July 31, 2026 • 52 mins
In honor of the 45th anniversary of MTV, we’re rereleasing a classic episode: the real story of MTV, as told by the founders. Today MTV is a cultural institution, but people forget what a long shot it was to get the channel off the ground. Bob Pittman led the team that created MTV. In this special episode, he reminisces with co-founders and friends John Sykes, Judy McGrath, Fred Seibert, Tom Freston and Jarl Mohn about what it was like to create the '80s version of a start-up and lead a TV revolution by dreaming up the rules as they went along. From why the first MTV logo was designed on crinkled paper (it spent a little time in a trash bin), to how a tiny record store in Tulsa helped save the business, to why you should really think twice about going on a Lost Weekend with Van Halen... all the way to how a terrible cereal inspired one of the greatest ad slogans of all time: “I want my MTV,” we’ve packed this episode full of stories that marketers, fans and entrepreneurs will all want to hear.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
You actually were the guy who inspired us to do
animated logos. Do you remember this? I said, well, what
are we going to do in between the videos and
the VJs?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Are we going to do jingles?
Speaker 4 (00:20):
And he went, no, No, we can't do jingles?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And I said, uh, what do we do? He said,
how about this? Imagine it's a picture of a cow.
I said, yeah, he said, and all of a sudden,
an X comes down and cuts the cow's head off
and it falls to the ground and you see the
veins coming out and the blood spurting out, and the
cow vomits, and in the vomit is the logo.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
I went, Oh, my god, I can do anything I want.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi. I'm Bob Tipman, and welcome to Math and Magic.
Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, and we're doing something
special on today's episode. One of the pivotal moments of
my life was leading the team that created MTV. I've
had the good of having all the co founders of
MTV on this podcast with me and in each of
the interviews, whether it's chatting with Judye Brat or Fred Ceiber,
(01:08):
John Sykes, or Yarrol Moone and of course Tom Preston.
We've always spent a little time talking about MTV, so
all we wanted to do for you today was pulled
together those stories for the first time ever. Tell the
story at the beginning of MTV through the eyes of
people who were actually in the room when it happened,
because all of us who are really in the room
(01:28):
often laugh about how far off other people's accounts can be.
So let me set the stage. It's the beginning of
the eighties. Cable TV was still a crazy idea. Most
business executives and most of America didn't understand it or
believe in how TV was about to change. And here
(01:49):
comes this pack of twenty year olds with an attitude.
None of us had ever done the jobs before. All
we knew is we had grown up with rock and
roll and we'd grown up with TV, and the two
had never successfully come together. We thought it had always
failed because TV people always wanted to try and make
music fit the TV form, a storia. We intended to
(02:10):
make TV fit the music form mood and emotion. MTV
was going to be about attitude and something people wanted
to join. We run a mission so when Iheart's own
John Sykes at the time, a twenty four year old
record executive at CBS Records in Chicago, heard what we
were up to. Well, he wanted in, so let's talk
(02:33):
about MTV. It's nineteen eighty the word gets out that
we're working on this DO music channel. How do you
hear about it? What does it mean to you? And
how on earth did you really get connected to us
to get on that original team.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
I grew up with three things in my life, radio, television,
and music.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
That's all I cared about.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
When I wasn't in the radio station, I was watching
TV or listening to music. Those things, to me shaped
our culture. So at school, TVs just starting up, and
I saw the cable channels were empty and music was
all over the radio. It was it on television. So
we used to go and shoot the concerts at Syracus,
and we'd tape them and send them to new channels,
and we'd play the concerts and people like, oh my god,
(03:15):
I can see the band. And all I wanted to
do at that point was put music on television. When
I graduated, I went to CBS, said let's put music
on let's run concerts. These three Martini lunch guys in
New York looked at me like it was crazy. I
got a job in the record business promoting radio stations.
I wanted to run the radio station. I didn't want
to promote them on the radar, but that's the job
I had. So then I heard from my friend Steve Casey,
(03:37):
was a WLS in Chicago, that his great friend Bob
Pittman was in New York and he was going to
start a video channel, and I lost my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
It still gives me goosebumps.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
I was like, this is what I was made to do,
This is what I wanted to do. To me, it
was like music belonged on television. So I started calling you,
and I called you, and I called you and I
called you, and thanks to your assistant and plunk It,
who I was annoying so much, he said, all right, Bob,
you please talk to this guy. And we met that
day with a borrowed support jacket because I han't own it.
(04:10):
But you and I connected that moment because we had
the same vision. Music and television were the two biggest
forces in pop culture and they were about to be
You know, you look.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Back on any successful product, and it seems easy. You
were there when we didn't even have approval from the
board to do it. We just had some money to
develop it. So give us a little color for people
who think things are easy and they always go exactly
the way you plan. What that early development was like.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
It is funny and people I go, oh my god,
you were and the team that started MTV. That must
have been a magical and great ago. I don't know.
I was working too hard. We were so into trenches
all the time. It only looks glamorous to day looking back,
but when you're in it, it's a slug fest. There
was this idea, but to make it happen, we had
no money, and we all quit jobs. You were at NBC,
(04:57):
I was at CBS. I was the promotion man the
year in Chicago, and I just said, I'm quitting. People
like us, we weren't going to fail. I never thought
we were going to fail. I got scared when you'd
come in and say, you know they're going to cut
the budgets. We got a few more months. We've got
to make our numbers. That just made me say, well,
we're gonna have to work hard to make our numbers.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, Okay,
we're going to the board and we're going to pitch
this for approval, and you go, what, we don't have approval.
I quit my job. We don't have approval. No, no, no, John,
this was development. All the blood ran out of your
face at that moment.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
I do remember I had to look up because there
was no Internet, I had to go in the dictionary
and look up the real definition of development.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
I just thought, we're developing something.
Speaker 6 (05:38):
Go No.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Development means it's not going to happen yet, but you
know something. But I was like, who cares if it
doesn't work, I'll go sleep on my sister's couching another job.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We were young. John Sykes was so hungry he pounded
on our door to let him in. He believed in
music television from the start. But my good pal Fred Cybert,
the one who came out of radio and helped create
the graphic look of MTV, his reason for getting into
TV was very different. One of your great supporters, who
I'd worked with and who I love dearly, Dale Pond,
(06:09):
recommended you to me pre MTV. It was in the
early days of PayTV. You came over to join us
in the cable revolution. Yeah, why did you make that jump?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, you know this is going to sound flattering. I
did it completely because of you. Dale had left the
country music radio station and left me alone, and the
guy I was working for at that time in radio
I had no respect for whatsoever. So you called me
one day, you said you want to be Intellivision, and oh,
you said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
(06:39):
the business, and there was one article about you, and
I thought to myself, you know, this guy is younger
than me, and I've heard of him, so that's, you know,
one check. So we go, we have the coffee, and
I walk out and I called my best friend and
I said, this guy that I just talked to is
so much smarter than my Boston radio He goes, what
(07:00):
do you think about that? I said, Well, here's what
Dale taught me. Doesn't matter what the job is, work
for the smartest person you can find, and at the
time you were the smartest person I could find.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah, that's what that means to toleration, that truth be told.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When you first told me about it. I thought it
was the dumbest idea in the world. Because I was
a music guy and I had seen, you know, a
few Crimy music videos. I hadn't really thought about it
too much, and then luckily somebody played me a music
video that made, you know, the little light go off.
I don't know whether it was blind faith or I
(07:33):
was too naive to know that you had to have
faith like you told me it was going to happen,
so I believed you was it youth totally. I was
just talking with Alan Goodman, my soon to be partner
at that point, and he said, you know, we didn't
really know what was going to happen, but you looked
at all the other people that were around you and
it just had to happen.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I think that's really true. I don't know if you remember,
but we went to the head of Warner Communications in
American Express and we got a meeting with Steve Ross,
who the CEO of Warner, along with his deputy's David Horowitz,
et cetera. And we got Jim Robinson and his deputy
lou Gershner from American Express. We were worried that when
we showed these videos too from American Express, go what
(08:12):
that stuffed? So he said, let's find the tamest one
over mind. I think we found the Olivia Newton jobs,
if you remember. But in the meeting they said you
have to play that kind of stuff, implying Oliviy Newton
John was too hard to race. But to their credit,
Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay, I'm in
for my aff how about you, Steve so awesome we
locked out. The MTV crew we assembled was a bunch
(08:34):
of lovable misfits and future Viacom MTV CEO. Tom Preston
was no different. It's been several years living in Afghanistan,
importing clothes and having adventures across Asia. But when things
got two political overseas, he made his way back. And
just so you don't think Tom went soft sitting the
top Viacom after he left the company, he returned Afghanistan
(08:55):
and even has a wonderful story about lying on a
floor in a bar and control with a firefight going
on all around, the bullets whizzing overhead.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in 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.
My first account there I worked on was g I Joe,
Now min You. This was sort of at the height
of the Vietnam War and I was in an alienated
(09:26):
state to begin with. When they were going to sign
me to charm and toilet paper, that was sort of
my last straw. I called an ex girlfriend who lived
in Paris. I said, they want me to work on
a toilet paper account where they had segmented the population
and to rollers, folders and crumplers. And she says, well,
you can't do that. You should quit that job. Don't
be a moron. Come with me. I'm going to go
(09:47):
across the Sahara Desert up in Paris. So I was
on a plane like ten days later. That was it
for me.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So Tom set up his clothing company, Hindoo Cush and
ran that successfully for a long while.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
When I even out of Asia, I thought, whatever I
do next, I wanted to be something that I also
loved deeply, and that was music. So I 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 is 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
(10:19):
been living the last eight years.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
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 had this wonderful affliction.
He liked to hire people for roles they had never
had before, and you and I benefited from that. But
you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even recognized
as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think you
(10:42):
were getting into? I mean, this was still sort of
Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
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 I thought MTV, like all
of us on the team, was really one of the
great ideas, and all of us were essentially on a crusade.
(11:06):
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 knew had been
FM radio. There was still three TV networks. Pong was
only a few years old.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Remember we used to say we're going to do to
FM what FM did to AM. That was our big claim.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Twenty five channels in the home, can you imagine.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Judy McGrath was another key employee in the early days.
She eventually rose to be CEO of MTV Networks. Here
she has reminiscing about what it meant to make the
rules up as we went along.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
The beauty in the wonder of MTV was that it
was really filled with people that I thought could not
find gainful employment anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
We couldn't.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
No, it would be somebody who had never really shot
anything and just wanted to get their hands on a
camera try it. And we were willing to do that,
so I would say absolutely. But remember, don't fall in
love with your own idea. This is about someone else,
not you. This is about the person on the other side.
They're like you, but you can't make this just for you.
(12:16):
And there are really no other rules aside from you know,
no full frontal nudity. Go out there and do it.
And it was so much fun to have the freedom
to meet people who were far more creative than I was.
I mean, when I joined, I didn't know anything about television.
I didn't even like it. My interview was with Fred,
(12:36):
who said, so, what kind of music do you like?
And I think I said Bruce Springsteen. I'm not sure.
He said, well, you're wrong, and I'll tell you why.
And then about forty five minutes later I left, not
having said anything else. And the next thing I know,
they were like, well, you know, look, this is just
a few of us. We're trying to get this thing going.
If you'd like to join, And it was kind of like,
(12:59):
how fast can I go out the door of Conde
and ass and jump on this thing? Whatever it is?
These people are crazy.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
What's funny is that when I ask Fred about it,
he remembered the story exactly the same way.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
She said Bruce Springsteen, and I said wrong, because I
don't have a good thing about Bruce.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The fact that she cared, you know, the Bruce haters
are coming after you right now. I believe me.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact
that she cared meant all the difference to me in
the world.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Not that I agreed, you.
Speaker 7 (13:28):
Know, I've just found the camaraderie and the purpose and
the sheer invention of something that didn't exist, so irresistible.
And again, on the math side of it, I was saying,
I mean this with all sincerity. You had a map
in the creative group, you had a plan, and the
(13:49):
plan were promises, and I loved that. I am making
a promise to you. You sit here, I'm going to
deliver something that you've been waiting for. It is the
first music television network. It is exactly for you. And
I thought, wow, I want my MTV and I have
no idea what it is, but those are powerful words
(14:12):
my in an era before social media and social engagement.
Something for me that felt like mine and want What
a powerful word, right, I want my MTV. I took
that very seriously. I took those promises to heart. Twenty
four hours a day, terrific in stereo, not really, but
(14:34):
you know, hey, it's work.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
It so for those ten people who did have stereoty, brilliant.
Speaker 7 (14:40):
I remember you saying to me, we want people to
think it sounds better than regular television, and they did.
It just felt to me like if I could marry
all the things I'm interested in with these set of
principles and join this crazy band of people who have
no right and a lot of audacity and a firm
belief that this can work. What a gift. I never
(15:03):
looked back, not one second.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Let's go back to Fred and chat about that iconic
MTV logo. Talk about the logo you set out, You've
got the mission. You and I have these discussions. I
naively say, we'll do our own Star Wars logan because
everybody has a Star Wars logan. You go to bob
Ours will look cheap. You said, look, if we do
something no one's ever seen before, they won't know it's
(15:27):
cheap exactly. So tell me about the logo. Well, the logo.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Itself actually came about because I was too scared to
go to someone famous. I wanted to go to Milton Glazer,
who's one of the most famous graphic designers of the
last fifty years, and I was like, oh, well, he's
going to be really expensive, and he'll get all the credit,
and I wanted a little credit, you know, at least.
So my childhood friend, who I've known since I'm four
(15:53):
years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had just started
a little design firm behind a tai Chiese studio above
Bigelo Chemistry on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had been the
guy because he's a year older than me, who had
always introduced me to every new rock band. He introduced
me to the Monkeys, he introduced me to the Mothers
of Invention, to the Who to Jeff Beck. So I
go down to his little tai Chi studio place and
(16:14):
I go, will you guys design a logo for this
rock channel we're starting? And they were like yes, And
they didn't ask me anything. They didn't ask me how
much they were going to get paid or anything like that.
And this was right after you sent out the first
memo in June of nineteen eighty and boy do I
wish I had that memo. So for a year they
designed logos and I just rejected everything, probably five hundred designs.
(16:41):
Finally they come in the office one day, were actually
going to go on the air soon, right, And we
still don't have anything, and they bring a pile and
I'm like, no, no, I'm going through.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The whole pile.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
And at the bottom of the pile is a piece
of tracing paper. Remember that, you know the paper you
could see through and it was all wrinkled and they
had flattened it out. It was just like a sketched TV.
I went, Okay, that's the one I can see. Frank
like growling. He and I now disagree. But what I
had heard is that there's three partners and one of
(17:14):
them wasn't really a designer. She was a production manager
and she had done it, and Frank saw it and
hated it and threw it in the garbage. She fished
it out and put it at the bottom of the pile.
He says, that's not true, but you know, maybe or
a good story. The only reason I said yes is
that Dale had taught me one lesson about design. You
(17:35):
need to dominate the space, and that big block em
was the only thing they showed that when you put
it on a TV screen, filled the whole scream. Okay,
we dominate the space. And in a world of thirty channels.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
And in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
So they come to my office with about ten different
boards and then a little board where Frank had illustrated
ten or twelve of them on acrylic overlays and said
this one will be for the heavy Metal show and
this one will be for the New Waves show. And
(18:11):
I'm like, Frank, we're not going to have shows, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I put it aside.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So I put all of the boards up on my
pegboard and couldn't decide. And this went on literally for
like weeks and weeks and weeks, and then I start
looking at his little acrylic thing with all the illustration,
and I said, why don't we just use them all
at once all the time? Or television we move, shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(18:37):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. You actually were the guy who inspired
us to do animated logos. I said, well, what are
we going to do in between the videos and the VJs?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Are we going to do jingles?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
And he went, no, no, we can't do jingles, and.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I said, what do we do? He said, how about this.
Imagine it's like a picture of a cow. I said, yeah,
he said, and all of a sudden, an X comes
down and cuts the cow's head off and it falls
to the ground and you see the veins coming out
and the blood spurting out, and the cow vomits, and
in the vomit is the logo. I went, Oh, my god,
(19:20):
I can do anything I want. This is the most
exciting moment of my life. And we started hiring animators
to do all that stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
The other thing you did when you did those promos,
you laid the music bed down first, yeah, and cut
to music. People forget this. They don't realize that was
an innovation.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
So I got that all from Dale.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And when we started making our first radio spots, we
would film country music stars and then he said, we'll
go to the audio studio and cut the audio track.
And I went, well, the video guy tells me, no,
you have to first do the picture. And then he goes, Fred,
we own the audio studio.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
It's free.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
If you get it right in the audio studio, then
the three hundred dollars an hour video studio will go
much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I
realized that he was absolutely wracked. Now fast forward twenty years.
I go to MTV one day and I go, who's
the promo department?
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Now on the one you're the one?
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Well, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They said, they make us do the audio first, we're filmed.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
People like why.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So twenty years later they were still doing it. But boy,
what it did is it brought rhythm.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
So we had a logo and we were a band
of believers. But part of getting MTV to stick was
proving the channel's worth to the record companies. Artists loved
the idea of being on TV, but the labels needed
to be convinced. At the time, David said music should
be heard and not seen. We needed a case study,
a story to prove we sold records. I talked to
(20:54):
John Psychs about it. We launch MTV, we get it underway.
We're trying to get some evidence that it's working because
the record companies are hemorrhaging money those years. They were
thinking about cutting videos out of their budget, which of
course would be a disaster for so we said we
got to get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle.
And you and Tom Preston, go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(21:19):
Just told on a second because we've got so much
more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.
Tell me what happened in Tulsa.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
We believe this was working, we felt it, but we
needed facts. We needed to convince a record business. So
it was like, we need a story, Tom, John, go
on their own, don't come back to you have a story.
And Tulsa didn't happen until we went to Syracuse, Houston
and we went to the cable markets. So Tom and
I driving through Tulsa in a rental car literally with
a map of record stores and going into places. So
(21:53):
you sold in the least records selling Duran. Duran is
sold in the Tulips to no, Nope, So we kept
driving driving. I still remember it was a record story
in an old house and Tom and I trudge in
and we say solely this only that so only durand drandren.
I sold two boxes of Durandrian records last week? What
(22:17):
you sold two box? You sold fifty records, twenty five
records in a box. Can we have your name and
can we use your phone? We called a box, said Bob, Bob, we.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Have a story. We have story.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
We have a record store that's selling music's only played
on MTV. And you said, great, get a name, get
the information. We need an article, and so we hang
up the phone. I turned to Tom, I go Tom,
we get to go home.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
And we took that and we wrote it as a
case study and we ran it in Billboard and the
music magazines to influence the record company. I keep going,
I have the of course you do. You have everything
we ever did at MTV. You are the pack rat.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
I have that one sheet MTV sells records. Joey Smith,
and boy that Joey Smith. Wherever you are, tell us Oklahoma,
thankk you.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Talta,
it's because those were the few markets where we had
enough cable density that we could make a point. These
cities ended up being little laboratories where we could peek
in and take measurements and show the world just how
effective MTV was going to be. So it proved our
(23:23):
worth to the record companies. But you have to remember
we still had the convinced cable operators to carry MTV.
They wanted to be paid to carry our channel, and frankly,
we didn't have the money. So we had to come
up with a breakthrough idea and genius campaign that could
do all the heavy lifting. Here Tom Preston and Fred
Seibert telling that story, let's start with talk. When we
(23:47):
launched MTV. You were the head of marketing. The cable
operator wouldn't put MTV on. They wanted us to pay them. One,
we didn't have the money, and two that was probably
a slippery slope, and so we decided we would use
a whole strategy to get distribution. I want my MTV.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Well it was sort of a Hail Mary pass because
you know, we're about to go under. No one in
the organization knew we were about to go under, So
how are we going to get these cable operators at us?
When we knew in fact that the people who actually
had it in the few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. So we actually
had to go over their heads. And the idea was
(24:23):
that campaign I Want my MAPO, which I remembered as
a baby boomer in the fifties, some obnoxious I want
my MAPO, but I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
The actual spot said, they grew up with rock and roll,
they grew up with television. Now they want their MTV.
George Lois, who never saw something that he couldn't copy,
had already copied a famous TV commercial from the fifties
called I Want my mapo for a really horrendous tasting
(24:53):
meal times right factly, and he redid it with Mick
Jagger and David Bowie. And on the beginning of the
spot he had P Towns in doing it, America demand
your MTV. Then people go, I want my MTV. I
want my MTV, and then P Towns and again with
a telephone.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Going call your cable.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Operator and say I want my TAB And they showed
us this spot.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
So if we could get major rock stars in a
commercial to kind of hold our logo validated, hold it
and command people to 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
(25:39):
had never heard of MTV. So we went and we
pitched it to you. I think you saw the feeling
of it right away.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Well, there's a lesson in this too that you've always
done very very well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
In the case of I want my MTV music stars
who were willing to be in the commercial for free
to help us accomplish goals, but you also have music
companies and others.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a strategist and a
creative guy.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And as a.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Strategist, what he understood is that we had no money
to spend on this ad. I remember going into our
boss's office and saying, but HBO spending ten million dollars
a year in advertising, goes, you're lucky you have two
somehow or other. The people in the media business didn't
actually believe in advertising as the weirdest thing, and so
I went to Dale. I said, look, we only have
(26:31):
two million dollars, and he did an incredible data dump
of where could MTV be put on against how much
media cost in that particular market, and he did three
or four or five crosstabs to figure out the most
likely places that if we put on.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
These spots, we'd have an embed that we would get.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
People calling and making the cable operators insane, and I
think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy
within four weeks.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
Next thing, you know, every cable operator there were eleven
of them in a market, which would not be unusual.
On time, they'd all call up and surrender. So we
would move at 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.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I had a guy who stop me at a cable
operator and said, I hate you, and I go, why
do you hate me? And he goes Because my phone
rings all day with those people saying I want my
MP I can't get any work done. In my chats
with the co founders, there's a lot of fondness for
this deviant culture we had. MTV was fine. It was
(27:42):
definitely anti establishment, and the truth is even the promotions
dripped with the brand sensibility. In some ways they defined
the brand sensibility. There's some of the crazy stories too.
It was fun reminiscing with John Sykes about them. You
were the guy who did the promotions. You came up
with these great ideas and fortunately, unfortunately with them, that
(28:03):
also executed them. Did the Paint the House paint promotion
with John Mellencamp, you did the Lost Weekend with Van Halen.
What formula were you using?
Speaker 5 (28:11):
Goes back to that Connecting New York thing of being
a dreamer, because I was the kid. I was the
viewer who thought, oh my god, if only I could
dot dot dot.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
So when you said we've.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Got to put together some promotions, we got to go
bigger than life.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
We go, what are we going to do?
Speaker 5 (28:27):
I just said to myself, Okay, what would anybody give
their eye teeth to do?
Speaker 3 (28:32):
What would be.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
The fantasy of all fantasies? And I remember just John
had done a song called pink Houses. So let's give
away a house and you're going to paint the mother pink.
Tell us about the first house you bought. When you
had to execute it, I mean you had to go
find a house, You had to go buy a house,
You had to go actually get a team to paint
it pink.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
You got to go fly people in. So we went,
and you had no money, so we had to buy
the cheapest house you could find.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
So Bob goes, take a cashier's check and just go
buy a house and I go okay. So I flew
in Indiana, and John Mellencamp, who loved the idea, sends
his ex wife to meet me to show me around
it by some house. She's a realtor. So we go
and I go okay. I got about two hours before
I get the flight back to New York. Show me
four houses. First house we buy, the woman is there,
(29:17):
she's cookies for me. The kids are out front, they've
cleaned it up. This was a shack. I felt so
bad for her. She was a single mom. Look at
this house and I said, so do it's a We
can paint this pink, so I wrote. I checked, thirty
two thousand dollars, bought the house. Her jaw dropped. No
realtor just handed the check and gotten the car. Drove
back when you opened up Rolling Stone. Three weeks later,
(29:39):
MTV buys house on toxic waste dump. So so I
call you, go Bob. I had no idea, John Mellencamp
writes me letters I have today. Dear John, I'm sure
you've read Rolling Stone by now, and I'm sure you
wouldn't want to give a house on a toxic waste stump.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
And I'm going, oh, my god, we're stuck with a house.
So I had to fly.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Back and get an other house. But that's not the good.
Double the budget, double the budget. The good story was
the Last Weekend with Van Halen. That one really really
defined MTV as a serious, dangerous rock and roll brand
to consumers. There was a movie called The Last Weekend.
Ray milland was in there and the guy loses his
mind whatever, and so we just said, let's do a
(30:21):
Last Weeks with a band. Who's the craziest band out
there right now, van Halen. Van Halen wouldn't do any
promotion because they were worried about their image. We called
them with the idea of like, we're in. We're in,
and by the way, will fulfill the contest. You don't
have to do anything. Just drop off the fans with
us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday. So we
did that. The kid arrives and they take him at
(30:43):
four o'clock in the afternoon right into the backstage and
everything you can imagine what happened with Van Halen happened.
So by the time the band goes on stage at
nine o'clock at night, this guy is fried. There's been
things that were not a Warner, Amex, the Condole or
MTV notice activity. So he's standing on stage a completely
out of his mind and David Lee Roth goes, we
(31:03):
have the winner tonight of the MTV Lost Weekend, Joe Smith.
You know, Joe Congratulations. They bring out a giant sheet cake.
He's got his hands up from the air and the
band's around him, and they take the sheet cake and
they push it into his face and the guy is
stunned and he starts curling around swinging punches at the band.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
The pan freaks out.
Speaker 5 (31:25):
They take him off and they bring him backstage and
we say to his friend, what's wrong with him? And
he said, we forgot to tell you. He has a
metal plate in his head. He was in an accident.
He's not supposed to drink, so they had to put
him in a room with a security guard all night.
But that kind of made the legend of MTV. I
wish we could take credit for that, but that was it.
So the contest. Maybe we're lucky we can't.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Take credit for it.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
You know what those contests did, they creates the fantasy
and the aspiration that makes someone want to be attracted
to a product.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
MTV could have been a flash in the pan, but
the marketing spirit captured an attitude that young America responded to.
People tuned in just to see what was going on
on MTV. It was a place to hang out, and
as the word spread, the channel made money. Although MTV
was the most radical of the cable channels, it was
also the first cable network to actually make a profit.
(32:13):
And we had the highest AD revenue of any of
the cable networks. And remember this was a time when
people didn't believe cable networks could even be profitable. Boy
did that feel good. But part of keeping the channel
successful was continuing to think outside the mainstream and continue
to come up with new ideas. Here's bread again.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in
and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here,
I didn't want to hire them. One of the earliest
people I hired had just come out of film school.
In his first job was cutting film negatives at a
porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you won't remember this,
but one day you called me into your office and
you said, hey, I need you to be the head
(32:53):
of production. I said, Bob you know, I've never seen
even the red light on top of a camera go on.
And you went, Oh, don't worry, you'll figure it out.
And that was that, and all of a sudden, I
was in television and you did a really great job.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Thank you. But it wasn't just people like Fred who
got an opportunity to MTV. Here Judy and Tom talking
about how he kept an eye out for new talent
and groomed them upward, and the culture that the two
of them kept going and kept building at the company
even after I left. If you think about it, in
the days of MTV, we probably looking back at an
(33:28):
extraordinary number of women and very important roles. Today would
be crowing about it. Probably, you know, whether you like
it or not, you have been mentoring people, You've been
setting an example. How do you handle that responsibility? What
do you do consciously about that?
Speaker 7 (33:43):
I began to see I was sort of a better
editor coach than I was a player. I can remember
some things that just felt like personal milestones to me.
You know. One of the great fun things I got
to do would be hanging out in the rehearsals for
the Video Music Awards, and I was sitting there and
I was thinking, Wow, you know, we've got a female director,
(34:03):
we have a female on stage managing the crew. We
have a young woman who's the head writer, we have
a young woman in charge of seating in events. But
we've got women in roles that were not traditionally women's roles.
They were just really good. And I do think it's
incumbent on somebody who gets an opportunity, like I got
(34:27):
to look out for underrepresented people in general. And so
you know, when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand, was
an easy like, let's let Beth direct, come on, like,
she can do it. We know she can do it.
Everybody knows she can do it. And I looked around
and thought, wow, this whole thing is kind of really
(34:48):
looking very different than most of the other sets that
I've been on. I once heard Tina Fey say something
about it's a panel where a bunch of women were
sort of congratulating each other for different things, and someone
said they were lucky, and a bunch of other women
jumped on her and said, oh my god. Women always
say they're lucky. Men never say they're lucky. You made
your own luck. And Tina was actually very thoughtful about it,
(35:11):
and she said, I think timing plays a role in
something as well as luck and talent. And you know,
I always felt like I worked with men who were
not typical and young employees who are not typical. So
how ridiculous would it be to take a typical approach
to anything else. We were upending tradition all the time,
(35:32):
and not just for the sake of doing it, but
because you give somebody a chance, they'll knock themselves out
to show you that they could really do it.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
And we actually talked about it back then. We said,
you know, if somebody's done three or four things and
they're not great, we have empirical evidence they won't be great. Yeah,
but if we give somebody a shot who's never done it,
they could be the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right, And
the only way we're going to find out is to
take a shot, exactly And you continued to do that
through your career.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
A lot of focus was on career. We're eating a
culture that would attract 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 Colbert.
You know, Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices.
Sometimes it was a hothouse atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
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 is really remarkable the people you.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
Had, well, a lot of it is sort of what's
the vibe of the place. We always wanted to make
the room for deviancy. I would always say, who's the
odd ballperson, Who's the intern who's going to come running
in with an idea likeyo MTV raps. That was like
a twenty one year old intern who came up with
a demo in his basement. Because we had these networks,
there was a lot of room for experimentation. Everything you
(36:42):
made didn't have to be really tightly organized. There was
a lot of room for improvisation and innovation. If you
have a hallmark for that, people would want to step
up and follow us. You just try and have good standards,
provide guard rails for people, celebrate risk. You know, we
give creative people a lot of freedom.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
One of the people who was crucial tim TV's early
success it was former NPR CEO y'all, Mom, y'arell and
I went way back. We even had a show called
album Tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live. But y'all
had an incredible eye for programming, and when MTV had
to think beyond music videos, he played a crucial role
(37:19):
for me.
Speaker 6 (37:20):
It was a great transition from the radio world to
the television world because there were so many similarities. If
you had picked me up and tried to drop me
into a broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I
would have, I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately
we all learned a lot of lessons about the fragility
(37:42):
of this brand new thing, music videos, and that was
something that we all kind of had to learn in
real time. It was humbling, it was embarrassing, and do.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
You think it stopped working.
Speaker 6 (37:53):
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
and there were so many people watching and being really
enthralled by. But I think ultimately it became less interesting.
It was television and we were using a lot I
was at least using a lot of radio rules for
a different medium, and people were making four minute decisions
(38:14):
of what they were going to watch and not thirty
minute and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately
had to switch strategy to go to content that people
would watch for longer periods of time, long form, and
that was very controversial at the time, but you.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Know it worked. What were your first shows?
Speaker 6 (38:33):
And we started with The Week in Rock and hiring
Kurt Loader from Rolling Stone magazine and taking the MTV
news segments and making it a half hour show and
that worked, and then Rockumentaries and Specials as the second.
The third was Club MTV is let's do an American
band stand for today.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Let's play music videos.
Speaker 6 (38:53):
And hire Downtown Julie Brown.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
That was a hit.
Speaker 6 (38:56):
Every show that went on did well. Then we're going
to really cocky and think, man, we really know how
to make hits. But I think it was more reflection
of the fact that music videos at the time had
run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
the Game Show, and all the research came back said
you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
(39:17):
to our good friend Marshall Cohen, we worked with an
MTV research guru, Yes, I said, I think we're asking
the wrong question. The question should be if we were
to do a game show, what would it look like?
And the answer came back, well, it should be irreverence
would be crazy. We used all the information and hired
(39:38):
Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a
regular on the show and it was a monster. But
the inditial research the way we asked it indicated that
it would have been a disaster.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
It worked out great for us. Were you able to
sell that to advertisement? Yep? Oh I loved it? Oh yeah, yeah.
So MTV started to play with new formats, but as
Freshtram remembers it, the limited budgets were actually an engine
for creativity.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
We couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix
or changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We
just couldn't play the top ten videos all day long.
There was always new shows coming around. We would add
shows unpackaged music and like on hip hop music with
the OMTV raps and so forth, and it kind of
came down to the real world day. That was in
nineteen ninety three, and that was like, well, we've tried
(40:28):
everything else, we should probably do a soap opera. Because
young people are interested in what other young people are doing,
so they came in with a presentation to me and
we had the 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
(40:51):
and stuck some cameras in there and bring these kids
in and then let them live and then we'll post
it afterwards and make it into a show. And that
was That was sort of the birth of reality. It
was an idea that was not born of brilliance but
born of cheapskateness.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
MTV was a success story finally, but it wasn't long
before the competition started circling. Here's Tom with the story
of what motivated us to start VH one.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
Ted Turner want to come in and basically p in
our parade. He said he was going to launch a
music channel that played none of the Devil's music. Let
me say first that the cable music channel lasted one
hundred and 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 have a second music channel,
and we made the case the cable operators, we have
(41:37):
a second music channel. You don't want to add the
Ted Turner channel. That's just going to go head to
head against the one you already have. Add VH one,
which we 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 to
you on a combo basis. Basically it was free if
you already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms
(41:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
Of course, launching EH one was one thing. It was
a savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential
and fighting off Ted Turner channel. But once that was over,
the team had to figure out what to do with it.
The network struggled for years. Ratings were abysmal, so John Sykes,
who had left MTV by then, was called back to
lead the charge. Tom Preston calls job says, come home,
(42:33):
need you to fix a VH one. What did you do?
Speaker 5 (42:36):
As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much
of the stuff. A brand is only valuable if there
is an underserved segment of the audience that needs it.
Hip hop was starting to happen. ALTERNI music was exploding,
and a lot of the traditional rock bands in R
and B bands were being pushed out and they're going
like kind off of the cliff, And I said, there's
a market here. Because having run a record company, a
(42:58):
publishing company, we were sieved. And these artists that used
to be called middle of the road back then, but
now they were actually vibrant pop bands. They didn't have
a place. And then I saw who are the most
powerful buyers, young adults, young college graduates. Here's a generation
it's grown up on MTV. They have money, they're affluent,
and they have nowhere to go. So I was as
(43:20):
excited actually about VH one as I was about MTV.
I mean, MTV is iconic and it will be there forever.
But the other thing about VH one to me also
was it was my own and I knew if I fell,
it would be on me. It would be sykes out.
If VH one fails, they used to call it VH
point one. It was the rating of it yet and
(43:40):
for those people who ratings, ratings are from zero to whatever,
and point one's of zero to one hundred VH one
is the ugly step child at MTV Networks. I used
to say it was nails out the backseat of a
car to put flats in the tires of the cars
behind us, because we didn't want aybody to compete with MTV.
But I said, now it quietly has thirty million homes.
(44:01):
There's a market for this. And I looked in the room.
Half the people like or a sleep. Iic to call
that quit and staying. They had a job, but they
didn't believe in the product, but they were profecting a paycheck.
So I said, listen, if you don't believe in this,
it's okay. We won't make a big thing and we're
going to fire you, but we'll work out a package
and you should leave because we need people going to
believe in this. There's a market for this, and I
(44:22):
believe that this is gonna be a three hundred million
dollar business in the next three years if we all
focus on that. So people came to me and said,
I don't want to do this. I didn't think they
I don't think they would come like, I don't think
you're right. I'm like, okay, well, thank you, good bye.
They all came back three years later looking for jobs.
But it was about believing in yourself, believing your idea,
(44:45):
hiring people around you who are better than you at
executing what they did. And we put together a team
at VH one hooping under run, NBC, Nintendo, Bravo. We
put together an all star trip. So it made me
proud and working with some of the red I mean
some Redstone nineteen ninety four was on his game. You
walked in and said, here's my plan, here's what I
(45:07):
want to do, and he'd just said, fine, go do it.
If you don't do it, I'll fire you. I said,
it's all I want to know. Just give me the rope,
and he did. It was a great nine years. We
shattered all the records there, but all good businesses, you
got to reinvent them otherwise they paid it off.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
MTV was the starting point of a cable revolution. The
channel and the creative engine we built gave birth to
so much more. Here's Tom talking about just that topic.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
I was ambitious and I was highly motivated for this
to succeed. I thought that we were in this TV revolution.
We had the wind at our back. It was all
going to come true. It 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 right place at the right time,
and this was sort of my destiny. I was going
(45:54):
to meet my opportunity.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
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 Judian Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there?
Speaker 4 (46:15):
There's a compliment to you, Bob, I mean, you are
the guy I always keep your eye on the consumer,
find out what the consumer wanted. 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. And we would
continue to launch new networks Comedy Central or TV Land,
(46:35):
and 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 and
India was actually very transferable because I really 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
(46:58):
television networking company, and we rolled out not just MTV,
but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a lot of others
right down through Africa. 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 all was a creative machine,
which again was something that you put in at the
(47:19):
inception of the company.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
When we first started MTV, it wasn't just entertainment. We
built a channel to be the voice of young America
and that included doing good and my time there. MTV
made its mark with massive events with important missions, an
Sky International, Band Aid, Farm Aid and of course Live Aid.
But it was rock the vote that truly took the
channel into politics, and some say even got a president elected.
(47:45):
Here's Judy talking about it. You've always done good, rocked
the Vote, juice or lose AIDS awareness. How did you
think about that inside of a company, and how do
you think of it for you as a as.
Speaker 7 (47:58):
A person, Well, you know, inside MTV, it was very
interesting when we decided to get into you know, and
certainly Rock the Vote was not our idea politics Jeff
air off, So Jeff was very passionate about this, and
it sort of grew into Rock the Vote. And I
remember talking to Tom Preston, with whom I had an
extraordinarily great creative relationship, and this was one of the
(48:22):
rare instances where we had a blowout. Really we really
didn't agree, but I listened to what he said. He said,
this is a terrible idea. It's not going to work.
This is an entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're
going to get laughed out of town. We do not
have permission to do this. There's nothing about us that
(48:44):
says we should be stepping anywhere near an election or
voting or any of this. So I went back and
I thought about it. A little bit, and I thought, okay,
this is where I come into the picture. I think
I grew up in an era where one of the
many things I loved about music was it's social commentary,
and it is about the times we live in and
it's about all the things that affect you in a
(49:05):
very deep way. And I thought, I think there's a
way to do this where it will be engaging. This
was not about telling young people you need to vote.
That's not the way I looked at it at all.
It was saying to people who make big decisions in
this country, this is a generation that is disengaged from you,
and you need to address them on their turf, their way,
(49:27):
and we'll invite you to do that. That's your shot.
It wasn't about trying to be parental or any of
that kind of stuff to them, or give them boring
facts or anything like that. And so we got as
smart as we could get. And I think I didn't
tell anybody. That's another thing. I sent Tabitha's sore and
Tabitha went to New Hampshire and she called me at
(49:47):
like midnight she said, you know, I got up here
in like a bunch of candidates are like, what's MTV
And she said, and then a couple of them like
got back off the bus, primarily Bill Clinton, and said
I'll talk to you. And then we were sort of
off and running. And you know that partnered with incredible
creative work on those rock to Vote spots, I mean
(50:09):
Madonna wrapped in a flag.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston quickly embraced the idea.
Speaker 4 (50:14):
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
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had one hundred and sixty eight
hours a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It
also turned out it legitimized us in the eyes of
advertisers who formerly wouldn't come near us, like American Express.
But most importantly, the audience liked it.
Speaker 7 (50:36):
And then fast forward to you know, we're going to
throw an inaugural ball that's not official and see if
anybody comes to the party, and our EM's going to
play and Vogue's going to play. We tried to make
it as spirited as MTV, but ad a little bit
of gravitas, if you will, and meaning you know like
you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and
(50:57):
you deserve to be heard and listen to, and we
were going to help you.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
MTV was a wonderful ride from the very beginning. My
co founders and I knew we were doing something that
was important to culture, but we had no idea we
were going to change culture. MTV change TV. It changed music,
it changed graphic design, and it certainly changed my life.
No matter how old I get or whatever else I've done,
(51:25):
MTV is still an important chapter of my life, and
all of us as co founders are still very much
a very tight family. But the truth is, looking back,
I think we all feel the same way Tom Freston
felt when he joined the team.
Speaker 4 (51:39):
I was happy to have a job. I couldn't believe
anyone was going to hire me.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
And lucky for all of us, we all kept getting
hired again and again. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production iHeartRadio. 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 Etoor for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael
Azar for their recording help are editor Ryan Murdoch and
of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone
(52:18):
who helped bring this show to your ears.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:09):
You actually were the guy who inspired us to do
animated logos. Do you remember this? I said, well, what
are we going to do in between the videos and
the VJs?
Speaker 3 (00:19):
Are we going to do jingles?
Speaker 4 (00:20):
And he went, no, No, we can't do jingles?
Speaker 2 (00:22):
And I said, uh, what do we do? He said,
how about this? Imagine it's a picture of a cow.
I said, yeah, he said, and all of a sudden,
an X comes down and cuts the cow's head off
and it falls to the ground and you see the
veins coming out and the blood spurting out, and the
cow vomits, and in the vomit is the logo.
Speaker 4 (00:42):
I went, Oh, my god, I can do anything I want.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
Hi. I'm Bob Tipman, and welcome to Math and Magic.
Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, and we're doing something
special on today's episode. One of the pivotal moments of
my life was leading the team that created MTV. I've
had the good of having all the co founders of
MTV on this podcast with me and in each of
the interviews, whether it's chatting with Judye Brat or Fred Ceiber,
(01:08):
John Sykes, or Yarrol Moone and of course Tom Preston.
We've always spent a little time talking about MTV, so
all we wanted to do for you today was pulled
together those stories for the first time ever. Tell the
story at the beginning of MTV through the eyes of
people who were actually in the room when it happened,
because all of us who are really in the room
(01:28):
often laugh about how far off other people's accounts can be.
So let me set the stage. It's the beginning of
the eighties. Cable TV was still a crazy idea. Most
business executives and most of America didn't understand it or
believe in how TV was about to change. And here
(01:49):
comes this pack of twenty year olds with an attitude.
None of us had ever done the jobs before. All
we knew is we had grown up with rock and
roll and we'd grown up with TV, and the two
had never successfully come together. We thought it had always
failed because TV people always wanted to try and make
music fit the TV form, a storia. We intended to
(02:10):
make TV fit the music form mood and emotion. MTV
was going to be about attitude and something people wanted
to join. We run a mission so when Iheart's own
John Sykes at the time, a twenty four year old
record executive at CBS Records in Chicago, heard what we
were up to. Well, he wanted in, so let's talk
(02:33):
about MTV. It's nineteen eighty the word gets out that
we're working on this DO music channel. How do you
hear about it? What does it mean to you? And
how on earth did you really get connected to us
to get on that original team.
Speaker 5 (02:46):
I grew up with three things in my life, radio, television,
and music.
Speaker 3 (02:51):
That's all I cared about.
Speaker 5 (02:52):
When I wasn't in the radio station, I was watching
TV or listening to music. Those things, to me shaped
our culture. So at school, TVs just starting up, and
I saw the cable channels were empty and music was
all over the radio. It was it on television. So
we used to go and shoot the concerts at Syracus,
and we'd tape them and send them to new channels,
and we'd play the concerts and people like, oh my god,
(03:15):
I can see the band. And all I wanted to
do at that point was put music on television. When
I graduated, I went to CBS, said let's put music
on let's run concerts. These three Martini lunch guys in
New York looked at me like it was crazy. I
got a job in the record business promoting radio stations.
I wanted to run the radio station. I didn't want
to promote them on the radar, but that's the job
I had. So then I heard from my friend Steve Casey,
(03:37):
was a WLS in Chicago, that his great friend Bob
Pittman was in New York and he was going to
start a video channel, and I lost my mind.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
It still gives me goosebumps.
Speaker 5 (03:49):
I was like, this is what I was made to do,
This is what I wanted to do. To me, it
was like music belonged on television. So I started calling you,
and I called you, and I called you and I
called you, and thanks to your assistant and plunk It,
who I was annoying so much, he said, all right, Bob,
you please talk to this guy. And we met that
day with a borrowed support jacket because I han't own it.
(04:10):
But you and I connected that moment because we had
the same vision. Music and television were the two biggest
forces in pop culture and they were about to be
You know, you look.
Speaker 3 (04:20):
Back on any successful product, and it seems easy. You
were there when we didn't even have approval from the
board to do it. We just had some money to
develop it. So give us a little color for people
who think things are easy and they always go exactly
the way you plan. What that early development was like.
Speaker 5 (04:37):
It is funny and people I go, oh my god,
you were and the team that started MTV. That must
have been a magical and great ago. I don't know.
I was working too hard. We were so into trenches
all the time. It only looks glamorous to day looking back,
but when you're in it, it's a slug fest. There
was this idea, but to make it happen, we had
no money, and we all quit jobs. You were at NBC,
(04:57):
I was at CBS. I was the promotion man the
year in Chicago, and I just said, I'm quitting. People
like us, we weren't going to fail. I never thought
we were going to fail. I got scared when you'd
come in and say, you know they're going to cut
the budgets. We got a few more months. We've got
to make our numbers. That just made me say, well,
we're gonna have to work hard to make our numbers.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, Okay,
we're going to the board and we're going to pitch
this for approval, and you go, what, we don't have approval.
I quit my job. We don't have approval. No, no, no, John,
this was development. All the blood ran out of your
face at that moment.
Speaker 5 (05:30):
I do remember I had to look up because there
was no Internet, I had to go in the dictionary
and look up the real definition of development.
Speaker 3 (05:36):
I just thought, we're developing something.
Speaker 6 (05:38):
Go No.
Speaker 5 (05:38):
Development means it's not going to happen yet, but you
know something. But I was like, who cares if it
doesn't work, I'll go sleep on my sister's couching another job.
Speaker 3 (05:47):
We were young. John Sykes was so hungry he pounded
on our door to let him in. He believed in
music television from the start. But my good pal Fred Cybert,
the one who came out of radio and helped create
the graphic look of MTV, his reason for getting into
TV was very different. One of your great supporters, who
I'd worked with and who I love dearly, Dale Pond,
(06:09):
recommended you to me pre MTV. It was in the
early days of PayTV. You came over to join us
in the cable revolution. Yeah, why did you make that jump?
Speaker 2 (06:18):
Well, you know this is going to sound flattering. I
did it completely because of you. Dale had left the
country music radio station and left me alone, and the
guy I was working for at that time in radio
I had no respect for whatsoever. So you called me
one day, you said you want to be Intellivision, and oh,
you said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
(06:39):
the business, and there was one article about you, and
I thought to myself, you know, this guy is younger
than me, and I've heard of him, so that's, you know,
one check. So we go, we have the coffee, and
I walk out and I called my best friend and
I said, this guy that I just talked to is
so much smarter than my Boston radio He goes, what
(07:00):
do you think about that? I said, Well, here's what
Dale taught me. Doesn't matter what the job is, work
for the smartest person you can find, and at the
time you were the smartest person I could find.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Yeah, that's what that means to toleration, that truth be told.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
When you first told me about it. I thought it
was the dumbest idea in the world. Because I was
a music guy and I had seen, you know, a
few Crimy music videos. I hadn't really thought about it
too much, and then luckily somebody played me a music
video that made, you know, the little light go off.
I don't know whether it was blind faith or I
(07:33):
was too naive to know that you had to have
faith like you told me it was going to happen,
so I believed you was it youth totally. I was
just talking with Alan Goodman, my soon to be partner
at that point, and he said, you know, we didn't
really know what was going to happen, but you looked
at all the other people that were around you and
it just had to happen.
Speaker 3 (07:52):
I think that's really true. I don't know if you remember,
but we went to the head of Warner Communications in
American Express and we got a meeting with Steve Ross,
who the CEO of Warner, along with his deputy's David Horowitz,
et cetera. And we got Jim Robinson and his deputy
lou Gershner from American Express. We were worried that when
we showed these videos too from American Express, go what
(08:12):
that stuffed? So he said, let's find the tamest one
over mind. I think we found the Olivia Newton jobs,
if you remember. But in the meeting they said you
have to play that kind of stuff, implying Oliviy Newton
John was too hard to race. But to their credit,
Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay, I'm in
for my aff how about you, Steve so awesome we
locked out. The MTV crew we assembled was a bunch
(08:34):
of lovable misfits and future Viacom MTV CEO. Tom Preston
was no different. It's been several years living in Afghanistan,
importing clothes and having adventures across Asia. But when things
got two political overseas, he made his way back. And
just so you don't think Tom went soft sitting the
top Viacom after he left the company, he returned Afghanistan
(08:55):
and even has a wonderful story about lying on a
floor in a bar and control with a firefight going
on all around, the bullets whizzing overhead.
Speaker 4 (09:05):
I was always trying to figure out where would I
fit in 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.
My first account there I worked on was g I Joe,
Now min You. This was sort of at the height
of the Vietnam War and I was in an alienated
(09:26):
state to begin with. When they were going to sign
me to charm and toilet paper, that was sort of
my last straw. I called an ex girlfriend who lived
in Paris. I said, they want me to work on
a toilet paper account where they had segmented the population
and to rollers, folders and crumplers. And she says, well,
you can't do that. You should quit that job. Don't
be a moron. Come with me. I'm going to go
(09:47):
across the Sahara Desert up in Paris. So I was
on a plane like ten days later. That was it
for me.
Speaker 3 (09:53):
So Tom set up his clothing company, Hindoo Cush and
ran that successfully for a long while.
Speaker 4 (09:59):
When I even out of Asia, I thought, whatever I
do next, I wanted to be something that I also
loved deeply, and that was music. So I 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 is 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
(10:19):
been living the last eight years.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
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 had this wonderful affliction.
He liked to hire people for roles they had never
had before, and you and I benefited from that. But
you got in here the cable revolution wasn't even recognized
as being a revolution. Yet, what did you think you
(10:42):
were getting into? I mean, this was still sort of
Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business.
Speaker 4 (10:45):
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 I thought MTV, like all
of us on the team, was really one of the
great ideas, and all of us were essentially on a crusade.
(11:06):
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 knew had been
FM radio. There was still three TV networks. Pong was
only a few years old.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Remember we used to say we're going to do to
FM what FM did to AM. That was our big claim.
Speaker 4 (11:27):
Twenty five channels in the home, can you imagine.
Speaker 3 (11:31):
Judy McGrath was another key employee in the early days.
She eventually rose to be CEO of MTV Networks. Here
she has reminiscing about what it meant to make the
rules up as we went along.
Speaker 7 (11:44):
The beauty in the wonder of MTV was that it
was really filled with people that I thought could not
find gainful employment anywhere else.
Speaker 3 (11:52):
We couldn't.
Speaker 7 (11:53):
No, it would be somebody who had never really shot
anything and just wanted to get their hands on a
camera try it. And we were willing to do that,
so I would say absolutely. But remember, don't fall in
love with your own idea. This is about someone else,
not you. This is about the person on the other side.
They're like you, but you can't make this just for you.
(12:16):
And there are really no other rules aside from you know,
no full frontal nudity. Go out there and do it.
And it was so much fun to have the freedom
to meet people who were far more creative than I was.
I mean, when I joined, I didn't know anything about television.
I didn't even like it. My interview was with Fred,
(12:36):
who said, so, what kind of music do you like?
And I think I said Bruce Springsteen. I'm not sure.
He said, well, you're wrong, and I'll tell you why.
And then about forty five minutes later I left, not
having said anything else. And the next thing I know,
they were like, well, you know, look, this is just
a few of us. We're trying to get this thing going.
If you'd like to join, And it was kind of like,
(12:59):
how fast can I go out the door of Conde
and ass and jump on this thing? Whatever it is?
These people are crazy.
Speaker 3 (13:06):
What's funny is that when I ask Fred about it,
he remembered the story exactly the same way.
Speaker 2 (13:11):
She said Bruce Springsteen, and I said wrong, because I
don't have a good thing about Bruce.
Speaker 3 (13:17):
The fact that she cared, you know, the Bruce haters
are coming after you right now. I believe me.
Speaker 2 (13:21):
They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact
that she cared meant all the difference to me in
the world.
Speaker 3 (13:27):
Not that I agreed, you.
Speaker 7 (13:28):
Know, I've just found the camaraderie and the purpose and
the sheer invention of something that didn't exist, so irresistible.
And again, on the math side of it, I was saying,
I mean this with all sincerity. You had a map
in the creative group, you had a plan, and the
(13:49):
plan were promises, and I loved that. I am making
a promise to you. You sit here, I'm going to
deliver something that you've been waiting for. It is the
first music television network. It is exactly for you. And
I thought, wow, I want my MTV and I have
no idea what it is, but those are powerful words
(14:12):
my in an era before social media and social engagement.
Something for me that felt like mine and want What
a powerful word, right, I want my MTV. I took
that very seriously. I took those promises to heart. Twenty
four hours a day, terrific in stereo, not really, but
(14:34):
you know, hey, it's work.
Speaker 3 (14:35):
It so for those ten people who did have stereoty, brilliant.
Speaker 7 (14:40):
I remember you saying to me, we want people to
think it sounds better than regular television, and they did.
It just felt to me like if I could marry
all the things I'm interested in with these set of
principles and join this crazy band of people who have
no right and a lot of audacity and a firm
belief that this can work. What a gift. I never
(15:03):
looked back, not one second.
Speaker 3 (15:06):
Let's go back to Fred and chat about that iconic
MTV logo. Talk about the logo you set out, You've
got the mission. You and I have these discussions. I
naively say, we'll do our own Star Wars logan because
everybody has a Star Wars logan. You go to bob
Ours will look cheap. You said, look, if we do
something no one's ever seen before, they won't know it's
(15:27):
cheap exactly. So tell me about the logo. Well, the logo.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Itself actually came about because I was too scared to
go to someone famous. I wanted to go to Milton Glazer,
who's one of the most famous graphic designers of the
last fifty years, and I was like, oh, well, he's
going to be really expensive, and he'll get all the credit,
and I wanted a little credit, you know, at least.
So my childhood friend, who I've known since I'm four
(15:53):
years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had just started
a little design firm behind a tai Chiese studio above
Bigelo Chemistry on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had been the
guy because he's a year older than me, who had
always introduced me to every new rock band. He introduced
me to the Monkeys, he introduced me to the Mothers
of Invention, to the Who to Jeff Beck. So I
go down to his little tai Chi studio place and
(16:14):
I go, will you guys design a logo for this
rock channel we're starting? And they were like yes, And
they didn't ask me anything. They didn't ask me how
much they were going to get paid or anything like that.
And this was right after you sent out the first
memo in June of nineteen eighty and boy do I
wish I had that memo. So for a year they
designed logos and I just rejected everything, probably five hundred designs.
(16:41):
Finally they come in the office one day, were actually
going to go on the air soon, right, And we
still don't have anything, and they bring a pile and
I'm like, no, no, I'm going through.
Speaker 3 (16:51):
The whole pile.
Speaker 2 (16:52):
And at the bottom of the pile is a piece
of tracing paper. Remember that, you know the paper you
could see through and it was all wrinkled and they
had flattened it out. It was just like a sketched TV.
I went, Okay, that's the one I can see. Frank
like growling. He and I now disagree. But what I
had heard is that there's three partners and one of
(17:14):
them wasn't really a designer. She was a production manager
and she had done it, and Frank saw it and
hated it and threw it in the garbage. She fished
it out and put it at the bottom of the pile.
He says, that's not true, but you know, maybe or
a good story. The only reason I said yes is
that Dale had taught me one lesson about design. You
(17:35):
need to dominate the space, and that big block em
was the only thing they showed that when you put
it on a TV screen, filled the whole scream. Okay,
we dominate the space. And in a world of thirty channels.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
And in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
So they come to my office with about ten different
boards and then a little board where Frank had illustrated
ten or twelve of them on acrylic overlays and said
this one will be for the heavy Metal show and
this one will be for the New Waves show. And
(18:11):
I'm like, Frank, we're not going to have shows, you know.
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I put it aside.
Speaker 2 (18:14):
So I put all of the boards up on my
pegboard and couldn't decide. And this went on literally for
like weeks and weeks and weeks, and then I start
looking at his little acrylic thing with all the illustration,
and I said, why don't we just use them all
at once all the time? Or television we move, shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(18:37):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. You actually were the guy who inspired
us to do animated logos. I said, well, what are
we going to do in between the videos and the VJs?
Speaker 3 (18:55):
Are we going to do jingles?
Speaker 4 (18:56):
And he went, no, no, we can't do jingles, and.
Speaker 2 (18:58):
I said, what do we do? He said, how about this.
Imagine it's like a picture of a cow. I said, yeah,
he said, and all of a sudden, an X comes
down and cuts the cow's head off and it falls
to the ground and you see the veins coming out
and the blood spurting out, and the cow vomits, and
in the vomit is the logo. I went, Oh, my god,
(19:20):
I can do anything I want. This is the most
exciting moment of my life. And we started hiring animators
to do all that stuff.
Speaker 3 (19:28):
The other thing you did when you did those promos,
you laid the music bed down first, yeah, and cut
to music. People forget this. They don't realize that was
an innovation.
Speaker 4 (19:37):
So I got that all from Dale.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
And when we started making our first radio spots, we
would film country music stars and then he said, we'll
go to the audio studio and cut the audio track.
And I went, well, the video guy tells me, no,
you have to first do the picture. And then he goes, Fred,
we own the audio studio.
Speaker 3 (19:58):
It's free.
Speaker 2 (20:00):
If you get it right in the audio studio, then
the three hundred dollars an hour video studio will go
much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I
realized that he was absolutely wracked. Now fast forward twenty years.
I go to MTV one day and I go, who's
the promo department?
Speaker 3 (20:16):
Now on the one you're the one?
Speaker 4 (20:19):
Well, what are you talking about?
Speaker 2 (20:20):
They said, they make us do the audio first, we're filmed.
Speaker 3 (20:24):
People like why.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
So twenty years later they were still doing it. But boy,
what it did is it brought rhythm.
Speaker 3 (20:33):
So we had a logo and we were a band
of believers. But part of getting MTV to stick was
proving the channel's worth to the record companies. Artists loved
the idea of being on TV, but the labels needed
to be convinced. At the time, David said music should
be heard and not seen. We needed a case study,
a story to prove we sold records. I talked to
(20:54):
John Psychs about it. We launch MTV, we get it underway.
We're trying to get some evidence that it's working because
the record companies are hemorrhaging money those years. They were
thinking about cutting videos out of their budget, which of
course would be a disaster for so we said we
got to get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle.
And you and Tom Preston, go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma.
(21:19):
Just told on a second because we've got so much
more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break.
Tell me what happened in Tulsa.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
We believe this was working, we felt it, but we
needed facts. We needed to convince a record business. So
it was like, we need a story, Tom, John, go
on their own, don't come back to you have a story.
And Tulsa didn't happen until we went to Syracuse, Houston
and we went to the cable markets. So Tom and
I driving through Tulsa in a rental car literally with
a map of record stores and going into places. So
(21:53):
you sold in the least records selling Duran. Duran is
sold in the Tulips to no, Nope, So we kept
driving driving. I still remember it was a record story
in an old house and Tom and I trudge in
and we say solely this only that so only durand drandren.
I sold two boxes of Durandrian records last week? What
(22:17):
you sold two box? You sold fifty records, twenty five
records in a box. Can we have your name and
can we use your phone? We called a box, said Bob, Bob, we.
Speaker 3 (22:28):
Have a story. We have story.
Speaker 5 (22:29):
We have a record store that's selling music's only played
on MTV. And you said, great, get a name, get
the information. We need an article, and so we hang
up the phone. I turned to Tom, I go Tom,
we get to go home.
Speaker 3 (22:40):
And we took that and we wrote it as a
case study and we ran it in Billboard and the
music magazines to influence the record company. I keep going,
I have the of course you do. You have everything
we ever did at MTV. You are the pack rat.
Speaker 5 (22:54):
I have that one sheet MTV sells records. Joey Smith,
and boy that Joey Smith. Wherever you are, tell us Oklahoma,
thankk you.
Speaker 3 (23:03):
If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Talta,
it's because those were the few markets where we had
enough cable density that we could make a point. These
cities ended up being little laboratories where we could peek
in and take measurements and show the world just how
effective MTV was going to be. So it proved our
(23:23):
worth to the record companies. But you have to remember
we still had the convinced cable operators to carry MTV.
They wanted to be paid to carry our channel, and frankly,
we didn't have the money. So we had to come
up with a breakthrough idea and genius campaign that could
do all the heavy lifting. Here Tom Preston and Fred
Seibert telling that story, let's start with talk. When we
(23:47):
launched MTV. You were the head of marketing. The cable
operator wouldn't put MTV on. They wanted us to pay them. One,
we didn't have the money, and two that was probably
a slippery slope, and so we decided we would use
a whole strategy to get distribution. I want my MTV.
Speaker 4 (24:03):
Well it was sort of a Hail Mary pass because
you know, we're about to go under. No one in
the organization knew we were about to go under, So
how are we going to get these cable operators at us?
When we knew in fact that the people who actually
had it in the few towns where it existed, they
loved it. They were fanatical about it. So we actually
had to go over their heads. And the idea was
(24:23):
that campaign I Want my MAPO, which I remembered as
a baby boomer in the fifties, some obnoxious I want
my MAPO, but I want my MTV.
Speaker 2 (24:31):
The actual spot said, they grew up with rock and roll,
they grew up with television. Now they want their MTV.
George Lois, who never saw something that he couldn't copy,
had already copied a famous TV commercial from the fifties
called I Want my mapo for a really horrendous tasting
(24:53):
meal times right factly, and he redid it with Mick
Jagger and David Bowie. And on the beginning of the
spot he had P Towns in doing it, America demand
your MTV. Then people go, I want my MTV. I
want my MTV, and then P Towns and again with
a telephone.
Speaker 4 (25:12):
Going call your cable.
Speaker 2 (25:13):
Operator and say I want my TAB And they showed
us this spot.
Speaker 4 (25:18):
So if we could get major rock stars in a
commercial to kind of hold our logo validated, hold it
and command people to 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
(25:39):
had never heard of MTV. So we went and we
pitched it to you. I think you saw the feeling
of it right away.
Speaker 3 (25:46):
Well, there's a lesson in this too that you've always
done very very well, which is harnessing the power of partners.
In the case of I want my MTV music stars
who were willing to be in the commercial for free
to help us accomplish goals, but you also have music
companies and others.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a strategist and a
creative guy.
Speaker 3 (26:09):
And as a.
Speaker 2 (26:09):
Strategist, what he understood is that we had no money
to spend on this ad. I remember going into our
boss's office and saying, but HBO spending ten million dollars
a year in advertising, goes, you're lucky you have two
somehow or other. The people in the media business didn't
actually believe in advertising as the weirdest thing, and so
I went to Dale. I said, look, we only have
(26:31):
two million dollars, and he did an incredible data dump
of where could MTV be put on against how much
media cost in that particular market, and he did three
or four or five crosstabs to figure out the most
likely places that if we put on.
Speaker 3 (26:52):
These spots, we'd have an embed that we would get.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
People calling and making the cable operators insane, and I
think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy
within four weeks.
Speaker 4 (27:07):
Next thing, you know, every cable operator there were eleven
of them in a market, which would not be unusual.
On time, they'd all call up and surrender. So we
would move at 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.
Speaker 3 (27:21):
I had a guy who stop me at a cable
operator and said, I hate you, and I go, why
do you hate me? And he goes Because my phone
rings all day with those people saying I want my
MP I can't get any work done. In my chats
with the co founders, there's a lot of fondness for
this deviant culture we had. MTV was fine. It was
(27:42):
definitely anti establishment, and the truth is even the promotions
dripped with the brand sensibility. In some ways they defined
the brand sensibility. There's some of the crazy stories too.
It was fun reminiscing with John Sykes about them. You
were the guy who did the promotions. You came up
with these great ideas and fortunately, unfortunately with them, that
(28:03):
also executed them. Did the Paint the House paint promotion
with John Mellencamp, you did the Lost Weekend with Van Halen.
What formula were you using?
Speaker 5 (28:11):
Goes back to that Connecting New York thing of being
a dreamer, because I was the kid. I was the
viewer who thought, oh my god, if only I could
dot dot dot.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
So when you said we've.
Speaker 5 (28:23):
Got to put together some promotions, we got to go
bigger than life.
Speaker 3 (28:26):
We go, what are we going to do?
Speaker 5 (28:27):
I just said to myself, Okay, what would anybody give
their eye teeth to do?
Speaker 3 (28:32):
What would be.
Speaker 5 (28:33):
The fantasy of all fantasies? And I remember just John
had done a song called pink Houses. So let's give
away a house and you're going to paint the mother pink.
Tell us about the first house you bought. When you
had to execute it, I mean you had to go
find a house, You had to go buy a house,
You had to go actually get a team to paint
it pink.
Speaker 3 (28:50):
You got to go fly people in. So we went,
and you had no money, so we had to buy
the cheapest house you could find.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
So Bob goes, take a cashier's check and just go
buy a house and I go okay. So I flew
in Indiana, and John Mellencamp, who loved the idea, sends
his ex wife to meet me to show me around
it by some house. She's a realtor. So we go
and I go okay. I got about two hours before
I get the flight back to New York. Show me
four houses. First house we buy, the woman is there,
(29:17):
she's cookies for me. The kids are out front, they've
cleaned it up. This was a shack. I felt so
bad for her. She was a single mom. Look at
this house and I said, so do it's a We
can paint this pink, so I wrote. I checked, thirty
two thousand dollars, bought the house. Her jaw dropped. No
realtor just handed the check and gotten the car. Drove
back when you opened up Rolling Stone. Three weeks later,
(29:39):
MTV buys house on toxic waste dump. So so I
call you, go Bob. I had no idea, John Mellencamp
writes me letters I have today. Dear John, I'm sure
you've read Rolling Stone by now, and I'm sure you
wouldn't want to give a house on a toxic waste stump.
Speaker 3 (29:55):
And I'm going, oh, my god, we're stuck with a house.
So I had to fly.
Speaker 5 (29:59):
Back and get an other house. But that's not the good.
Double the budget, double the budget. The good story was
the Last Weekend with Van Halen. That one really really
defined MTV as a serious, dangerous rock and roll brand
to consumers. There was a movie called The Last Weekend.
Ray milland was in there and the guy loses his
mind whatever, and so we just said, let's do a
(30:21):
Last Weeks with a band. Who's the craziest band out
there right now, van Halen. Van Halen wouldn't do any
promotion because they were worried about their image. We called
them with the idea of like, we're in. We're in,
and by the way, will fulfill the contest. You don't
have to do anything. Just drop off the fans with
us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday. So we
did that. The kid arrives and they take him at
(30:43):
four o'clock in the afternoon right into the backstage and
everything you can imagine what happened with Van Halen happened.
So by the time the band goes on stage at
nine o'clock at night, this guy is fried. There's been
things that were not a Warner, Amex, the Condole or
MTV notice activity. So he's standing on stage a completely
out of his mind and David Lee Roth goes, we
(31:03):
have the winner tonight of the MTV Lost Weekend, Joe Smith.
You know, Joe Congratulations. They bring out a giant sheet cake.
He's got his hands up from the air and the
band's around him, and they take the sheet cake and
they push it into his face and the guy is
stunned and he starts curling around swinging punches at the band.
Speaker 3 (31:23):
The pan freaks out.
Speaker 5 (31:25):
They take him off and they bring him backstage and
we say to his friend, what's wrong with him? And
he said, we forgot to tell you. He has a
metal plate in his head. He was in an accident.
He's not supposed to drink, so they had to put
him in a room with a security guard all night.
But that kind of made the legend of MTV. I
wish we could take credit for that, but that was it.
So the contest. Maybe we're lucky we can't.
Speaker 3 (31:43):
Take credit for it.
Speaker 5 (31:44):
You know what those contests did, they creates the fantasy
and the aspiration that makes someone want to be attracted
to a product.
Speaker 3 (31:53):
MTV could have been a flash in the pan, but
the marketing spirit captured an attitude that young America responded to.
People tuned in just to see what was going on
on MTV. It was a place to hang out, and
as the word spread, the channel made money. Although MTV
was the most radical of the cable channels, it was
also the first cable network to actually make a profit.
(32:13):
And we had the highest AD revenue of any of
the cable networks. And remember this was a time when
people didn't believe cable networks could even be profitable. Boy
did that feel good. But part of keeping the channel
successful was continuing to think outside the mainstream and continue
to come up with new ideas. Here's bread again.
Speaker 2 (32:33):
We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in
and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here,
I didn't want to hire them. One of the earliest
people I hired had just come out of film school.
In his first job was cutting film negatives at a
porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you won't remember this,
but one day you called me into your office and
you said, hey, I need you to be the head
(32:53):
of production. I said, Bob you know, I've never seen
even the red light on top of a camera go on.
And you went, Oh, don't worry, you'll figure it out.
And that was that, and all of a sudden, I
was in television and you did a really great job.
Speaker 3 (33:07):
Thank you. But it wasn't just people like Fred who
got an opportunity to MTV. Here Judy and Tom talking
about how he kept an eye out for new talent
and groomed them upward, and the culture that the two
of them kept going and kept building at the company
even after I left. If you think about it, in
the days of MTV, we probably looking back at an
(33:28):
extraordinary number of women and very important roles. Today would
be crowing about it. Probably, you know, whether you like
it or not, you have been mentoring people, You've been
setting an example. How do you handle that responsibility? What
do you do consciously about that?
Speaker 7 (33:43):
I began to see I was sort of a better
editor coach than I was a player. I can remember
some things that just felt like personal milestones to me.
You know. One of the great fun things I got
to do would be hanging out in the rehearsals for
the Video Music Awards, and I was sitting there and
I was thinking, Wow, you know, we've got a female director,
(34:03):
we have a female on stage managing the crew. We
have a young woman who's the head writer, we have
a young woman in charge of seating in events. But
we've got women in roles that were not traditionally women's roles.
They were just really good. And I do think it's
incumbent on somebody who gets an opportunity, like I got
(34:27):
to look out for underrepresented people in general. And so
you know, when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand, was
an easy like, let's let Beth direct, come on, like,
she can do it. We know she can do it.
Everybody knows she can do it. And I looked around
and thought, wow, this whole thing is kind of really
(34:48):
looking very different than most of the other sets that
I've been on. I once heard Tina Fey say something
about it's a panel where a bunch of women were
sort of congratulating each other for different things, and someone
said they were lucky, and a bunch of other women
jumped on her and said, oh my god. Women always
say they're lucky. Men never say they're lucky. You made
your own luck. And Tina was actually very thoughtful about it,
(35:11):
and she said, I think timing plays a role in
something as well as luck and talent. And you know,
I always felt like I worked with men who were
not typical and young employees who are not typical. So
how ridiculous would it be to take a typical approach
to anything else. We were upending tradition all the time,
(35:32):
and not just for the sake of doing it, but
because you give somebody a chance, they'll knock themselves out
to show you that they could really do it.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
And we actually talked about it back then. We said,
you know, if somebody's done three or four things and
they're not great, we have empirical evidence they won't be great. Yeah,
but if we give somebody a shot who's never done it,
they could be the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right, And
the only way we're going to find out is to
take a shot, exactly And you continued to do that
through your career.
Speaker 4 (35:58):
A lot of focus was on career. We're eating a
culture that would attract 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 Colbert.
You know, Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices.
Sometimes it was a hothouse atmosphere.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
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 is really remarkable the people you.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
Had, well, a lot of it is sort of what's
the vibe of the place. We always wanted to make
the room for deviancy. I would always say, who's the
odd ballperson, Who's the intern who's going to come running
in with an idea likeyo MTV raps. That was like
a twenty one year old intern who came up with
a demo in his basement. Because we had these networks,
there was a lot of room for experimentation. Everything you
(36:42):
made didn't have to be really tightly organized. There was
a lot of room for improvisation and innovation. If you
have a hallmark for that, people would want to step
up and follow us. You just try and have good standards,
provide guard rails for people, celebrate risk. You know, we
give creative people a lot of freedom.
Speaker 3 (36:59):
One of the people who was crucial tim TV's early
success it was former NPR CEO y'all, Mom, y'arell and
I went way back. We even had a show called
album Tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live. But y'all
had an incredible eye for programming, and when MTV had
to think beyond music videos, he played a crucial role
(37:19):
for me.
Speaker 6 (37:20):
It was a great transition from the radio world to
the television world because there were so many similarities. If
you had picked me up and tried to drop me
into a broadcast network to do scripted filmed entertainment, I
would have, I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately
we all learned a lot of lessons about the fragility
(37:42):
of this brand new thing, music videos, and that was
something that we all kind of had to learn in
real time. It was humbling, it was embarrassing, and do.
Speaker 3 (37:51):
You think it stopped working.
Speaker 6 (37:53):
There was so much heat around music videos at the time,
and there were so many people watching and being really
enthralled by. But I think ultimately it became less interesting.
It was television and we were using a lot I
was at least using a lot of radio rules for
a different medium, and people were making four minute decisions
(38:14):
of what they were going to watch and not thirty
minute and sixty minute or ninety minute decisions, and ultimately
had to switch strategy to go to content that people
would watch for longer periods of time, long form, and
that was very controversial at the time, but you.
Speaker 3 (38:31):
Know it worked. What were your first shows?
Speaker 6 (38:33):
And we started with The Week in Rock and hiring
Kurt Loader from Rolling Stone magazine and taking the MTV
news segments and making it a half hour show and
that worked, and then Rockumentaries and Specials as the second.
The third was Club MTV is let's do an American
band stand for today.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
Let's play music videos.
Speaker 6 (38:53):
And hire Downtown Julie Brown.
Speaker 3 (38:54):
That was a hit.
Speaker 6 (38:56):
Every show that went on did well. Then we're going
to really cocky and think, man, we really know how
to make hits. But I think it was more reflection
of the fact that music videos at the time had
run their course. The most controversial one remote Control of
the Game Show, and all the research came back said
you can't do a game show. And I remember saying
(39:17):
to our good friend Marshall Cohen, we worked with an
MTV research guru, Yes, I said, I think we're asking
the wrong question. The question should be if we were
to do a game show, what would it look like?
And the answer came back, well, it should be irreverence
would be crazy. We used all the information and hired
(39:38):
Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a
regular on the show and it was a monster. But
the inditial research the way we asked it indicated that
it would have been a disaster.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
It worked out great for us. Were you able to
sell that to advertisement? Yep? Oh I loved it? Oh yeah, yeah.
So MTV started to play with new formats, but as
Freshtram remembers it, the limited budgets were actually an engine
for creativity.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
We couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix
or changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We
just couldn't play the top ten videos all day long.
There was always new shows coming around. We would add
shows unpackaged music and like on hip hop music with
the OMTV raps and so forth, and it kind of
came down to the real world day. That was in
nineteen ninety three, and that was like, well, we've tried
(40:28):
everything else, we should probably do a soap opera. Because
young people are interested in what other young people are doing,
so they came in with a presentation to me and
we had the 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
(40:51):
and stuck some cameras in there and bring these kids
in and then let them live and then we'll post
it afterwards and make it into a show. And that
was That was sort of the birth of reality. It
was an idea that was not born of brilliance but
born of cheapskateness.
Speaker 3 (41:06):
MTV was a success story finally, but it wasn't long
before the competition started circling. Here's Tom with the story
of what motivated us to start VH one.
Speaker 4 (41:16):
Ted Turner want to come in and basically p in
our parade. He said he was going to launch a
music channel that played none of the Devil's music. Let
me say first that the cable music channel lasted one
hundred and 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 have a second music channel,
and we made the case the cable operators, we have
(41:37):
a second music channel. You don't want to add the
Ted Turner channel. That's just going to go head to
head against the one you already have. Add VH one,
which we 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 to
you on a combo basis. Basically it was free if
you already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms
(41:59):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:07):
Of course, launching EH one was one thing. It was
a savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential
and fighting off Ted Turner channel. But once that was over,
the team had to figure out what to do with it.
The network struggled for years. Ratings were abysmal, so John Sykes,
who had left MTV by then, was called back to
lead the charge. Tom Preston calls job says, come home,
(42:33):
need you to fix a VH one. What did you do?
Speaker 5 (42:36):
As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much
of the stuff. A brand is only valuable if there
is an underserved segment of the audience that needs it.
Hip hop was starting to happen. ALTERNI music was exploding,
and a lot of the traditional rock bands in R
and B bands were being pushed out and they're going
like kind off of the cliff, And I said, there's
a market here. Because having run a record company, a
(42:58):
publishing company, we were sieved. And these artists that used
to be called middle of the road back then, but
now they were actually vibrant pop bands. They didn't have
a place. And then I saw who are the most
powerful buyers, young adults, young college graduates. Here's a generation
it's grown up on MTV. They have money, they're affluent,
and they have nowhere to go. So I was as
(43:20):
excited actually about VH one as I was about MTV.
I mean, MTV is iconic and it will be there forever.
But the other thing about VH one to me also
was it was my own and I knew if I fell,
it would be on me. It would be sykes out.
If VH one fails, they used to call it VH
point one. It was the rating of it yet and
(43:40):
for those people who ratings, ratings are from zero to whatever,
and point one's of zero to one hundred VH one
is the ugly step child at MTV Networks. I used
to say it was nails out the backseat of a
car to put flats in the tires of the cars
behind us, because we didn't want aybody to compete with MTV.
But I said, now it quietly has thirty million homes.
(44:01):
There's a market for this. And I looked in the room.
Half the people like or a sleep. Iic to call
that quit and staying. They had a job, but they
didn't believe in the product, but they were profecting a paycheck.
So I said, listen, if you don't believe in this,
it's okay. We won't make a big thing and we're
going to fire you, but we'll work out a package
and you should leave because we need people going to
believe in this. There's a market for this, and I
(44:22):
believe that this is gonna be a three hundred million
dollar business in the next three years if we all
focus on that. So people came to me and said,
I don't want to do this. I didn't think they
I don't think they would come like, I don't think
you're right. I'm like, okay, well, thank you, good bye.
They all came back three years later looking for jobs.
But it was about believing in yourself, believing your idea,
(44:45):
hiring people around you who are better than you at
executing what they did. And we put together a team
at VH one hooping under run, NBC, Nintendo, Bravo. We
put together an all star trip. So it made me
proud and working with some of the red I mean
some Redstone nineteen ninety four was on his game. You
walked in and said, here's my plan, here's what I
(45:07):
want to do, and he'd just said, fine, go do it.
If you don't do it, I'll fire you. I said,
it's all I want to know. Just give me the rope,
and he did. It was a great nine years. We
shattered all the records there, but all good businesses, you
got to reinvent them otherwise they paid it off.
Speaker 3 (45:22):
MTV was the starting point of a cable revolution. The
channel and the creative engine we built gave birth to
so much more. Here's Tom talking about just that topic.
Speaker 4 (45:32):
I was ambitious and I was highly motivated for this
to succeed. I thought that we were in this TV revolution.
We had the wind at our back. It was all
going to come true. It 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 right place at the right time,
and this was sort of my destiny. I was going
(45:54):
to meet my opportunity.
Speaker 3 (45:55):
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 Judian Grath, who built MTV
and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What
drove that and where did that vision come from? And
how did you get there?
Speaker 4 (46:15):
There's a compliment to you, Bob, I mean, you are
the guy I always keep your eye on the consumer,
find out what the consumer wanted. 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. And we would
continue to launch new networks Comedy Central or TV Land,
(46:35):
and 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 and
India was actually very transferable because I really 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
(46:58):
television networking company, and we rolled out not just MTV,
but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a lot of others
right down through Africa. 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 all was a creative machine,
which again was something that you put in at the
(47:19):
inception of the company.
Speaker 3 (47:22):
When we first started MTV, it wasn't just entertainment. We
built a channel to be the voice of young America
and that included doing good and my time there. MTV
made its mark with massive events with important missions, an
Sky International, Band Aid, Farm Aid and of course Live Aid.
But it was rock the vote that truly took the
channel into politics, and some say even got a president elected.
(47:45):
Here's Judy talking about it. You've always done good, rocked
the Vote, juice or lose AIDS awareness. How did you
think about that inside of a company, and how do
you think of it for you as a as.
Speaker 7 (47:58):
A person, Well, you know, inside MTV, it was very
interesting when we decided to get into you know, and
certainly Rock the Vote was not our idea politics Jeff
air off, So Jeff was very passionate about this, and
it sort of grew into Rock the Vote. And I
remember talking to Tom Preston, with whom I had an
extraordinarily great creative relationship, and this was one of the
(48:22):
rare instances where we had a blowout. Really we really
didn't agree, but I listened to what he said. He said,
this is a terrible idea. It's not going to work.
This is an entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're
going to get laughed out of town. We do not
have permission to do this. There's nothing about us that
(48:44):
says we should be stepping anywhere near an election or
voting or any of this. So I went back and
I thought about it. A little bit, and I thought, okay,
this is where I come into the picture. I think
I grew up in an era where one of the
many things I loved about music was it's social commentary,
and it is about the times we live in and
it's about all the things that affect you in a
(49:05):
very deep way. And I thought, I think there's a
way to do this where it will be engaging. This
was not about telling young people you need to vote.
That's not the way I looked at it at all.
It was saying to people who make big decisions in
this country, this is a generation that is disengaged from you,
and you need to address them on their turf, their way,
(49:27):
and we'll invite you to do that. That's your shot.
It wasn't about trying to be parental or any of
that kind of stuff to them, or give them boring
facts or anything like that. And so we got as
smart as we could get. And I think I didn't
tell anybody. That's another thing. I sent Tabitha's sore and
Tabitha went to New Hampshire and she called me at
(49:47):
like midnight she said, you know, I got up here
in like a bunch of candidates are like, what's MTV
And she said, and then a couple of them like
got back off the bus, primarily Bill Clinton, and said
I'll talk to you. And then we were sort of
off and running. And you know that partnered with incredible
creative work on those rock to Vote spots, I mean
(50:09):
Madonna wrapped in a flag.
Speaker 3 (50:11):
Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston quickly embraced the idea.
Speaker 4 (50:14):
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
had some kind of social purpose associated with what we
would do, and we had one hundred and sixty eight
hours a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It
also turned out it legitimized us in the eyes of
advertisers who formerly wouldn't come near us, like American Express.
But most importantly, the audience liked it.
Speaker 7 (50:36):
And then fast forward to you know, we're going to
throw an inaugural ball that's not official and see if
anybody comes to the party, and our EM's going to
play and Vogue's going to play. We tried to make
it as spirited as MTV, but ad a little bit
of gravitas, if you will, and meaning you know like
you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and
(50:57):
you deserve to be heard and listen to, and we
were going to help you.
Speaker 3 (51:04):
MTV was a wonderful ride from the very beginning. My
co founders and I knew we were doing something that
was important to culture, but we had no idea we
were going to change culture. MTV change TV. It changed music,
it changed graphic design, and it certainly changed my life.
No matter how old I get or whatever else I've done,
(51:25):
MTV is still an important chapter of my life, and
all of us as co founders are still very much
a very tight family. But the truth is, looking back,
I think we all feel the same way Tom Freston
felt when he joined the team.
Speaker 4 (51:39):
I was happy to have a job. I couldn't believe
anyone was going to hire me.
Speaker 3 (51:45):
And lucky for all of us, we all kept getting
hired again and again. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
Speaker 1 (51:55):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production iHeartRadio. 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 Etoor for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael
Azar for their recording help are editor Ryan Murdoch and
of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone
(52:18):
who helped bring this show to your ears.
Speaker 3 (52:21):
Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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