. The line was life well spent, which
when Walmart was trying to get more into broad based
their clothes and other things versus just slow prices and
the worker's best work. I've ever been involved in my
lifetime at that time, we were competing against the best
agencies in the world, and we were doing it kind

(13:28):
of by gut because again we had just done the merger.
So the creative people I was working with and my team,
we're doing a pitch for the first time ever again,
and the pitch lasted six months from beginning. Then when
we wanted I was in Shanghai doing other business in
the phone ring in the middle of the night, and
they said you need to come back and now meet

(13:49):
the president of Walmart, which I had never met throughout
the whole review. Came back let him. I'm not sure
we got along perfectly, but you know, we weren't getting
fired over that. But there were a number of other
issues that came up. None of them are illegal, none
of them incorrect. But you have to imagine now I
have all of my clients, Mandoli's Coolers, Johnson and Johnson,

(14:12):
the best clients in the world, asking me what happened
of how I lost Walmart in a matter of a
month or two. So, first of all, dealing with the
CEOs of a hundred fights and five companies was the
hardest couple of weeks of my life. And all I
could say to them. We didn't do anything that we
hadn't done on your business, and everything was completely legal,

(14:32):
but we lost it. And there's nothing I can say
about it because Walmarts asked us not to talk about
the reasons. One of the great ironies, if you want
to laugh about it right now, which sometimes I was
over at foot Coom the other day in Chicago for
some meetings just for fun. They've got the Walmart account again,
So think about the irony. And it ended up where
it belonged in the first place, because the work was

(14:53):
brilliant and they're doing brilliant work today. But what was
strange for me is, you know, obviously to be a
CEO of an ad agency you have to have a
little bit of an ego, and I'm sure over the
course of my early career in direct marketing I had
a pretty good ego because of the early success. But
when we won Walmart, I felt like we had created

(15:15):
the greatest agency in the world and nobody was going
to stop us, you know, front page of every publication
around the world. And then all of a sudden, not
a client wanted to talk to us. Clients wanted to
know what we had done wrong. So you go from
having done everything correctly to win the business to all
of a sudden you've done something wrong and you can't

(15:36):
tell them what you've actually done because it isn't anything
you've really done. And uh, it's going from the ultimate
high you're a twelve on a scale at ten down
to one, and you spent years, you know, in grief,
and then people are wondering what happened. What happened was
it was some bad luck on our part, but it

(15:57):
was also an incredible experience because A, I learned a
lot and be a made all of us at the
agency tighter from it. But it sure isn't anything I'd
ever wish upon anybody. I would never wish anybody to
go through what I wanted through, No, of course not.
But Howard bring us to the four, brings us to

(16:19):
now talk to us about how our draft and how
you're taking this experience you had and your understanding of
direct marketing, but as I say, performance marketing with where
you are today and really identifying the opportunities around this

(16:40):
thing called the metaverse. With physical you've you know, kind
of captured the zeitgeist of the moment with the metaverse
and and the idea of democratizing kind of access. Please
give us a picture of the current state of affairs. Okay,
first of all, you know meta, you know, one of

(17:03):
the things we skipped was my agency was an early
investor in Facebook. Well, you know, let me do that
one Howard, when Facebook was founded and was getting some
traction to let the audience in on that story, because
I was there kind of on the periphery, on the shoulder,
if you will. They had sixty employees and seven million users,

(17:24):
and the deal that you orchestrated was for interpublic to
take a percentage interest in this fledgling company in social media.
My understanding is that fledgling interest worked out to be
somewhere around a two d and fifty million dollar success fee,
if you will, maybe more. We invested two and a

(17:45):
half million dollars in a four forty million evaluation. A
few years later, it was moved from draft FCB up
to in the public. In public exited the shares as
they wanted during whatever period they felt like selling shares,
and I can assure you there was closer to a
be on it. There you go. Well, a good investment, nonetheless,

(18:06):
but you were early in understanding social media and now
you're early and you know at the forefront of meta
and the metaverse. Yeah. My takeaway on it, Michael is,
first of all, any business you get in today needs
to solve a client's business problem. So when people are
getting into a lot of this social media and metaverse discussion,

(18:30):
I'm not into these one offs. People are doing these
one off n f T s and promotions. To me,
that's all like ridiculous. My view on meta and metaverse
is that the technology that's going to be developed and
is being developed today will allow the consumer for the
first time to go from a Web two environment to

(18:52):
a Web three environment where they will be more engaged
than they ever were before. The technology that will exist
will allow you to get into the advertising for the
first time. You'll be the person in the environment as
well as you will be able to take a classic
Web two site and turn into a Web three platform

(19:12):
that will be allowed the consumer to really see and
understand and feel and become a part of the behavioral
understanding of a product. So I got back into this
business about nine months ago with a bunch of thirty
old brilliant people from the n f T Gaming as
well as McKinsey World and we built a small consultancy
and what we're doing right now is we're tarning a

(19:35):
lot of luxury brands and we're showing them how not
to be a one off promotional type business. We want
to be able to show how the future of marketing
is going to involve the technology and the thesis that
exists within what's being built in the metaverse. I'm a
firm believer that the next couple of years of marketing

(19:58):
will change the way it can sumer interacts with the brand.
And what have we always been about. We've always been
about how do we make a consumer interact with the
brand in a new and exciting way. To me the
virtual reality, the augmented reality, the use of databases and
the use of segmentation that will exist today and will
exist into the future, will allow a company and the

(20:20):
consumer to have a much deeper consumer relationship, will be
able to change behavior, measure behavior, and change behavior again.
But these major fashion brands, Michaelubs, you saw when you
go to Paris and you're dealing with your clients there,
they're all excited as hell about being able to change
the way a consumer interacts with the brand. Virtually as

(20:41):
well as in retail. These brands are not going to
walk away from retail. Remember the whole thing is people
thought all direct marketing was gonna eliminate retail. No, virtual
reality is going to enhance retail. Virtual reality is going
to again be another source where consumers can have this
deep relationship with a brand while at the same time

(21:02):
either buying online are going to a store. Eventually, you'll
probably be able to go into a high fashion brand
you have looked at the fashion show at home ahead
of time. You will feel like you're at the fashion
show in Paris. You'll walk into a little room at
a famous boutique. There will be a avatar of you.
They will have ability to flip all the clothes that

(21:24):
were in the fashion show onto you as an avatar.
You'll be able to purchase those clothes in your exact
size and colors, and they'll show up in the store
a few months later. So it will enhance the experience,
it will make it more real, and it will also
help the brands eliminate making products that people never buy
and eventually discount. So it's a tighter relationship. And you

(21:45):
chose fashion and high end fashion because it's an area,
you know. I'm just curious why the high end side
of it versus the popular price, if you will, it's
obviously the higher price brands. First of all, they have
a stronger knee. Second of all, the brands are gonna
be able to afford to give away the technology to
their consumer to use the technology. For example, you'll have

(22:07):
and one of my favorite things, Eventually a woman will
know every piece of close events in her class. She'll
be able to go to her I PM, they'll be
stag they'll know what house there, and she'll know. Once
you more, you'll put a calendar app with it, and
the calendar app will tell you what you wore out with.
Let's say my wife went out with your wife, she'll
know the three outfits she wore the three times she
went out with your wife. So technology will come together
with fashion in such a way that the woman or

(22:30):
the man will have so much information and be able
to pick out as close ahead of time. You're going
on a business trip, You'll go to your I pad.
You'll say, here are the eight items I need to
bring because I'm going to a cold weather place, warm
weather place. It's going to make the consumer experience better
and easier. So I'm really excited about how data. I'm
always been a data keek. I love brands, but I

(22:51):
love data. I remember back when I'm doing spreadsheets on results.
So in the future, data is going to drive everything
cost to a new consumer, lifetime value of a consumer.
All of these things will be coming together in the
web three world, but at the same time driving enhanced
retail experience and enhanced direct marketing or classic marketing. So so, Howard,

(23:16):
you've come a long way, and here you are at
the cutting edge yet again, but with the experience in
the history you've had, and it's one of the more
interesting experiences in our industry. I mean, you've been doing
this for, as you said, forty years, and it's been
what a forty years across the industry, not only for you,
but you know, both local in Chicago, national out of

(23:38):
New York and Chicago, and international where you were so
comfortable and yet some of the greatest direct marketing stories
and you and I have spent many years talking about
one in particular with HBO, you know, early on, and
here we're at a point in time when brands really
need to get that joke. If you will of the

(24:00):
difference between brand and performance because so many brands. Hbo
is a great example. Hbo is a brand that always
was around getting subscribers. Then they kind of hit the
numbers they needed and subscriber, and now they have to
get subscribers in a different way for the streaming service.
Is there any advice that you would kind of give
to brand and media executives in this next five years.

(24:22):
You know, based on your history and based on what
you can see relative to where we're going, you've had
the ability traditionally and historically to look around corners. If
you're looking around the corner this time and you're speaking
to an emerging media brand or media executive, is there
any bit of advice you give them? The most important

(24:43):
thing for a brand if they want to do something
from a breakthrough standpoint, You know, you can do some
good advertising, and you might move things tense of a point.
You might be able to improve the offer and improve
things significantly more. You might be able to do it
better media. By and all these things together, you can
proved the business if you really want to create a breakthrough.

(25:03):
Let's use Hbo an example. When I showed up at HBO,
they were a twenty four hour movie network. In they
started to do some original programming, concerts, boxing events, and
that drove the business, so they started to change that.
But the biggest impact that HBO had, in my humble opinion,
was when everybody realized, we're all sitting around the room,

(25:26):
this brilliant guy, John Billick, who was the head of
marketing there, and you know, everybody was saying, you know,
at HBO, we don't have ratings. Now let's do some
really great original programming. Let's put it on Sunday night.
By owning Sunday Night, they changed the behavior of America.
And when you change behavior, you can go from medium

(25:49):
growth some nice growth to geometric go. So if you're
a brand, you need to understand what behavior you want
to change in that consumer interaction, and if you can
change the behavior, you can drive a brand into the stratosphere.
HBO is one of the best examples I've ever seen
of changing a behavior. By putting their original programming on

(26:11):
Sunday Night, it became a must place to go in America.
You have to give HBO the credit to say, Okay, yeah,
we're gonna program six other days a week, but I'm
announcing every original programming on Sunday night, and all of
us were there saw the sales go up geometrically. So Howard,
let me switch to a subject that's probably not as

(26:33):
good but actually pretty good. You were an early investor
and a board member of a company that has gone through,
you know, a massive change of behavior wave and then
one that kind of didn't seem to sustain as behaviors
move back, and there's a whole host of reasons for it,

(26:54):
I'm guessing, but Peloton. You know, I'm looking across to
my gym. I happen to be at home when I'm
chatting with you, and there's a Peloton. And I was
a very very very early adopter of spinning per se
and then in home spinning. And you were an early
investor and a board member of a company that had
a rocket and then came down to earth a bit.

(27:17):
Is there any lesson that you're comfortable sharing of something
like that that had such a rapid rise and you
know market cap that that's a behavior again, No, no,
But that's why I bring it up, not to talk
about Peloton, but to talk about what you did at
Peloton and the company did, and you know, credit to
John Foley and others, you changed people's behavior. The pandemic

(27:41):
was an instigator, but you were already trying to change
people's behavior to in house, in home exercise. Yeah. Now, Peloton,
let's start with, is one of the world's great brands.
So what happened there was John came to me in
the early days because I would think people think of
me as a subscription expert. So he came to me
to sit in my office in New York just as

(28:03):
they were launching the company. And I must tell you
I was one wrong. So you know, sometimes I'm right
and sometimes I'm wrong. Well, but Howard, let me let
me just tell you. My mother used to say she
may not always be right, but she's never wrong. So
you can use that. You can use that she may
not always be right, but she's never wrong. Okay, Well,
in this case, my projections were so far off the

(28:23):
market it's a joke. So John sits in my office
and he goes through what he's building, and I say, oh,
it's a beautiful model. Here's what I think is gonna happen.
You know, first year you'll get your subscribes. I wasn't
talking about volume I was talking about retention, and because
this product has the best retention of any product I
just about seeing in my life. It still has like
retention level. It has incredible consumer scores. The consumers love

(28:46):
the credit. But he comes in my office and he goes,
what do you think is gonna happen? I said, first year,
you'll keep about eighty five percent of your customer. Second
year probably dropped about sixty eight percent, sixty five percent,
and you'll end up netting at about fifty percent retention
right after three years. I wasn't even close. I mean,
they're in the nineties, so start with. Everybody loves that
product and John Foley was a genius in his team

(29:08):
to build that product. Okay, so we're plugging along. We're
spending a ton of money building the brand. This was
an example where we built the brand that drove people
to the website to buy the product. Some of the
advertising was good, and as you know, some of the
advertising wasn't so good. But when we drove people to
the web before the pandemic, we were growing nicely and

(29:29):
we were going public in October of the year before
the pandemic, and we got public and the business was
doubling every year, and it was a beautiful business. Come
around March fourteen, the pandemic hits. We couldn't make product
fast enough. I mean, we were not prepared for the
geometric growth. Okay, there's a big behavior that took place

(29:51):
because of the pandemic. People stopped going out, stopped going
to gyms, and we were the only good product getting
exercise with. So we're sitting here trying to find factories
by factors, ship bikes over on the airplanes, the most
ridiculous thing to try and keep up with consumer demand.
And I think the biggest issue was they ordered a

(30:14):
lot more inventory in the second year of the pandemic,
to the tune of billions. So then when the pandemic stopped,
ordering went back to what I would consider a more
normal level. But I do think the current management and
team will with the changes they're making, frying some good
stabilization and I think the brand will come back nicely

(30:35):
over the next couple of years. You know, how to
make a good product. You make a good product. People
want a good product, and they make a good product
and it's and its subscription. You know, they need to
be selling the more. In my opinion of the experience
of the instructors. You know, the hardware needs to go
to second tier. First tier is the experience you get
with the instructors. And if they keep pushing in that direction,

(30:56):
I think they'll start to grow again. Remember they're not
really international, only a couple of countries, so I think
there's still a great opportunity there. But that is a
perfect example of behavioral change that worked. But again, it's
a crisis in the world. But remember my funny thing
I told you. I once told Jeff Ucas that we
got to get murder and on April one, we have

(31:18):
to put all the CNN reporters on Fox and all
the Fox reporders on CNN for the one day. I
think that would have been the funnest day in the
history of America. I think we should do that now, Howard,
draft you and I could talk forever, as we do
when we get the privilege to spend time, and I'm
I'm thankful that happens frequently. I want to take a
moment to just say thank you, Howard. You sharing your

(31:39):
thinking and your experience is going to be very very
interesting for our listening audience. And you know, I know
that visicale. As you roll out this new strategy is
going to you know, garner great success, and it should
because there's no company that wouldn't benefit from having the

(32:00):
thinking and the insights that you have represented over a
forty year career. And I'm privileged that at least for
almost thirty years of that career, I've been able to
count you as a friend. So, Howard Draft, it's a
great pleasure, Michael. It's been great being your friend for
thirty years. But what I love most when we get

(32:20):
together is when we start gassiping about the business because
the business, to me, is still the most exciting business
in the world. Thank God for that, Howard Draft, Thank
for having me. I'm Michael Casson. Thanks for listening to
Good Company. Good Company is a production of I Heart

(32:42):
Radio Special. Thanks to Lena Peterson, chief Brand Officer and
Managing Director of media Link, for her vision I'm Good Company,
and to Jen Seely, Vice President Marketing Communications of media
Link for programming, amazing talent and content