August 29, 2019 • 40 mins
Tom Freston has a rare skill: the ability to pair raw, creative visionaries with the establishment to create bigger and bolder ventures than either could dream up on their own. From his work at MTV and Viacom— creating a “hothouse” for nurturing talent and spreading TV networks across the globe, to nudging Vice from a street magazine to an Emmy-winning news service and multimedia behemoth, learn why Freston thinks you need to stay humble, how owning the IP changed the game for MTV and Nickelodeon, and why not buying MySpace may be the smartest thing he did for his career.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. To ride an idea that you believed in
with a group of people who were making no money
and have it turn into a worldwide phenomena. I mean
it was incredible. All of a sudden, you know you
couldn't get arrested, and then you know you're being wined
and dying everywhere. Welcome to this episode of Math and
(00:33):
Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm Bob Pittman.
On this podcast, we explore the creative and data analytics
side of marketing and how business people and entrepreneurs use
that magic mix help them find success. Today's guest as
an old friend who I have known and admired for
most of my adult working life. Tom Freston to M
(01:00):
is totally unique in the media and entertainment business. He
has this ability to bridge the sort of wildly new,
untamed creatives with the establishment and often helps each group
understand each other and sometimes even creates ventures together. He
was the first person to tell me about Vice, for example,
(01:20):
and even gave me an opportunity to invest in it
in the beginning. I stupidly did not take his advice,
but Tom had spotted something that few of us could
have grasped except him back then, and he has done
that countless times in his career. Tom owned a business
based in Afghanistan back in the seventies, came back to
the US. It was on the original team that built
(01:40):
him TV. When I left MTV in nine seven, Tom
succeeded me as CEO of MTV Networks, and he and
his team, which included Judy McGrath, who has been on
the podcast before, took him TV two heights. None of
us would have ever imagined we had gone public. Briefly,
we lost in that LBO. Viacom bought it pre sum
the red Stone shortly after they bought it. In Tom's
(02:03):
time at the top, some of the red Stone effectively
bought Viacom, and he did so because he had Tom's support. Ironically,
decades later, and one of the strangest moments in corporate history,
Tom left by a com because of Sumner. We'll get
to that later. Tom went on to explore his two
great passions, travel to places in the world filled with wonder,
and his other love nurturing creatives and helping them find
(02:26):
success and protecting their ideas. Welcome Tom. Nice to be here, Bob.
Tom has some great stories and we'll get to those
in a minute time, but first we want to do
you in sixty seconds. So here we go. Do you
prefer vanilla or chocolate Vanilla? Facebook or Instagram? Instagram? The
Real World or the Osbourne's Wine or Tequila Tequila? MTV
(02:50):
News or Vice New York or l A l A
Madonna or Cindy Lauper Madonna, Andy Warhol or Andy Rooney,
Andy Warhol. It's about to get harder. You're ready. Secret
talent photographer, favorite city London, favorite color blue, career highlight
working with you in MTV those years? Oh I love that? Huh?
(03:13):
Childhood hero Conto, favorite TV show? Andy Griffith. Best life
concert you've ever seen? Live a excuse me quote to
live by, Live, free, or die. Best thing about being you?
I get to do whatever I want? The worst bad
you participated in the Macarena? What would be the title
(03:36):
of your memoir? Mr? Tom? Who would play you in
a movie? Dustin Hoffman? What's one book song? Movie that
changed you? On the road? Jack carolac last one? Who
would you like to meet you haven't yet? Matt. I
had told many you're a brave man. Okay, let's again
by going back to your beginning. You probably travel more
(03:57):
than anyone I know. Yet you grew up in a
mall Connecticut town and you didn't travel much at all
as a kid. As I remember, you were not in
a very diverse community. But diversity has been a hallmark
of your career. Your dad was a commuter, and you
were the first person I knew who ever moved downtown
because the Tribeca back when it was all commercial. You've
(04:17):
always been the urban explorer. So what in that childhood
brought you to this place? Why so many contrasts? I
don't know. I grew up in Roheaton, Connecticut. It was
an all white town. We didn't even have forget blacks
or Italians. There was no Jews. It was very homo genious.
By the time I got to college, I'd only been
in two states, New York and Connecticut, and I'd only
(04:41):
had one trip in my life, which was a day
trip to the Mystic Seaport with my father, who sort
of suffered from PTSD from World War Two and never
wanted to go anywhere. So when I was seventeen, I
headed off to college and just sort of never came back,
always looking, you know, sort of for the road less traveled.
In a way, was there anything in that upbringing that
s have led you to this or were you running
(05:02):
away from something? Were you gathering something, or is there's
something that gives you strength from that era? I think
I was sort of running away for the conformity of
suburban New York City, and I was running away in
the end from what I saw as a kind of
boring organization man life. What lessons did you take from
those days, anything that when you think about business or
think about your family, that you learned there that you
(05:24):
repeat again and again. Well. I would watch my father
and his friends who were largely involved in the marketing
advertising business. They were sort of like the Madman cocktail party,
the whole drill, and I saw how hard everyone worked.
I also saw how some of his friends, who were
in the more creative advertising world, actually got a lot
(05:45):
of enjoyment out of their work because they had something
to do with the creative process. So that was sort
of a gene that stayed in the back of my head.
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in the business world. There wasn't an artist, per se.
I wasn't a writer or a musician, but I wanted
to always be around creative people. My first grown up jobs. Essentially,
we're working in an ad agency. You went off to
(06:06):
college in Vermont the sixties. You paid for school through
a variety of jobs. I remember you telling me about
some of the things you did. Tell us some of
those wonderful jobs. I've done every menial job imaginable. But
when I was in college, I used to do everything
from run the student cafeteria, became the head waiter. At
one point, I would work washing dishes. I would sweep
the floors of hospitals. I would deliver snacks to people's
(06:29):
rooms at night from a place called Frosty Stein, where
people would break into my car and steal the other
order I had in my car when I was delivering one.
It was a bit with frustration, but I I worked
really hard. I made more money in college. When I
left college, I was probably making less for a couple
of years, and I was when I was there. When
did the sixties subculture find you? Well? I was eighteen
(06:50):
years old the day President Kennedy was shot nineteen sixty three.
In my mind. That's sort of the day is that
the sixties began. For me. The first view are really
out of the sixties was the summer of nineteen sixty five.
I had listened to someone who had come back from
the year before from Lake George, New York, and had
worked at this what was then a sort of thriving
(07:11):
resort where a lot of young people would come and
work for this summer. And it was there that I
went and got a job as a bellhop and then
as a bartender. But I ran into a lot of
young people my age who weren't necessarily in college. They
would work in Aspen in the wintertime, they would come
work in Lake George in the summertime. It's the first
time I've really seen people outside of the normal career track.
(07:31):
They smoked pot, they would travel, and the Pound was
just filled with rock and roll bands. This is the
first glimpse into bohemia. I kind of just jumped in
head first. And then I moved to New York City
to go to college, to go to graduate school, and
that was sort of, you know, nineteen sixty seven, moving
into the East Village, I was right in the middle
of it all. So you went to college though in
(07:53):
New York at n y U to get an m
b A. This is well before people got an NBA.
This was the sixties. Why did you get an NBA
in nineteen sixty seven. I was gonna graduate college. They said, hey,
you know you're gonna get drafted and go to Vietnam
really quickly, and you better think of somewhere else to
go to get a student to firm. And I didn't
want to go to medical school. I didn't want to
go to dental school or law school. Is there any
(08:14):
school I could go to? Said way, you can go
to business school. I didn't even know there was such
a thing. I mean, I was really behind the curve there.
So I applied and got into a couple of business
schools and went to n y U. I did two
years straight. It was really the Vietnam War drove me
to business school. After getting your m b A. Instead
of going to somewhere like Mackenzie, you became a bartender
(08:35):
in the Caribbean Colorado Martha's Vineyard. What's that the beginning
of the wonder lust? And why do that rather than
jump into work? Well, I wasn't. I'm ready. I I
figured I've been to school for, you know, eighteen years.
I was ready to kind of stretch out. I wanted
to kind of join those people whose life I had
admired back in Lake George. At first I was going
to ask when I became a dishwasher, but I wanted
(08:56):
to be free. I had never really driven across the country,
never really almost been anywhere, So that really what my
appetite for things that were to come, much to my
parents should grun at the time, because they assumed, of course, well,
now you're gonna get a grown up job. So now
we get to Tom Freston. In business, you jump in
feet first at the legendary ad agency Bettnam Bowls. You
worked on G I. Joe and Sharman. But I guess
(09:19):
it didn't seem like the place for you. Why, well,
my first account there I worked on was G I. Joe. Now,
mind you, this was sort of at the height of
the Vietnam War, and I was in an alienated state
to begin with, let alone doing that for a living.
It was an interesting learning time to see sort of
being a big ad agency, to see how it all worked,
how all the pieces came together. But when they were
(09:39):
going to assign me to Charman toilet paper. That was
sort of my last straw. I said, I I'm not
gonna do this. I called an ex girlfriend who lived
in Paris and I said, you know, I'm really I'm
really bombed. They want they want me to work on
a toilet paper account where they had segment in the
population and two rollers, folders and crumplers. And she says, well,
you can't do that. You can't do that. You should
(10:01):
quit that job. Dupi a moron, Come with me. I'm
gonna go across the Sahara desert up in Paris. So
I was on a plane like ten days later. That
was it for me. You'd saved enough money. I had
like five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money
at the time. Shore was So you wind up with
Hindu Kush your clothing line. How did you get there
from I'm gonna go walk across the Sahara to you
(10:22):
start your own clothing line based in Afghanistan. We split up,
we crossed the Sahara. I have said about traveling throughout
Africa and then into Europe, and uh I met a
girl in Greece who she was selling all these cool
clothes on the beach and micanos to these German tourists,
and she would go in the winter and make these
clothes in India Nepal and bring them back. I kind
of lodged that in the back of my head, but
(10:43):
she convinced me to go to India. So many months
later I went on overland to India, basically hitchhike through
Iran Afghanistan, ended up in India. The day I went
across the Afghan border, my life sort of change because
I said, Wow, this place is just terrific. The guy
at immigration, he was wearing an acrand Band high school
jacket as his uniform. I said, this is a country
(11:05):
that's as far away from New York as I would find.
And I set about figuring out how I could survive
and live there. The only way I was gonna do
was to start a business. At that point in time globalism.
I was sort of in the front row for globalism
because air freight was starting out. You could make something
in New Delhi or in Cobble and for five dollars
and sell it the next day for twenty five dollars
(11:25):
in New York. So I set up a business. I
had friends at Vogue and Mademoiselle and Bloomingdale's. I built factories,
I acquired partners, and both New Delhi and Cobble I
had houses. How on earth did you know how to
do this? I didn't know anything. How did you get
it done? Just through hard work. I realized at one
point that nothing I ever will do in my life
will ever be harder than this. There were so many
(11:46):
things that could go wrong. The people you had to bribe,
their strikes, There's all kinds of issues. But I enjoyed it.
We were very successful. We would design clothes. It was
sort of contemporary. Remember the clothes, and uh, they were cool.
And we would do trade shows and I was selling
into the United States and in the UK and Australia.
And it became a multimillion dollar business and I was
(12:06):
I was living like a pasha in New Delhi and
in Cobble. That was fantastic. And I got to travel,
which was my initial goal. I got pretty much to
go almost everywhere. India had fourteen states in those days.
I hit every one of them. It was exhilarating, made
a lot of money. Had no idea what I was doing,
but I applied a lot of basic marketing principles and
stuff I had picked up along the way, And you know,
(12:27):
you could learn by observing others and next thing you know,
you're just figuring something out. And it was just a
longer supply chain than usual. Competitively, I was like the
only American doing this almost at the time. I would
hire designers, they would come and live and stay with me,
and we made a good product. It's very cool. So
let's jump. All that became to an end. Russians invaded Afghanistan.
(12:51):
Jimmy Carter Post, the president at the time, put restrictions
on and so you came back to the US. You
were hired by Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Operation, the company
owned by American Express and Warner Communications that would eventually
become MTV Networks. We were both originally brought to the
company for other jobs, by the way, before the MTV
development even began, by the incredibly charismatic John Lack, who
(13:14):
had this wonderful affliction. He liked to hire people for
roles they had never had before, and you and I
benefited from that. Although John left about a year after
MTV started, I think it is safe to say we
would not have had MTV. While there's strong support and advocacy,
and I do want to give him a shout out here,
but you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even
(13:34):
recognized as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think
you were getting into? I mean, this was still sort
of Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business. I thought
I was getting into one of the greatest ideas that
had ever come around. I had spent parts of the
summers in Europe and I was familiar with the music
video which were largely unknown to the American audiences, and
they were infectious. And when I was driven out of Asia,
I thought, whatever I do next, I wanted to be
(13:56):
something that I also loved deeply, and that was music.
So I'm methodically looked around getting a job in the
music business. Through connections, I ended up in John Lack's
office and I told him I thought this a fantastic idea.
He says, we're looking for people who have no experience
in television. I said, I'm your man. They didn't even
have television where I've been living in the last eight years.
So I thought MTV, like all of us on the team,
(14:19):
was really one of the great ideas and all of
us were essentially on a crusade. We got paid nothing.
It was the early eighties version of a startup, very
much so. And if you looked at the media environment
then nothing had really changed in years. The only thing
that had come around new had been FM radio. There
was still three TV networks. Pong was only a few
years old. Remember we used to say we're going to
(14:41):
do to FM what FM did to a M That
was our big plane channels in the home. It was
a very small group of us. They began developing MTV.
We did not have approval to do it. I got
a small budget to put together a plan. You were
the only one with the real marketing background. I was
happy to have a job. I couldn't believe anyone was
gonna hire me. We did start the channel and it
(15:02):
was a great consumer success, but a business failure. As
by the way, we're all the cable networks of the day.
Of course, that failure was good for you and me
and led to me being the CELO and eventually the CEO,
and you're moving up to run everything where affiliates sails
all the way to GM of the service and finally
CEO did it sort of seem like it was all
falling in place. Or was this all luck or were
you ambitious and saying I'm working at all? I was
(15:25):
ambitious and I was highly motivated for this to succeed.
I thought that MTV and then of course Nickelodeon and
Nick at Knight and the rest of the things. I
just thought we were in this TV revolution. We had
the wind at our back. It was all going to
come true. Was too good of an idea to fail.
You know, a lot of life is about timing and luck,
and I had somehow ended up once again in the
(15:45):
right place at the right time, and this was sort
of my destiny. I was going to meet my opportunity.
What you did, you know, I would say my time there.
We really proved it was a business. Were the first
cable network to make a profit. But it was really
you and your team, including Shooting Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
(16:07):
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there? There's a compliment to you, Bob,
I mean, you are the guy always keep your eye
on the consumer, find out what the consumer one. We
would always see this research, the consumer wanted what we
were selling, and we could tune it up a bit.
And we also had this sort of slightly subversive, underground feel,
and you know, there was nothing really around like that.
(16:27):
And we would continue to launch new networks Comedy Central
or tv Land and in so far as taking it
around the world. The whole international world of television began
to deregulate in the late eighties. All these countries really
only had state TV pretty much, as you know. So
the confidence I had built from my years living in
Afghanistan in India was actually very transferable because I really
(16:49):
knew we could go anywhere and do anything. And if
we could go to Europe, we could go to Asia,
we go to Latin America. So we built really the
first worldwide television networking company, and we rolled out not
just empt V but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a
lot of others right down through Africa. But then realizing
along the way, if we could develop I P and
own it like SpongeBob or Rugrats or Bavis and butt Head,
(17:12):
we could get into things like feature films, consumer product
licensing and build a really big business. So the business
gradually evolved from one where we would package other people's
product like a music video, to where we would increasingly
own what we did. But at the heart of it
always a creative machine, which again was something that you
put in at the inception of the company. A lot
of focus was on creating a culture that would attract
(17:34):
creative people. They would want to come and live there.
I mean we'd have at one point Judd Apatow or
Ben Stiller or John Stewart, Stephen Cobra, you know, Adam
Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices. Sometimes it
was a hothouse atmosphere. You were probably the first talent incubator.
I don't think they called them that back then. How
did you pull that together? Because it just really remarkable
the people we had. They came through MTV and Nickelodeon
(17:56):
and people have started their careers there. You gave him
the shot, well all out of his sort of what's
the vibe of the place. We always wanted to make
the room for deviancy. I would always say, who is
the odd ball person, Who's the intern who's gonna come
running in with an idea like yo MTV raps. That
was like a twenty one year old intern who came
up with a demo and his basement. You know, we
give creative people a lot of freedom because we had
(18:18):
these networks, there was a lot of room for experimentation.
Everything you made didn't have to be really tightly organized.
There's a lot of room for improvisation and innovation. If
you have a hallmark for that, people would want to
step up and follow. What's you just try and have
good standards, provide guard rails for people, celebrate risk. How
did you build that culture across the different networks. What's
(18:38):
remarkable is you not only had this cultural fit with MTV,
which had that same sort of innovation, yet a different
cultural fit with Nickelodeon and a different one with v
H one. I want to make creativity the primary aptitude
of the organization. So what I try and do is
put the person who ran the network very creative person
that would send a signal to the ranization. That was
(19:00):
a value we prize most. And if that creative person
could make the connection with what they did with the consumer,
a lot of the business stuff would kind of fall together.
But in some cases you'd hire a business person, but
that business person had to be seen as a fan
I'm a business affairs guy, and now I have this job,
and I want to know. I think you people create
the value. I'm not creating the value and deals that
(19:21):
I do, but it's what you guys make. And by
the way, I know what you're talking about because I
am deeply a mess in the popular culture. The fact
that we made a lot of stuff ourselves and didn't
just farm it out. You had actual creative directors and
producers and people there. Most TV networks they would just
farm stuff out to production companies. You are known for creativity,
(19:42):
you're sort of the crazy guy that sets this wonderful culture.
But I know you use a lot of research and insights.
How do you fit the research and the insights into
something that's sort of that creative I never talked about
business to anybody whatever. We would speak to creative people.
Maybe this is because the business was always going so
good we didn't have to, but we would never really
(20:03):
talk about how much revenue came in or how much
we're off our budget, and we would celebrate any kind
of creative triumph. So that also kind of reinforced the
notion that we are a creative first organization. Just hold
on a second, because we've got so much more to
talk about. We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome
(20:24):
back to Math and Magic. We're here with Tom Freston.
When we launched MTV, you were the head of marketing.
The cable operator wouldn't put m TV on. They wanted
us to pay them one, we didn't have the money,
and too that was probably a slippery slope, and so
we decided we would use a poll strategy to get distribution.
(20:45):
I want my MTV tell me the evolution of how
that came down, because that's clearly one of the legendary
ad campaigns of the past thirty or forty years. Well,
it was sort of a hail Mary passed because you
know we're about to go under. I mean I did
talking about not talking about business. No one in the
organization knew we were about to go under. So how
are we going to get these cable operators at us?
(21:05):
When we knew, in fact that the people who actually
had it in a few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. Back then, music
was the centerpiece of culture, so there was a very
strong emotional button you could push. Ideas, if we could
get major rock stars in a commercial to kind of
hold our logo validated, hold it and command people to
(21:26):
call their cable company and demand their MTV make it
look cool, put some animation around it, and then put
it in these markets at very high frequency. We go
into a market and it would be like a blockbuster
movie was opening. Most people in the market had never
heard of MTV. Next thing, you know, every cable operator
there were eleven of them in the market, which would
not be unusual time they'd all call up and surrender.
(21:48):
So we would move a market by market for a
couple of years across the country, going from like what
was seven million subscribers ended up being eighty or ninety million. Well,
there's a lesson in this too that you've always done
very very well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
And in the case of I want my MTV music
stars who were willing to be in the commercial for
free to help us accomplish our goals, but you also
(22:10):
have music companies and others. Talk to me a little
bit about how you harness that kind of power of
partners and how you think about partners in business. In
that business and almost any business, partners were essentially, but
they say on the music side, our partners were the
record companies and the artists. And you know, in any partnership,
someone had to give something. And the most important thing
to a record company was to be able to take
an artist out of nowhere and sort of what they
(22:31):
would say, break him and make him popularize in some extent,
and MTV was like the tool to do that, and
there was a lot of competition to get videos on
the air when MTV was in his prime. What's your
real priority, mr. Record company? We will take care of you,
but in return we want a few things too. There
was an example there when we used the power of
fighting brand. When Ted Turner came after in TV. We
(22:53):
were just ready to go public and barely got out
public because he announced in the face of it with
the cable music channel, and we fronted the battle with
our fighting brand VH one. At the time, we invented
VH one to go against Ted Turner. Tell me a
little bit about that story, because you were right smack
dab in the middle of that was a classic fighting
brand thing you would have seen in the world of
package goods, like back in my day's working at Procter
(23:14):
and gambling an ad agency where you're trying to thwart
a new competitor with Ted Turner want to come in
and basically p in our parade. He said he was
going to launch a music channel that played like none
of the Devil's music. Let me say first that the
cable music channel lasted a hundred one days on the
air and he had to fold up and go home.
But we decided we can't let this happen, and if
there's going to be a second music channel, we should
(23:36):
have a second music channel, and we made the case
to cable operations, we have a second music channel. You
don't want to add the Ted Turner channel. That's just
gonna go head to head against the one you already have.
Add VH one, which was called the Very Hot One
at the time, because it would be more compatible and
it would play artists for another demo and we would
sell it tu on a combo basis. Basically it was
(23:57):
free if you already had MTV, so he couldn't get distribute,
and he'd already kind of detegrated as image wise by
putting himself in some kind of Christian rock station, and
we strangled him in terms of not being able to
get distribution. Therefore, no advertising, no revenue, no light on
the end of the tunnel, and he went out of
business and we went forward. Let's jump to the evolution
of MTV and building this amazing brand. You lad the
(24:20):
jump from just music videos to long form programs, including
in the process the invention if you will, really a
reality TV. Why how Well, there's a couple of factors there.
One was our in house creative force, in a way
was always looking to do more, and do more, and
create and do more stuff. So packaging hours of ten
(24:43):
different music videos, they were always looking for ways to
put new spins on that and so forth. The other
thing was that the music video format was beginning to wane,
and as we were bigger, our audience ratings on which
we sold advertising was beginning to create her and unless
we put some spikes in there, we could see ourselves
live on a road to some kind of oblivion. We
couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix or
(25:04):
changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We just
couldn't play the top ten videos all day long. So
we thought we would follow a strategy that we've seen
Rolling Stone utilize successfully, which was when there's lulls in
the music business, they would be talking about movies or comedy.
David Letterman would be on the cover. We could be
about a lot of the things the music was about
and still keep our music first image fashion. With Cindy
(25:26):
Crawford and we decided to beef up our music news
right and just make it sort of a throwaway. We
brought in Curt Loader, incredible journalists, and we put shows
on the air, and when we put a show on
the air, the ratings will be two to three times
higher than just running music videos. We would also try
and refresh the look the field in the style at
a network every three or four or five years, because
(25:47):
the demo kind of passes it through it, so we'd
reinvent it so there was always new shows coming around.
We would add shows on package music and like on
hip hop music with the OMTV raps and so forth,
and it kind of came down to the real world
there that was re and that was like, well, we've
tried everything else, we should probably do a soap opera.
Because young people are interested in what other young people
(26:07):
are doing, so they came in with a presentation to me,
and we had to hire writers, and I said, well,
you know, we don't have any money to hire writers,
so we can't do this. So then Doug Herzog came
back and said, you know, we're really good at post production,
that's our major skill. What if we just rented Aloft
and Soho and stuck some cameras in there and bring
these kids in and then let them live and then
(26:28):
we'll post it afterwards and make it into a show.
And that was That was sort of the birth of
reality TV. It was an idea that was not born
of brilliance but born of cheap skateness. MTV was always
embedded in the youth culture, and as a matter of fact,
you and I years ago had the discussion about should
we grow up with this audience or should we give
(26:49):
up this audience and continue to get a new audience
to be the voice of young America. You took it seriously.
I think you also, in terms of being the voice
of young America, also represented their desire to do good
and make a difference. I was there for Live a
far made some of that, but you took it much broader,
much deeper than any TV network had ever dared Choose
(27:09):
or Lose? Would you want to Peabody Award for Rock
the Vote programming about lgbt Q rights, substance abuse, gun violence, health,
gender and more. What was the philosophy? What drove you?
We knew it was important to our audience. I also
knew it was extremely important to the employee base. Employees
would feel better about working there if they knew we
(27:29):
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had a hundred sixty eight hours
a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It also
turned out, like we Choose or Lose, for example, it
legitimized us in the eyes of advertisers who formally wouldn't
come near us, like American Express. But most importantly, the
audience liked it. I would ask every network to come
up with a couple of social purpose campaigns a year,
(27:50):
so it really became part of the DNA of the company.
So before we get to Tom freston three point oh,
let's hit sum of the red Stone. He says he
took control of Viacom way back in nine seven because
of the dinner he had with you and Jerry Leborne
when he took over. I think it's fair to say
you and MTV Networks were now the center of Viacom.
You were the star. Fast forward decades later, after you
(28:12):
did this wonderful solid Sumner has made you first coach
CEO of Viacom, then CEO of i Com. When he
split by a coming CBS, you were the guy. And then,
all of a sudden, or at least it appeared to
be all of a sudden, it's reported that he's furiosued
in my my Space and actually fires you, shocks the
industry and alienates him from the creative community and clearly
(28:33):
makes you this martyr hero or whatever. Is that really
what came down that sort of you know, I was
sort of shocked. I had had two incidents with him
that didn't go well. I become the CEO of the
new Viacom public company that included Paramount Pictures and the
MTV Networks and a few other businesses, and I had
had a fight with him over my Space. We were
(28:56):
looking to morph ourselves into the digital world with acquisitions,
and we were looking at my Space as a possibility.
They were then the social network leader. I remember Facebook
was really just still only for that was the fake
Friendster was dead and it was the Facebook. So one
weekend when we were talking to the folks out in California,
(29:19):
Rupert Murdoch came in like on a high horse, over
a weekend and he bought it with no due diligence
or anything, for five D seventy million dollars. Summers thought
that was a great defeat. He wanted that Charlie row
show saying, you know, I've been totally disgraced. Meanwhile, Rupert
Murdoch now was his pictures on magazine as a new
media hero, and Sumner's real competitor in life was Rupert Murdoch,
(29:39):
and Rupert Murdoch showed him up and made me look bad.
I also had had my first fight with him a
couple of weeks before that, which was over Tom Cruise.
He decided he was gonna fire Tom Cruise and called
a press conference to his house. His Tom Cruise had
been jumping up and down on Oprah's couch and he
thought Tom Cruise had to go. And I said, you
can't fire him. He doesn't work for us, first of all.
(30:00):
But that was a big screaming match that didn't go
down well. And then a couple of weeks later, on
Labor Day he brought me over to his house and
fired me. And I was like, wow, this is after
twenty years of working with him, of continual growth and performance.
So I was kind of shocked. God, I must say
it turned out to be a blessing, A blessing for sure.
It was. It was the best way to go. I
(30:20):
had been there twenty six years overall, so it was
a quarter of a century as a time to turn
the page. Well also as a friend who watched you closely,
you had an obligation, and I think it's safe to
say you would have never felt like you could leave
MTV Networks or Viacom through that sense of obligation. And
he read you and you went on to be um
freston three point Oh yeah, let's get into that before
(30:41):
we do that. Did someth ever, thank you for not
getting my Space? No? When Rupert Murdoch sold it for
thirty five million dollars, I saw his daughter was still
waiting for thank you know, but it never came. When
this happened, I remember the time you were totally in demand.
You've turned down great job after great job to run companies.
You were a few us to go that route why
(31:02):
the first thing I did was just do nothing. Sometimes
you see people get fired from a job and then
the next thing you know, they're working the next day
somewhere else. But I decided I would let things come
into focus a bit, and I realized that I'm gonna
work with people that I like on things I'm really
passionate about. I was never a mainstream business guy, and
I had a business out of Afghanistan, Indio. When you
hired me an MTV, this was a fringey, underground startup
(31:23):
and I basically was there and built it. It was
like we had equity and this is it was the
nexus of all the things. I loved, animation, music, film,
so I really felt like it was sort of partially
my company. I didn't feel like being grafted onto the
top of a company like say a Yahoo or something.
It just didn't turn me on. And I felt the
(31:43):
last two business chapters in my life have been things
that was really passionate about. I didn't feel that, and
I just said, well, maybe I could have another hype
of life and have a more portfolio approach. Instead of
taking a single big job, I could do a bunch
of different things, and that's essentially what I've been doing
four or five or six different types of things. So
one with Bono you spent a lot of time on that.
(32:05):
How did that happen? Well, I had built up a
relationship with him over the years. I mean you two
and MTV kind of came up together. The day after
I got fired, I was in l A. He called
me on the phone. He just said, hey, if why
don't you come run RED? I know no, he said.
He had Bill Gates calling me and Steve Jobs saying
I should take this job. So he kind of got
my interest up, but I said no, I'm not gonna
do anything right now. A few months later, his manager
(32:29):
implored me to come and meet with him in France
because I fell in love with what they were doing.
I met this whole other group of young people who
were activists. They were in a whole different world from
any young people I had worked with before, and I
said I would stay on as the board chair. And
I've been doing that for twelve years. The one campaign
we've got ten million members, which also includes Red, which
is where's you know? Almost seven million dollars for the
(32:50):
Global Fund for HIV AIDS. Amazing. I know you were
advising Oprah for a while. You were at Moby Group
Mobi Group. That was the first thing I did. I
went back to Afghana brought TV. Yeah, essentially went back
to work in Afghanistan several months a year to teach
people how to run a TV network, which was totally
(33:10):
exhilarating and really full circle for me. The network itself
was really a platform for social change they've never really had.
It plugged him into the outside world, connecting them with
each other, you know, gender equality, all those types of things.
Despite the fact that the war is still going on.
I mean, their business is still relatively unaffected, which shows
you the power. And they're going around the world now right.
We had a network in Iran we've had to shutdown.
(33:32):
We had one in Yemen we've had to shut down.
We had one in Ethiopia, which is really exciting, one
of my favorite countries in Africa that's doing well. They
just opened up their economy to a lot of things,
including private media. So Afghanistan and Ethiopia are the two
main businesses. Vice I've heard advice until you told me
about it. You spotted that really early, did an investment.
(33:53):
What did you see there? And I know you're still
helping them in what do you think the future there is? Well,
I saw there was another youth brand, you know, a good,
strong youth brand. They really kind of come from the streets.
I mean MTV basically was a startup with a lot
of people from the streets. Even though he had two
parents who didn't really care and know about us, we
kind of went off and did that. Vice started off
as a magazine in Toronto. They started off doing really
(34:17):
edgy stuff and they would distribute it free and boutiques
and they would distribute like a million copies that is
in all these countries. And at one point Shane Smith,
who's this early leader of Vice, he realized that when
YouTube came around in nineteen two thousand and six, that
this was a big change, that that was a platform
that's gonna go into people's home with video. And if
he could take their storytelling ability that they had sort
(34:39):
of god with a good ear on the ground in
their magazine and translated into video, working with Spike Jones
and other people, they could create a business. So I
went on their board, invested with them. I still work
with them. I think they built a great news brand
on HBO they've had like thirty three Emmy nominations, but
if you add it up, they had like three d
million users worldwide, half their businesses outside the country. They've
(35:02):
got at its heart a creative enterprise. Again, as we
began to wrap up, let's focus on a couple of
big lessons. How can you grow a hip and cool
company into being the establishment and yet avoid becoming the man.
One of the few people who have done that, You
try and uh, you know, stay close to your roots.
I mean, I was never a mainstream guy, never aspired
(35:25):
to be a fortune five hundred CEO or have a
mainstream business. And I felt that a lot of our
businesses were successful because they kind of had like whiskers
on in the way they were there. There were sort
of mainstream, there were always a little underground, but we
were sort of ahead of our time. So I always
tried to keep people focused on we're not as big
as we think we are. We're gonna stay humble, We're
(35:45):
gonna reinvent, reinvent, reinvent. And my gut was I just
never wanted to be a traditional businessman in my soul.
I still don't. How did you spot great ideas and
how do you still spot great ideas? And how do
you spot the great new talent? A lot of it's thinktual.
If you're trying to do something in the youth culture,
it's really about who are you gonna hire who really
(36:07):
has their ear to the ground, because it's a young world,
and no matter how up to date you think you are,
you're really sort of out of it. I would see
this happen in the music business, for example, with David Kiffin,
who had excellent ear for artists in the seventies and
in the sixties, but then in the eighties he began
to falter, and he had an epiphany, I'm gonna hire
gooda and our guys who know what they're doing. So
(36:28):
how do you your post seventy now managed to stay
so connected to the youth culture and fresh ideas, which
I think everyone would agree you do and do it
remarkably well. I still read voraciously everything I get my
hands on, listen to everything I can. It's hard these
days as the music has kind of moved into silos
(36:49):
and the middles disappeared all the publications and places we
used to rely upon to find about what's new. You've
gotta like look deeper, but you know, as you get
at the things like Spotify and Higheart, so I just
use Instagram. I kind of think facebooks are like the
Frankenstein monster of our age. I've seen firsthand what it's
done in other countries, like in Burma with the Rohingas,
(37:09):
where it's the sole news source. It can be really
hijacked by people. But Instagram's fun. Of all the things
I've done in my career, MTV is certainly unique in
a small band of us made an impact together. We
were at the dawn of our careers. You Shooting mc grath,
John Sykes, s Fred Cybert, Mark Bouth and I were
recently inducted into the Cable Hall of Famous. The MTV
(37:29):
Founders is the MTV early days, starting it when the
odds were against this. That a special part for you too.
That was the best part. I love my years in
Afghanistan and India. That was making something out of nothing,
but to ride an idea that you believed in with
a group of people who were making no money and
have it turned into a worldwide phenomena. I mean it
(37:49):
was incredible. All of a sudden, you know, you couldn't
get arrested and then you know you're being wined and
dined everywhere. People were beating a path through our door.
It was a fantastic time. Always wrap up the podcast
with the same note we began math, the insights and
data and magic the creativity that's built on those insights
and excites consumers and fans. Think about it for a second.
(38:12):
Who's the greatest math person you know or have known?
There's no single person I suppose I could point to
Bob whose name I could associate with being a great
data master. So let's move to the magic side. Who's
the greatest show person, the magician that just seems to
be able to take a germ of an idea and
turn into something brilliant. Well, I think you'll ever be
(38:33):
able to beat Steve Jobs. I mean Steve Jobs was
a master of everything. Like they say, you to create
something that no one seemed to want. If you were
doing research about it, you never would have done THEE
And then this comes to you perfectly packaged, and then
you know, improved upon repeatedly with product after product. He
would be number one and number two in my book. Tom,
you are one of a kind, wonderful friend. Thanks for
(38:56):
joining us and thanks for the stories. Hey, thanks Bob,
it's great to be here. Here are a few things
I picked up from my conversation with Tom One. One
of the keys to Tom's creative success has been telling
its talent to stay humble and not get full of themselves.
As he told his staff at MTV, we're gonna stay humble.
(39:17):
We're gonna reinvent, reinvent, reinvent too. According to Tom, great
ideas can come out of cheap skateness. As he puts it,
the Real World would have been a traditional soap opera
if MTV had had the money, but instead, less money
forced the company to get creative and invent reality TV three.
One of Tom's big realizations was that Viacom could be
(39:40):
a bigger company if it created its own i P.
By owning things like SpongeBob, rug Rats, and Beavis and
butt Head. It allowed the company to get into feature
films and licensing and make a bigger business for It's
such simple advice, but Tom stays on top of trends
by reading everything can get his hands on. It's how
he keeps up with trends, and it's how he discovered
(40:01):
vice before so many others did. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks
for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat. Nikki Eatre for pulling research,
(40:24):
Bill Plax and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor,
Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel
Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears.
Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. To ride an idea that you believed in
with a group of people who were making no money
and have it turn into a worldwide phenomena. I mean
it was incredible. All of a sudden, you know you
couldn't get arrested, and then you know you're being wined
and dying everywhere. Welcome to this episode of Math and
(00:33):
Magic Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing. I'm Bob Pittman.
On this podcast, we explore the creative and data analytics
side of marketing and how business people and entrepreneurs use
that magic mix help them find success. Today's guest as
an old friend who I have known and admired for
most of my adult working life. Tom Freston to M
(01:00):
is totally unique in the media and entertainment business. He
has this ability to bridge the sort of wildly new,
untamed creatives with the establishment and often helps each group
understand each other and sometimes even creates ventures together. He
was the first person to tell me about Vice, for example,
(01:20):
and even gave me an opportunity to invest in it
in the beginning. I stupidly did not take his advice,
but Tom had spotted something that few of us could
have grasped except him back then, and he has done
that countless times in his career. Tom owned a business
based in Afghanistan back in the seventies, came back to
the US. It was on the original team that built
(01:40):
him TV. When I left MTV in nine seven, Tom
succeeded me as CEO of MTV Networks, and he and
his team, which included Judy McGrath, who has been on
the podcast before, took him TV two heights. None of
us would have ever imagined we had gone public. Briefly,
we lost in that LBO. Viacom bought it pre sum
the red Stone shortly after they bought it. In Tom's
(02:03):
time at the top, some of the red Stone effectively
bought Viacom, and he did so because he had Tom's support. Ironically,
decades later, and one of the strangest moments in corporate history,
Tom left by a com because of Sumner. We'll get
to that later. Tom went on to explore his two
great passions, travel to places in the world filled with wonder,
and his other love nurturing creatives and helping them find
(02:26):
success and protecting their ideas. Welcome Tom. Nice to be here, Bob.
Tom has some great stories and we'll get to those
in a minute time, but first we want to do
you in sixty seconds. So here we go. Do you
prefer vanilla or chocolate Vanilla? Facebook or Instagram? Instagram? The
Real World or the Osbourne's Wine or Tequila Tequila? MTV
(02:50):
News or Vice New York or l A l A
Madonna or Cindy Lauper Madonna, Andy Warhol or Andy Rooney,
Andy Warhol. It's about to get harder. You're ready. Secret
talent photographer, favorite city London, favorite color blue, career highlight
working with you in MTV those years? Oh I love that? Huh?
(03:13):
Childhood hero Conto, favorite TV show? Andy Griffith. Best life
concert you've ever seen? Live a excuse me quote to
live by, Live, free, or die. Best thing about being you?
I get to do whatever I want? The worst bad
you participated in the Macarena? What would be the title
(03:36):
of your memoir? Mr? Tom? Who would play you in
a movie? Dustin Hoffman? What's one book song? Movie that
changed you? On the road? Jack carolac last one? Who
would you like to meet you haven't yet? Matt. I
had told many you're a brave man. Okay, let's again
by going back to your beginning. You probably travel more
(03:57):
than anyone I know. Yet you grew up in a
mall Connecticut town and you didn't travel much at all
as a kid. As I remember, you were not in
a very diverse community. But diversity has been a hallmark
of your career. Your dad was a commuter, and you
were the first person I knew who ever moved downtown
because the Tribeca back when it was all commercial. You've
(04:17):
always been the urban explorer. So what in that childhood
brought you to this place? Why so many contrasts? I
don't know. I grew up in Roheaton, Connecticut. It was
an all white town. We didn't even have forget blacks
or Italians. There was no Jews. It was very homo genious.
By the time I got to college, I'd only been
in two states, New York and Connecticut, and I'd only
(04:41):
had one trip in my life, which was a day
trip to the Mystic Seaport with my father, who sort
of suffered from PTSD from World War Two and never
wanted to go anywhere. So when I was seventeen, I
headed off to college and just sort of never came back,
always looking, you know, sort of for the road less traveled.
In a way, was there anything in that upbringing that
s have led you to this or were you running
(05:02):
away from something? Were you gathering something, or is there's
something that gives you strength from that era? I think
I was sort of running away for the conformity of
suburban New York City, and I was running away in
the end from what I saw as a kind of
boring organization man life. What lessons did you take from
those days, anything that when you think about business or
think about your family, that you learned there that you
(05:24):
repeat again and again. Well. I would watch my father
and his friends who were largely involved in the marketing
advertising business. They were sort of like the Madman cocktail party,
the whole drill, and I saw how hard everyone worked.
I also saw how some of his friends, who were
in the more creative advertising world, actually got a lot
(05:45):
of enjoyment out of their work because they had something
to do with the creative process. So that was sort
of a gene that stayed in the back of my head.
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in the business world. There wasn't an artist, per se.
I wasn't a writer or a musician, but I wanted
to always be around creative people. My first grown up jobs. Essentially,
we're working in an ad agency. You went off to
(06:06):
college in Vermont the sixties. You paid for school through
a variety of jobs. I remember you telling me about
some of the things you did. Tell us some of
those wonderful jobs. I've done every menial job imaginable. But
when I was in college, I used to do everything
from run the student cafeteria, became the head waiter. At
one point, I would work washing dishes. I would sweep
the floors of hospitals. I would deliver snacks to people's
(06:29):
rooms at night from a place called Frosty Stein, where
people would break into my car and steal the other
order I had in my car when I was delivering one.
It was a bit with frustration, but I I worked
really hard. I made more money in college. When I
left college, I was probably making less for a couple
of years, and I was when I was there. When
did the sixties subculture find you? Well? I was eighteen
(06:50):
years old the day President Kennedy was shot nineteen sixty three.
In my mind. That's sort of the day is that
the sixties began. For me. The first view are really
out of the sixties was the summer of nineteen sixty five.
I had listened to someone who had come back from
the year before from Lake George, New York, and had
worked at this what was then a sort of thriving
(07:11):
resort where a lot of young people would come and
work for this summer. And it was there that I
went and got a job as a bellhop and then
as a bartender. But I ran into a lot of
young people my age who weren't necessarily in college. They
would work in Aspen in the wintertime, they would come
work in Lake George in the summertime. It's the first
time I've really seen people outside of the normal career track.
(07:31):
They smoked pot, they would travel, and the Pound was
just filled with rock and roll bands. This is the
first glimpse into bohemia. I kind of just jumped in
head first. And then I moved to New York City
to go to college, to go to graduate school, and
that was sort of, you know, nineteen sixty seven, moving
into the East Village, I was right in the middle
of it all. So you went to college though in
(07:53):
New York at n y U to get an m
b A. This is well before people got an NBA.
This was the sixties. Why did you get an NBA
in nineteen sixty seven. I was gonna graduate college. They said, hey,
you know you're gonna get drafted and go to Vietnam
really quickly, and you better think of somewhere else to
go to get a student to firm. And I didn't
want to go to medical school. I didn't want to
go to dental school or law school. Is there any
(08:14):
school I could go to? Said way, you can go
to business school. I didn't even know there was such
a thing. I mean, I was really behind the curve there.
So I applied and got into a couple of business
schools and went to n y U. I did two
years straight. It was really the Vietnam War drove me
to business school. After getting your m b A. Instead
of going to somewhere like Mackenzie, you became a bartender
(08:35):
in the Caribbean Colorado Martha's Vineyard. What's that the beginning
of the wonder lust? And why do that rather than
jump into work? Well, I wasn't. I'm ready. I I
figured I've been to school for, you know, eighteen years.
I was ready to kind of stretch out. I wanted
to kind of join those people whose life I had
admired back in Lake George. At first I was going
to ask when I became a dishwasher, but I wanted
(08:56):
to be free. I had never really driven across the country,
never really almost been anywhere, So that really what my
appetite for things that were to come, much to my
parents should grun at the time, because they assumed, of course, well,
now you're gonna get a grown up job. So now
we get to Tom Freston. In business, you jump in
feet first at the legendary ad agency Bettnam Bowls. You
worked on G I. Joe and Sharman. But I guess
(09:19):
it didn't seem like the place for you. Why, well,
my first account there I worked on was G I. Joe. Now,
mind you, this was sort of at the height of
the Vietnam War, and I was in an alienated state
to begin with, let alone doing that for a living.
It was an interesting learning time to see sort of
being a big ad agency, to see how it all worked,
how all the pieces came together. But when they were
(09:39):
going to assign me to Charman toilet paper. That was
sort of my last straw. I said, I I'm not
gonna do this. I called an ex girlfriend who lived
in Paris and I said, you know, I'm really I'm
really bombed. They want they want me to work on
a toilet paper account where they had segment in the
population and two rollers, folders and crumplers. And she says, well,
you can't do that. You can't do that. You should
(10:01):
quit that job. Dupi a moron, Come with me. I'm
gonna go across the Sahara desert up in Paris. So
I was on a plane like ten days later. That
was it for me. You'd saved enough money. I had
like five thousand dollars. That was a lot of money
at the time. Shore was So you wind up with
Hindu Kush your clothing line. How did you get there
from I'm gonna go walk across the Sahara to you
(10:22):
start your own clothing line based in Afghanistan. We split up,
we crossed the Sahara. I have said about traveling throughout
Africa and then into Europe, and uh I met a
girl in Greece who she was selling all these cool
clothes on the beach and micanos to these German tourists,
and she would go in the winter and make these
clothes in India Nepal and bring them back. I kind
of lodged that in the back of my head, but
(10:43):
she convinced me to go to India. So many months
later I went on overland to India, basically hitchhike through
Iran Afghanistan, ended up in India. The day I went
across the Afghan border, my life sort of change because
I said, Wow, this place is just terrific. The guy
at immigration, he was wearing an acrand Band high school
jacket as his uniform. I said, this is a country
(11:05):
that's as far away from New York as I would find.
And I set about figuring out how I could survive
and live there. The only way I was gonna do
was to start a business. At that point in time globalism.
I was sort of in the front row for globalism
because air freight was starting out. You could make something
in New Delhi or in Cobble and for five dollars
and sell it the next day for twenty five dollars
(11:25):
in New York. So I set up a business. I
had friends at Vogue and Mademoiselle and Bloomingdale's. I built factories,
I acquired partners, and both New Delhi and Cobble I
had houses. How on earth did you know how to
do this? I didn't know anything. How did you get
it done? Just through hard work. I realized at one
point that nothing I ever will do in my life
will ever be harder than this. There were so many
(11:46):
things that could go wrong. The people you had to bribe,
their strikes, There's all kinds of issues. But I enjoyed it.
We were very successful. We would design clothes. It was
sort of contemporary. Remember the clothes, and uh, they were cool.
And we would do trade shows and I was selling
into the United States and in the UK and Australia.
And it became a multimillion dollar business and I was
(12:06):
I was living like a pasha in New Delhi and
in Cobble. That was fantastic. And I got to travel,
which was my initial goal. I got pretty much to
go almost everywhere. India had fourteen states in those days.
I hit every one of them. It was exhilarating, made
a lot of money. Had no idea what I was doing,
but I applied a lot of basic marketing principles and
stuff I had picked up along the way, And you know,
(12:27):
you could learn by observing others and next thing you know,
you're just figuring something out. And it was just a
longer supply chain than usual. Competitively, I was like the
only American doing this almost at the time. I would
hire designers, they would come and live and stay with me,
and we made a good product. It's very cool. So
let's jump. All that became to an end. Russians invaded Afghanistan.
(12:51):
Jimmy Carter Post, the president at the time, put restrictions
on and so you came back to the US. You
were hired by Warner MX Satellite Entertainment Operation, the company
owned by American Express and Warner Communications that would eventually
become MTV Networks. We were both originally brought to the
company for other jobs, by the way, before the MTV
development even began, by the incredibly charismatic John Lack, who
(13:14):
had this wonderful affliction. He liked to hire people for
roles they had never had before, and you and I
benefited from that. Although John left about a year after
MTV started, I think it is safe to say we
would not have had MTV. While there's strong support and advocacy,
and I do want to give him a shout out here,
but you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even
(13:34):
recognized as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think
you were getting into? I mean, this was still sort
of Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business. I thought
I was getting into one of the greatest ideas that
had ever come around. I had spent parts of the
summers in Europe and I was familiar with the music
video which were largely unknown to the American audiences, and
they were infectious. And when I was driven out of Asia,
I thought, whatever I do next, I wanted to be
(13:56):
something that I also loved deeply, and that was music.
So I'm methodically looked around getting a job in the
music business. Through connections, I ended up in John Lack's
office and I told him I thought this a fantastic idea.
He says, we're looking for people who have no experience
in television. I said, I'm your man. They didn't even
have television where I've been living in the last eight years.
So I thought MTV, like all of us on the team,
(14:19):
was really one of the great ideas and all of
us were essentially on a crusade. We got paid nothing.
It was the early eighties version of a startup, very
much so. And if you looked at the media environment
then nothing had really changed in years. The only thing
that had come around new had been FM radio. There
was still three TV networks. Pong was only a few
years old. Remember we used to say we're going to
(14:41):
do to FM what FM did to a M That
was our big plane channels in the home. It was
a very small group of us. They began developing MTV.
We did not have approval to do it. I got
a small budget to put together a plan. You were
the only one with the real marketing background. I was
happy to have a job. I couldn't believe anyone was
gonna hire me. We did start the channel and it
(15:02):
was a great consumer success, but a business failure. As
by the way, we're all the cable networks of the day.
Of course, that failure was good for you and me
and led to me being the CELO and eventually the CEO,
and you're moving up to run everything where affiliates sails
all the way to GM of the service and finally
CEO did it sort of seem like it was all
falling in place. Or was this all luck or were
you ambitious and saying I'm working at all? I was
(15:25):
ambitious and I was highly motivated for this to succeed.
I thought that MTV and then of course Nickelodeon and
Nick at Knight and the rest of the things. I
just thought we were in this TV revolution. We had
the wind at our back. It was all going to
come true. Was too good of an idea to fail.
You know, a lot of life is about timing and luck,
and I had somehow ended up once again in the
(15:45):
right place at the right time, and this was sort
of my destiny. I was going to meet my opportunity.
What you did, you know, I would say my time there.
We really proved it was a business. Were the first
cable network to make a profit. But it was really
you and your team, including Shooting Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
(16:07):
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there? There's a compliment to you, Bob,
I mean, you are the guy always keep your eye
on the consumer, find out what the consumer one. We
would always see this research, the consumer wanted what we
were selling, and we could tune it up a bit.
And we also had this sort of slightly subversive, underground feel,
and you know, there was nothing really around like that.
(16:27):
And we would continue to launch new networks Comedy Central
or tv Land and in so far as taking it
around the world. The whole international world of television began
to deregulate in the late eighties. All these countries really
only had state TV pretty much, as you know. So
the confidence I had built from my years living in
Afghanistan in India was actually very transferable because I really
(16:49):
knew we could go anywhere and do anything. And if
we could go to Europe, we could go to Asia,
we go to Latin America. So we built really the
first worldwide television networking company, and we rolled out not
just empt V but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a
lot of others right down through Africa. But then realizing
along the way, if we could develop I P and
own it like SpongeBob or Rugrats or Bavis and butt Head,
(17:12):
we could get into things like feature films, consumer product
licensing and build a really big business. So the business
gradually evolved from one where we would package other people's
product like a music video, to where we would increasingly
own what we did. But at the heart of it
always a creative machine, which again was something that you
put in at the inception of the company. A lot
of focus was on creating a culture that would attract
(17:34):
creative people. They would want to come and live there.
I mean we'd have at one point Judd Apatow or
Ben Stiller or John Stewart, Stephen Cobra, you know, Adam
Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices. Sometimes it
was a hothouse atmosphere. You were probably the first talent incubator.
I don't think they called them that back then. How
did you pull that together? Because it just really remarkable
the people we had. They came through MTV and Nickelodeon
(17:56):
and people have started their careers there. You gave him
the shot, well all out of his sort of what's
the vibe of the place. We always wanted to make
the room for deviancy. I would always say, who is
the odd ball person, Who's the intern who's gonna come
running in with an idea like yo MTV raps. That
was like a twenty one year old intern who came
up with a demo and his basement. You know, we
give creative people a lot of freedom because we had
(18:18):
these networks, there was a lot of room for experimentation.
Everything you made didn't have to be really tightly organized.
There's a lot of room for improvisation and innovation. If
you have a hallmark for that, people would want to
step up and follow. What's you just try and have
good standards, provide guard rails for people, celebrate risk. How
did you build that culture across the different networks. What's
(18:38):
remarkable is you not only had this cultural fit with MTV,
which had that same sort of innovation, yet a different
cultural fit with Nickelodeon and a different one with v
H one. I want to make creativity the primary aptitude
of the organization. So what I try and do is
put the person who ran the network very creative person
that would send a signal to the ranization. That was
(19:00):
a value we prize most. And if that creative person
could make the connection with what they did with the consumer,
a lot of the business stuff would kind of fall together.
But in some cases you'd hire a business person, but
that business person had to be seen as a fan
I'm a business affairs guy, and now I have this job,
and I want to know. I think you people create
the value. I'm not creating the value and deals that
(19:21):
I do, but it's what you guys make. And by
the way, I know what you're talking about because I
am deeply a mess in the popular culture. The fact
that we made a lot of stuff ourselves and didn't
just farm it out. You had actual creative directors and
producers and people there. Most TV networks they would just
farm stuff out to production companies. You are known for creativity,
(19:42):
you're sort of the crazy guy that sets this wonderful culture.
But I know you use a lot of research and insights.
How do you fit the research and the insights into
something that's sort of that creative I never talked about
business to anybody whatever. We would speak to creative people.
Maybe this is because the business was always going so
good we didn't have to, but we would never really
(20:03):
talk about how much revenue came in or how much
we're off our budget, and we would celebrate any kind
of creative triumph. So that also kind of reinforced the
notion that we are a creative first organization. Just hold
on a second, because we've got so much more to
talk about. We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome
(20:24):
back to Math and Magic. We're here with Tom Freston.
When we launched MTV, you were the head of marketing.
The cable operator wouldn't put m TV on. They wanted
us to pay them one, we didn't have the money,
and too that was probably a slippery slope, and so
we decided we would use a poll strategy to get distribution.
(20:45):
I want my MTV tell me the evolution of how
that came down, because that's clearly one of the legendary
ad campaigns of the past thirty or forty years. Well,
it was sort of a hail Mary passed because you
know we're about to go under. I mean I did
talking about not talking about business. No one in the
organization knew we were about to go under. So how
are we going to get these cable operators at us?
(21:05):
When we knew, in fact that the people who actually
had it in a few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. Back then, music
was the centerpiece of culture, so there was a very
strong emotional button you could push. Ideas, if we could
get major rock stars in a commercial to kind of
hold our logo validated, hold it and command people to
(21:26):
call their cable company and demand their MTV make it
look cool, put some animation around it, and then put
it in these markets at very high frequency. We go
into a market and it would be like a blockbuster
movie was opening. Most people in the market had never
heard of MTV. Next thing, you know, every cable operator
there were eleven of them in the market, which would
not be unusual time they'd all call up and surrender.
(21:48):
So we would move a market by market for a
couple of years across the country, going from like what
was seven million subscribers ended up being eighty or ninety million. Well,
there's a lesson in this too that you've always done
very very well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
And in the case of I want my MTV music
stars who were willing to be in the commercial for
free to help us accomplish our goals, but you also
(22:10):
have music companies and others. Talk to me a little
bit about how you harness that kind of power of
partners and how you think about partners in business. In
that business and almost any business, partners were essentially, but
they say on the music side, our partners were the
record companies and the artists. And you know, in any partnership,
someone had to give something. And the most important thing
to a record company was to be able to take
an artist out of nowhere and sort of what they
(22:31):
would say, break him and make him popularize in some extent,
and MTV was like the tool to do that, and
there was a lot of competition to get videos on
the air when MTV was in his prime. What's your
real priority, mr. Record company? We will take care of you,
but in return we want a few things too. There
was an example there when we used the power of
fighting brand. When Ted Turner came after in TV. We
(22:53):
were just ready to go public and barely got out
public because he announced in the face of it with
the cable music channel, and we fronted the battle with
our fighting brand VH one. At the time, we invented
VH one to go against Ted Turner. Tell me a
little bit about that story, because you were right smack
dab in the middle of that was a classic fighting
brand thing you would have seen in the world of
package goods, like back in my day's working at Procter
(23:14):
and gambling an ad agency where you're trying to thwart
a new competitor with Ted Turner want to come in
and basically p in our parade. He said he was
going to launch a music channel that played like none
of the Devil's music. Let me say first that the
cable music channel lasted a hundred one days on the
air and he had to fold up and go home.
But we decided we can't let this happen, and if
there's going to be a second music channel, we should
(23:36):
have a second music channel, and we made the case
to cable operations, we have a second music channel. You
don't want to add the Ted Turner channel. That's just
gonna go head to head against the one you already have.
Add VH one, which was called the Very Hot One
at the time, because it would be more compatible and
it would play artists for another demo and we would
sell it tu on a combo basis. Basically it was
(23:57):
free if you already had MTV, so he couldn't get distribute,
and he'd already kind of detegrated as image wise by
putting himself in some kind of Christian rock station, and
we strangled him in terms of not being able to
get distribution. Therefore, no advertising, no revenue, no light on
the end of the tunnel, and he went out of
business and we went forward. Let's jump to the evolution
of MTV and building this amazing brand. You lad the
(24:20):
jump from just music videos to long form programs, including
in the process the invention if you will, really a
reality TV. Why how Well, there's a couple of factors there.
One was our in house creative force, in a way
was always looking to do more, and do more, and
create and do more stuff. So packaging hours of ten
(24:43):
different music videos, they were always looking for ways to
put new spins on that and so forth. The other
thing was that the music video format was beginning to wane,
and as we were bigger, our audience ratings on which
we sold advertising was beginning to create her and unless
we put some spikes in there, we could see ourselves
live on a road to some kind of oblivion. We
couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix or
(25:04):
changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We just
couldn't play the top ten videos all day long. So
we thought we would follow a strategy that we've seen
Rolling Stone utilize successfully, which was when there's lulls in
the music business, they would be talking about movies or comedy.
David Letterman would be on the cover. We could be
about a lot of the things the music was about
and still keep our music first image fashion. With Cindy
(25:26):
Crawford and we decided to beef up our music news
right and just make it sort of a throwaway. We
brought in Curt Loader, incredible journalists, and we put shows
on the air, and when we put a show on
the air, the ratings will be two to three times
higher than just running music videos. We would also try
and refresh the look the field in the style at
a network every three or four or five years, because
(25:47):
the demo kind of passes it through it, so we'd
reinvent it so there was always new shows coming around.
We would add shows on package music and like on
hip hop music with the OMTV raps and so forth,
and it kind of came down to the real world
there that was re and that was like, well, we've
tried everything else, we should probably do a soap opera.
Because young people are interested in what other young people
(26:07):
are doing, so they came in with a presentation to me,
and we had to hire writers, and I said, well,
you know, we don't have any money to hire writers,
so we can't do this. So then Doug Herzog came
back and said, you know, we're really good at post production,
that's our major skill. What if we just rented Aloft
and Soho and stuck some cameras in there and bring
these kids in and then let them live and then
(26:28):
we'll post it afterwards and make it into a show.
And that was That was sort of the birth of
reality TV. It was an idea that was not born
of brilliance but born of cheap skateness. MTV was always
embedded in the youth culture, and as a matter of fact,
you and I years ago had the discussion about should
we grow up with this audience or should we give
(26:49):
up this audience and continue to get a new audience
to be the voice of young America. You took it seriously.
I think you also, in terms of being the voice
of young America, also represented their desire to do good
and make a difference. I was there for Live a
far made some of that, but you took it much broader,
much deeper than any TV network had ever dared Choose
(27:09):
or Lose? Would you want to Peabody Award for Rock
the Vote programming about lgbt Q rights, substance abuse, gun violence, health,
gender and more. What was the philosophy? What drove you?
We knew it was important to our audience. I also
knew it was extremely important to the employee base. Employees
would feel better about working there if they knew we
(27:29):
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had a hundred sixty eight hours
a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It also
turned out, like we Choose or Lose, for example, it
legitimized us in the eyes of advertisers who formally wouldn't
come near us, like American Express. But most importantly, the
audience liked it. I would ask every network to come
up with a couple of social purpose campaigns a year,
(27:50):
so it really became part of the DNA of the company.
So before we get to Tom freston three point oh,
let's hit sum of the red Stone. He says he
took control of Viacom way back in nine seven because
of the dinner he had with you and Jerry Leborne
when he took over. I think it's fair to say
you and MTV Networks were now the center of Viacom.
You were the star. Fast forward decades later, after you
(28:12):
did this wonderful solid Sumner has made you first coach
CEO of Viacom, then CEO of i Com. When he
split by a coming CBS, you were the guy. And then,
all of a sudden, or at least it appeared to
be all of a sudden, it's reported that he's furiosued
in my my Space and actually fires you, shocks the
industry and alienates him from the creative community and clearly
(28:33):
makes you this martyr hero or whatever. Is that really
what came down that sort of you know, I was
sort of shocked. I had had two incidents with him
that didn't go well. I become the CEO of the
new Viacom public company that included Paramount Pictures and the
MTV Networks and a few other businesses, and I had
had a fight with him over my Space. We were
(28:56):
looking to morph ourselves into the digital world with acquisitions,
and we were looking at my Space as a possibility.
They were then the social network leader. I remember Facebook
was really just still only for that was the fake
Friendster was dead and it was the Facebook. So one
weekend when we were talking to the folks out in California,
(29:19):
Rupert Murdoch came in like on a high horse, over
a weekend and he bought it with no due diligence
or anything, for five D seventy million dollars. Summers thought
that was a great defeat. He wanted that Charlie row
show saying, you know, I've been totally disgraced. Meanwhile, Rupert
Murdoch now was his pictures on magazine as a new
media hero, and Sumner's real competitor in life was Rupert Murdoch,
(29:39):
and Rupert Murdoch showed him up and made me look bad.
I also had had my first fight with him a
couple of weeks before that, which was over Tom Cruise.
He decided he was gonna fire Tom Cruise and called
a press conference to his house. His Tom Cruise had
been jumping up and down on Oprah's couch and he
thought Tom Cruise had to go. And I said, you
can't fire him. He doesn't work for us, first of all.
(30:00):
But that was a big screaming match that didn't go
down well. And then a couple of weeks later, on
Labor Day he brought me over to his house and
fired me. And I was like, wow, this is after
twenty years of working with him, of continual growth and performance.
So I was kind of shocked. God, I must say
it turned out to be a blessing, A blessing for sure.
It was. It was the best way to go. I
(30:20):
had been there twenty six years overall, so it was
a quarter of a century as a time to turn
the page. Well also as a friend who watched you closely,
you had an obligation, and I think it's safe to
say you would have never felt like you could leave
MTV Networks or Viacom through that sense of obligation. And
he read you and you went on to be um
freston three point Oh yeah, let's get into that before
(30:41):
we do that. Did someth ever, thank you for not
getting my Space? No? When Rupert Murdoch sold it for
thirty five million dollars, I saw his daughter was still
waiting for thank you know, but it never came. When
this happened, I remember the time you were totally in demand.
You've turned down great job after great job to run companies.
You were a few us to go that route why
(31:02):
the first thing I did was just do nothing. Sometimes
you see people get fired from a job and then
the next thing you know, they're working the next day
somewhere else. But I decided I would let things come
into focus a bit, and I realized that I'm gonna
work with people that I like on things I'm really
passionate about. I was never a mainstream business guy, and
I had a business out of Afghanistan, Indio. When you
hired me an MTV, this was a fringey, underground startup
(31:23):
and I basically was there and built it. It was
like we had equity and this is it was the
nexus of all the things. I loved, animation, music, film,
so I really felt like it was sort of partially
my company. I didn't feel like being grafted onto the
top of a company like say a Yahoo or something.
It just didn't turn me on. And I felt the
(31:43):
last two business chapters in my life have been things
that was really passionate about. I didn't feel that, and
I just said, well, maybe I could have another hype
of life and have a more portfolio approach. Instead of
taking a single big job, I could do a bunch
of different things, and that's essentially what I've been doing
four or five or six different types of things. So
one with Bono you spent a lot of time on that.
(32:05):
How did that happen? Well, I had built up a
relationship with him over the years. I mean you two
and MTV kind of came up together. The day after
I got fired, I was in l A. He called
me on the phone. He just said, hey, if why
don't you come run RED? I know no, he said.
He had Bill Gates calling me and Steve Jobs saying
I should take this job. So he kind of got
my interest up, but I said no, I'm not gonna
do anything right now. A few months later, his manager
(32:29):
implored me to come and meet with him in France
because I fell in love with what they were doing.
I met this whole other group of young people who
were activists. They were in a whole different world from
any young people I had worked with before, and I
said I would stay on as the board chair. And
I've been doing that for twelve years. The one campaign
we've got ten million members, which also includes Red, which
is where's you know? Almost seven million dollars for the
(32:50):
Global Fund for HIV AIDS. Amazing. I know you were
advising Oprah for a while. You were at Moby Group
Mobi Group. That was the first thing I did. I
went back to Afghana brought TV. Yeah, essentially went back
to work in Afghanistan several months a year to teach
people how to run a TV network, which was totally
(33:10):
exhilarating and really full circle for me. The network itself
was really a platform for social change they've never really had.
It plugged him into the outside world, connecting them with
each other, you know, gender equality, all those types of things.
Despite the fact that the war is still going on.
I mean, their business is still relatively unaffected, which shows
you the power. And they're going around the world now right.
We had a network in Iran we've had to shutdown.
(33:32):
We had one in Yemen we've had to shut down.
We had one in Ethiopia, which is really exciting, one
of my favorite countries in Africa that's doing well. They
just opened up their economy to a lot of things,
including private media. So Afghanistan and Ethiopia are the two
main businesses. Vice I've heard advice until you told me
about it. You spotted that really early, did an investment.
(33:53):
What did you see there? And I know you're still
helping them in what do you think the future there is? Well,
I saw there was another youth brand, you know, a good,
strong youth brand. They really kind of come from the streets.
I mean MTV basically was a startup with a lot
of people from the streets. Even though he had two
parents who didn't really care and know about us, we
kind of went off and did that. Vice started off
as a magazine in Toronto. They started off doing really
(34:17):
edgy stuff and they would distribute it free and boutiques
and they would distribute like a million copies that is
in all these countries. And at one point Shane Smith,
who's this early leader of Vice, he realized that when
YouTube came around in nineteen two thousand and six, that
this was a big change, that that was a platform
that's gonna go into people's home with video. And if
he could take their storytelling ability that they had sort
(34:39):
of god with a good ear on the ground in
their magazine and translated into video, working with Spike Jones
and other people, they could create a business. So I
went on their board, invested with them. I still work
with them. I think they built a great news brand
on HBO they've had like thirty three Emmy nominations, but
if you add it up, they had like three d
million users worldwide, half their businesses outside the country. They've
(35:02):
got at its heart a creative enterprise. Again, as we
began to wrap up, let's focus on a couple of
big lessons. How can you grow a hip and cool
company into being the establishment and yet avoid becoming the man.
One of the few people who have done that, You
try and uh, you know, stay close to your roots.
I mean, I was never a mainstream guy, never aspired
(35:25):
to be a fortune five hundred CEO or have a
mainstream business. And I felt that a lot of our
businesses were successful because they kind of had like whiskers
on in the way they were there. There were sort
of mainstream, there were always a little underground, but we
were sort of ahead of our time. So I always
tried to keep people focused on we're not as big
as we think we are. We're gonna stay humble, We're
(35:45):
gonna reinvent, reinvent, reinvent. And my gut was I just
never wanted to be a traditional businessman in my soul.
I still don't. How did you spot great ideas and
how do you still spot great ideas? And how do
you spot the great new talent? A lot of it's thinktual.
If you're trying to do something in the youth culture,
it's really about who are you gonna hire who really
(36:07):
has their ear to the ground, because it's a young world,
and no matter how up to date you think you are,
you're really sort of out of it. I would see
this happen in the music business, for example, with David Kiffin,
who had excellent ear for artists in the seventies and
in the sixties, but then in the eighties he began
to falter, and he had an epiphany, I'm gonna hire
gooda and our guys who know what they're doing. So
(36:28):
how do you your post seventy now managed to stay
so connected to the youth culture and fresh ideas, which
I think everyone would agree you do and do it
remarkably well. I still read voraciously everything I get my
hands on, listen to everything I can. It's hard these
days as the music has kind of moved into silos
(36:49):
and the middles disappeared all the publications and places we
used to rely upon to find about what's new. You've
gotta like look deeper, but you know, as you get
at the things like Spotify and Higheart, so I just
use Instagram. I kind of think facebooks are like the
Frankenstein monster of our age. I've seen firsthand what it's
done in other countries, like in Burma with the Rohingas,
(37:09):
where it's the sole news source. It can be really
hijacked by people. But Instagram's fun. Of all the things
I've done in my career, MTV is certainly unique in
a small band of us made an impact together. We
were at the dawn of our careers. You Shooting mc grath,
John Sykes, s Fred Cybert, Mark Bouth and I were
recently inducted into the Cable Hall of Famous. The MTV
(37:29):
Founders is the MTV early days, starting it when the
odds were against this. That a special part for you too.
That was the best part. I love my years in
Afghanistan and India. That was making something out of nothing,
but to ride an idea that you believed in with
a group of people who were making no money and
have it turned into a worldwide phenomena. I mean it
(37:49):
was incredible. All of a sudden, you know, you couldn't
get arrested and then you know you're being wined and
dined everywhere. People were beating a path through our door.
It was a fantastic time. Always wrap up the podcast
with the same note we began math, the insights and
data and magic the creativity that's built on those insights
and excites consumers and fans. Think about it for a second.
(38:12):
Who's the greatest math person you know or have known?
There's no single person I suppose I could point to
Bob whose name I could associate with being a great
data master. So let's move to the magic side. Who's
the greatest show person, the magician that just seems to
be able to take a germ of an idea and
turn into something brilliant. Well, I think you'll ever be
(38:33):
able to beat Steve Jobs. I mean Steve Jobs was
a master of everything. Like they say, you to create
something that no one seemed to want. If you were
doing research about it, you never would have done THEE
And then this comes to you perfectly packaged, and then
you know, improved upon repeatedly with product after product. He
would be number one and number two in my book. Tom,
you are one of a kind, wonderful friend. Thanks for
(38:56):
joining us and thanks for the stories. Hey, thanks Bob,
it's great to be here. Here are a few things
I picked up from my conversation with Tom One. One
of the keys to Tom's creative success has been telling
its talent to stay humble and not get full of themselves.
As he told his staff at MTV, we're gonna stay humble.
(39:17):
We're gonna reinvent, reinvent, reinvent too. According to Tom, great
ideas can come out of cheap skateness. As he puts it,
the Real World would have been a traditional soap opera
if MTV had had the money, but instead, less money
forced the company to get creative and invent reality TV three.
One of Tom's big realizations was that Viacom could be
(39:40):
a bigger company if it created its own i P.
By owning things like SpongeBob, rug Rats, and Beavis and
butt Head. It allowed the company to get into feature
films and licensing and make a bigger business for It's
such simple advice, but Tom stays on top of trends
by reading everything can get his hands on. It's how
he keeps up with trends, and it's how he discovered
(40:01):
vice before so many others did. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks
for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
Heart Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special
thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent,
which is no small feat. Nikki Eatre for pulling research,
(40:24):
Bill Plax and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor,
Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel
Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears.
Until next time,
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