July 25, 2019 • 43 mins
It isn’t hard to call Fred Seibert a creative genius: from his early role in shepherding the look of MTV and crafting a brand image for Nickelodeon, to running Hanna-Barbera, to commissioning some of Cartoon Networks most iconic modern cartoons (Powerpuff Girls! Johnny Bravo!), Fred knows how to bottle Magic. But a big part of his secret is applying Math to the mix. Tune in as he reveals how to spot talent, the secret to great logo design, and why creatives need to count more
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at my
Heart Radio. When we first got to MTV, 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? Are we gonna do jingles?
Went oh, no, we can't do jingles? And I said,
(00:23):
well what do we do? He said, how about this?
Imagine It's like a picture of a cow, you know,
a drawn 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.
(00:43):
I went, oh my god, I can do anything I want.
I am Bob Pittman. And this is Math and Magic
Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we or the
insights side of marketing the creative side, and how they
come together to create the truly remarkable ideas and successes. Today,
(01:07):
on this episode, we have someone who is a true iconoclast.
Somebody would call him a Frankie creative genius, Fred Cyber.
Welcome Fred, Fred and I were part of the birth
of MTV. Were at the first twenty four hour day
movie pace service the movie channel before that, playing around
(01:29):
with the concept of making a channel the thing instead
of just letting the shows set the image of the network.
Bred and I also shared roots and radio as our start.
Fred gets most of the credit for the original groundbreaking
look unfield of MTV. He also helped Jerry Laborn when
she created the first tween a network, which is Nickelodeon.
I can still remember when he pitched the brand image
(01:51):
for Nickelodeon and it was like orange, that's it Orange,
And of course, all these years later it was as
impactful as the look of MTV. Bred went on to
do so much more in branding, network creative and a
major career and a major influence and animation from his
time as the head of Hanna Barbera to his own Frederator.
He also discovered and developed some great talent one of
(02:13):
his superpowers. We're here to get into all that and more,
but first, Fred, we're gonna do you in sixty seconds.
Just give us quick reactions, just to warm us up. So, Fred,
do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs, hoodies or button downs?
Button downs? Power puff Girls or Johnny Bravo. Oh, definitely
(02:33):
power puff Girls. Mets are Yankees, Martha Quinn or Nina Blackwood,
Martha cup Or Cone Cone Disney or Hannah Barbara Barbara.
For sure, it's about to get harder. What's your favorite city?
New York City? Favorite cartoon? Bugs Bunny. What would you
eat for your last meal? Probably the same thing I
(02:54):
eat for my first meal, some yogurt and some chicken.
And you've always eaten met since I've known you. Smartest
you know? Bob Pittman, Oh, right, childhood? He wrote, that's
tough too. I don't know my parents. I guess first
job working in my parents pharmacy. Favorite book, Dashell Hammett
anything that he wrote. Quote to Live by something by
(03:15):
Winston Churchill about success is after a lot of failures?
Worth bad or fashion trend you've participated in? Probably my
khakis and white button down shirts. You've never changed. God
bless you. Who would play you in a movie? Everyone
says that I look like the late Harold Remus. What
would be the title of your memoir? He tried really hard,
(03:36):
proud professional achievement. There's nothing I've ever done that I
didn't have a great time doing it. So how about
this creating the catalog for a jazz label called Mosaic Records.
God bless you. What's your favorite ice cream flavor? A
mixture of vanilla and chocolate yogurt flavor? Plain? Best live
concert b B King at the Fillmore East done? Excellent?
(03:58):
Was that was a good set of questions. But before
we go back to your beginnings, let's talk about people,
because I do think this is one of your superpowers.
Let's talk about people who you hired, mentored, or help develop.
Seth McFarlane from Family Guy, famed Judy McGrath who went
on to be CEO of MTV Networks, who, by the way,
has been here. She said. The interview went is what
music do you like? She said somebody? You said wrong
(04:20):
And the rest of the time you talked and she
got the jobs she said Bruce Springsteen and I said wrong.
And Foley who helped build Showtime Programming and they headed that. Well,
you developed her? Why we all did? But all did?
But you know, you've had a really great track record.
How do you spot talent? You know, it's a really
mystical process. When you asked me to come and talk
(04:44):
to you about working with you. I said, you know,
I only watched TV. I don't make and you said,
come talk to me anyway, and we had a quick
cup of coffee like at the Four Seasons or something
like that, and I didn't think another thing about it
until you called and said you're hired, and it was like,
I wonder why. And I think that almost everybody that
I've met with it's that same kind of process. Basically,
(05:06):
it's having a conversation with somebody and go, you know,
I just want to spend more time with them. And
it really comes down to did they say something or
did we have a dialogue that made me go, boy,
I would really like to help this person. So how
do you empower them to develop breakthrough not ordinary ideas.
(05:27):
What I feel like I've done is one let people
know that my major goal at work is to have fun,
because I think you can make money from having fun.
The second thing is to provide structure in a way
that doesn't seem overly structured. You know, in my TV days,
it was making sure that spots were thirty seconds and
(05:47):
not a second longer or shorter. When you and some
of our other colleges say it doesn't matter how long
they are, Like, I don't know, discipline seems like a
good idea. Or when we made cartoons to begin with,
and I was in love with Looney Tunes, I said, well,
it's making the same length as Looney Tunes. They said why,
I said, because Looney Tunes are the greatest cartoons ever made.
(06:08):
What I found over the years is that by giving
people structure and almost nothing else other than sort of
a philosophy of where you'd like them to go, if
they don't want to be there, they leave, they quit.
They don't vibe with you one way or the other.
And if they do, they've sort of accepted the structures
and the strictures, and as long as I don't over
(06:30):
note them. In our business, it's all about the notes
that you give and all that type of stuff. In
the cartoon business, I just would say to people, well,
what cartoon do you really want to make? If you
have one you really want to make, will do it.
And if you tell me you have fifty you want
to make, I don't want to do it. It means
you don't care about anything. So I'm just looking for
people who care about something. When you were talking about Judy,
(06:54):
and I asked her who she liked, and she said Bruce,
And I said, wrong, because I don't have a good
thing about Bruce. The fact she cared, you know, the
Bruce haters are coming after you right now. I believe me,
They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact
that she cared meant all the difference to me in
the world, not that I agreed. You've got these people.
How would you describe your coaching technique getting the best
(07:15):
out of people? I asked them to tell me what
they want to do. The way that I sort of
think about it is there's a big circle of ball,
and everything in it in that ball is what I love.
And then they have their own circle in their own ball,
and it's everything that they love. And I said, why
don't we just like find the places where we touch,
just where we kiss, and then we're both gonna be really,
(07:36):
really happy. And the only thing I want is like
for us all to be happy. Well we've been able
to do for a living over our lifetime is kind
of magical in that I think that what I've done
my whole life is make people happy. The people that
I work with want people to be in love with
the work that they do because people are really passionate
about their work. I never hired anybody who actually knew
(07:58):
what they were doing, that had on it before. That
was one of our hallmark. We had these creative promo departments.
Once people came in and started saying, well, I worked
on promos over here, like, I didn't want to hire them.
If they were a wonderful writer, that was great. If
they were wonderful director, that was great. One of the
earliest people I hired had just come out of film
school and his first job was cutting negatives film negatives
(08:21):
at a porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you know,
like whatever, So let's jump back a little bit. I
want to get some insights from your youth about you.
Your parents were both pharmacists, owned the pharmacy and Long Island,
you worked there, and you were going to Columbia to
become a pharmacist. Yeah. Anything in that, what is it
tell us about you? I have no idea other than that.
I was very influenced by my parents. Everyone in my
(08:42):
family are pretty much scientists. There's biochemists, there's neurosurgeons, there's
other pharmacists, chemists, and I decided at six I was
going to be a chemist, and you know, I would
blow up the basement with you know, experiments and all
that type of stuff. But when I was twelve, a
lightning bolt struck that changed my life. It's like this,
you know the Beatles movie that's just come out yesterday.
(09:03):
It was like that, And in fact it was the Beatles.
It was the day they went on Ed Sullivan, and
my life changed. I went and bought a guitar, taught
myself guitar. I was already a musician, I started bands,
I did all the things that everybody did. But I
was a chemist and I was a science math kid,
and I went to college for that. And I'm in
(09:24):
a zoology class one day where you know, we had
been dissecting frogs great and the next week we're going
to dissect rats. So I get there and all the
rats are alive. And the first thing the zoology teacher
said is now I'll show you how to kill the
rat before you dissect it. And I looked at my
lab partner and I said, you know, I like the
Beatles more than this. And I walked out and I
(09:45):
walked right to the college radio station. My path changed instantly.
So your parents, who are the pharmacists. What do they
say this, Oh, great, Fred, you're leaving this wonderful career
to go be a radio something. We did not have
a decent conversation for the next ten years. Actually, really yeah,
they were very, very upset. When they became less upset
is when I went to work in radio and I
(10:06):
was forced to wear a suit to work, and they thought, oh,
it'll all be okay. Well, actually, just make you feel better.
My parents told me for the first ten years I
was where I can get out of radio. That's a
crazy business. Go back to college, man, each college should
be a normal kid. And then about in my thirties
sometimes they said, gosh, I sure, I'm glad you didn't
listen to us exactly. Well, I finally said to my folks,
I'm doing everything you taught me, all the ways you
(10:29):
taught me to do it. I just took my own
path in doing it. And they finally sort of calmed down.
And even though pretty much for my entire career until
I started making cartoons, they had no idea what I
did for a living. After you're leaving this possible career
as a pharmacist, you eventually wound up as the promotions
director at a country music station w h N in
New York. One of your great supporters, who I had
(10:51):
worked with and who I love dearly, Dale Pond, recommended
you to me pre MTV. It was in the early
days of pay TV. You came over to join us
in the cable revolution, at the beginning of the cable
network space. Why did you make that jump? Well, you
know this is gonna sound flattering. I did it completely
because of you. Dale had left the country music radio
(11:12):
station and left me alone. And the guy I was
working for at that time in radio, I had no
respect for whatsoever. Pretty much anything I did, he told
me it wasn't any good. So you called me one day,
you said you want to be in televisioned and no,
You said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
the business, and there was one article about you about
(11:33):
your promotion at w NBC. We're w NBC and we're
gonna make you rich. 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
(11:53):
just talked to is so much smarter than my boss
in radio. He goes, what do you think about that?
I said, well, here's what Dale talk 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. That's what that's flattering. So any
career lessons and that for the folks listening, go work
for the person, not the job. I tell people that
(12:14):
all the time working for smart people. Has always worked,
working for Ted Turner, working for Scott Sasso, working for you.
I would go in at ground level at a job
and I always came out at the top floor, and
then I go off on my own for a while,
and then when I screwed that up, I go back,
you know, to a job. We started experimenting with network
(12:35):
branding with Movie Channel, although the Movie Channel has been
lost in history, so it's really some pioneering work done there.
How would you describe that. I mean, that was very
early and we were about the only people that were
doing that approach to let's make the network the star,
not the program. The stuff in eighty when we started
together May eighth. Wow, what a memory. Yeah, the average
(12:58):
home in America had to annals of television. I lived
in New York City, so we had seven, but you know,
the average home had two. However, in the same town
that had seven TV stations, they were about seventy seventy
five radio stations. And over the years before radio had
learned to compete because they only each had a sliver
(13:20):
of the thing. And what that effectively came out to
is they each had personalities. You and I had either
the benefit or the curse of having come out of
that business where we had to compete like crazy. At
a television station, they just turn on one light switch
and the other switch opens a hole in the ceiling
and money drops on their head. Because it was just
easy to make money in television. So we started from
(13:45):
the premise that you had to have a personality. It
turned out that in television that was called an innovation.
And by the way, we were probably about thirty years
too soon. Yeah, but indeed that was the demise of
TV as we know it, when the loyalty was to
the program, not the network. When you asked me to
come back and work on Nickelodeon. There were only thirty
(14:05):
cable networks, which we thought was amazing, and that Nickelodeon
was number thirty and people are like, what do you
mean only thirty? What you know? And and there I
have to tell you what. At MTV time, I was
so freaked out that there were thirty that the resulting
work came out because I was like, oh my god,
(14:27):
Oh my god, what are we gonna do to stand out?
What are we gonna do to stand out? And a
lot of it just came out of the panic of
getting lost in the mush, So let's move on to
starting MTV. The board would not approve the idea, but
I did get us a budget to develop it in
that period. Did you ever think we weren't going to
get approval to launch MTV? How did you believe in it?
(14:47):
Truth be told. 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 crummy 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 was too naive to know that you
(15:10):
had to have faith, like you told me it was
gonna happen. Was it youth totally? 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. I think that's really true. Well,
you know, we went to the head of Warner Communications
(15:32):
and American Express that on the joint venture Warner m
X where we got started, and we got a meeting
with Steve Ross, who was the CEO of of Warner,
along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And we
got Jim Robinson and his deputy Louke Gershner from American Express.
I don't know if you remember, but we were worried
that when we showed these videos too, from American Express
(15:53):
called so he said, let's find the tamest one. I
think we found Olivia Newton John as THEDO to talk
about the launch of of MTV we if you remember,
but in the meeting, they said, do you have to
play that kind of stuff, implying Olivian Newton John was too.
But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay,
(16:13):
I'm in from my half. Howbout Steve? So we locked out.
Let's go to the launch of MTV and talk about
some of the things that really, I think still stand
out today. The logo. We had no money for a logo.
I was probably the cheapest man in the world and
had expectations you could create a lot out of nothing.
Well we had, we really started, but not like venture
(16:33):
capital guys. Well again, here's the metric I use. A
guy comes to see me for a job in the
promo department from CBS Channel two in New York, and
I said, how much do you get paid? And he
was getting paid twice as much as I was. That
was the metric. We all earned intern wages. If somebody
had a dollar and we were asked him to spend
ten cents, we knew they'd be bad. We found people
(16:55):
that had a penny and we gave him the dime.
They thought they had all the money to people all
the time. Absolutely, Just hold on a second, because we've
got so much more to talk about. We'll be back
after a quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
We're here with Fred Cyberg. So talk about the logo.
(17:17):
You set out, you got the mission. You and I
had these discussions. I've naively said, we'll do our own
Star Wars logo because everybody has a Star Wars loging
and 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 cheap. So tell me about the logo. Well,
the logo itself actually came about because I was too
(17:37):
scared to go to someone famous. I wanted to go
to Milton Glazer, who was one of the most famous
graphic designers of the last fifty years. And I was like, oh,
well he's gonna be really expensive and we'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 years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had
(17:58):
just started a little design firm behind find a tie
Chee studio above Bigelow Chemists on Sixth Avenue. And Frank
had been the guy, because he's a year older than
me who would 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,
and I knew that Frank loved music. So I go
down to his little tie chee studio place and I go,
(18:19):
will you guys design a logo for this rock channel
we're starting? And they're 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,
and boy do I wish I had that memo. So
for a year they designed logos and I just rejected everything,
(18:43):
probably five hundred designs. So finally they come in the
office one day. We're actually going to go on the
air soon, right, and we still don't have anything, and
they bring up pile and I'm like, no, no, I'm
going through the whole pile. And at the bottom of
the pile is a he's of tracing paper. Remember that,
you know the paper you could see through and it
(19:03):
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 kind of
He and I now disagree. But what I had heard
is that the woman. There's three partners, and one of
them wasn't really a designer. She was a production manager
(19:25):
and she had done it, and Frank saw it and
hated him, 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 it
was good story. The only reason I said yes is
that Dale had taught me one lesson about design. You
need to dominate the space, and that big block g
(19:47):
M 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,
and in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
You know, a logo is supposed to be a thing
that you make and it never changes. So they come
(20:11):
to my office with about ten different boards. Everything was
on boards in those days, and then a little board
where Frank had illustrated ten or twelve of them on
acrylic overlays. 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 finally
(20:32):
we had to do something. And I looked at them.
I'm just staring at all of them. They were all like,
really kind of cool, and I said, why don't we
just use them all at once? All the time. I
don't know who I was talking to, and I was
like what I said, Well, we're television, we move, shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(20:52):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. The other thing you did when you
did those promos, the great stuff, you laid the music
bed down first and cut the music, and everybody else
in that era people forget this. They don't realize that
(21:13):
was an innovation that everybody else did the video first
and then rolled to music undress. So I got that
all from Dale. I was an audio guy, and I
was a really good audio guy. I was a mixer
and all that engineer. 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
(21:36):
guy tells me, no, you have to first do the picture.
And then he goes, Fred, we own the audio studio.
It's free. If you get it right in the audio studio,
then the three hour video studio will go much faster.
By the time we got to MTV, I realized that
he was absolutely right. I was hiring basically kids, you know,
(21:59):
one just out of school, and we didn't have any money.
Now fast forward twenty years. I go to MTV one day.
I'm running their online business for a little while, and
I go, who's the promo department now? And they tell
me and I go down and I introduced myself to
a couple of people in the one you what what
you're the one? Well, what are you talking about? They said,
(22:22):
they make us do the audio first, we're filmed. People
like why. So twenty years later they were still doing it.
But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm and energy.
It brought the backbeat of rock and roll into those spots.
Everything was beat. You know, I'm in radio. I love audio.
People don't realize how much of your emotion is not
(22:45):
driven by what you're looking at. That's what you're hearing.
I used to joke all the time that we could
make the spots black and they would have the same
effect horror films. You go in the next room, listen
to turn off the sound. It's not very scary. So
let me. I'm not to spend all of our time
on MTV, but I want to hit one other thing here.
The cable operators wanted us to pay them. As you say,
(23:06):
we had intern wages and no money. So our good
friend Mao Stunts, who actually had a Harvard MBA, said
we should use consumer pull. What the hell is consumer pull?
And he goes will get the consumer to demand it. Great,
So you and Tom Preston came over to my apartment
one night to show me a Cable Brats spot. Embedded
(23:28):
in the Cable Brats was this memorable line, I want
my MTV. 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
(23:51):
really horrendous tasting. He had sports stars like Mickey Mantel
and Joe Namath crying like I want my babo, and
he redid it with Mick Jagger and you know whoever,
David Bowie and Pete Towns and all that type of stuff,
and they showed us this spot. So we went and
(24:13):
we pitched it to you. I think you saw the
feeling of it right away. 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 to
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
(24:33):
two million dollars. Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a
strategist and a creative guy. And as a strategist, what
he understood is that we had no money to spend
on this app. And he did an incredible data dump
of where could MTV be put on against how much
(24:58):
media cost in particular market, and he did three or
four or five cross tabs to figure out the most
likely places that if we put on these spots that
we would get people calling and making the cable operators insane.
And that's exactly what happened. He literally took what Mayo
said and put on the beginning of the spot. He
(25:22):
had Pete Towns in doing it. America demand your MTV.
Then people go, I want my MTV, I want my MTV,
and then Pete Towns and again with a telephone going
call your cable operator and say I want and God knows,
I think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy.
(25:43):
Within four weeks, I had a guy stopped me at
a cable show cable operator and said, I hate you,
and I go, why why do you hate me? And
he goes, because my phone rings all day with those
people saying I want my m t BA can't get
any work done. Demand is bad. We reverse that demand
end curve. And by the way, I just sort of
flip it. A couple of years, one of the major
(26:04):
cable operators decided they were going to take MTV off
the air. And you called up and you said, we
need new spots, and I went, what's that. You said,
we have to get people to keep them from turning
off MTV, And we went and filmed a lot of
rock stars, half in shadow and all in black and
white going there trying to take away your MTV. And
(26:24):
we put those on the air, and lo and behold,
they did not cancel our channels. God bless him. So
let's jump to Jerry Labor. Let's jump to Nickelodeon. You
mentioned Nickelodeon was number thirty. It was a toddler's channel,
invented to help Time Warner Cable get some cable franchises.
It's exactly the way that Netflix uses kids on their
(26:45):
service now. It is a come on that no family
can resist and for us had basically no value. We
have this idea, we're gonna turn into a tween channels. Actually,
Jerry said, this is great. An old school teacher, I
got a great idea. We relaunched it to that point.
Only MTV had an image as a network and your mission.
You need to do with Nickelodeon what we did with MTV.
(27:07):
How on earth did you end up with Orange? After
the MTV logo thing, which was really the most visible
manifestation of the creative work, designers came out of the
woodwork wanting to work with us. We found somebody up
in Boston, a guy called Tom Corey and his partner
Scott Nash. We asked him to come up with some
ideas for logo. So they came up with a bunch
(27:28):
of things, and all of them were pretty standard logos,
truth be told, I picked a really standard one. We
were about to go in and pitch it when Alan said,
you know, our thing is this moving logo, and they
have one here. Why didn't we pick that? I said, well,
it's orange. It's only one color. And so we called
Tom and we go, how come like orange? Like you said?
(27:50):
He goes, well, you know this is the color. It's
uh pantone O to one and it is not found
in nature. Anything we put it on it will stand
out from that. So we go in to pitch it
to Jerry and her team and she's like, but you're
the MTV guys, how come we don't get lots of colors?
(28:11):
And I think you said probably something similar and we
just o and I think we just tap danced really
hard and at that point you were willing to give
us our heads. And the thing that was really brilliant
about their solution is that it wasn't an orange logo.
It was white type that was always exactly the same.
(28:35):
One of the key elements of the logos. You have
to have something that is fixed. But the orange thing
ended up being thousands of different shapes around it, and
sometimes they were real shapes, like a boy riding a
bicycle or a girl's head, and sometimes it was just
an abstract design, a blob, a splat color burst, you know,
(28:57):
or something like that, and we realized that we could
have fun using it. The thing about designers is they
hate the work that anyone else has done. So you
give them a logo that somebody else designed, the first
thing they're gonna want to do is change it. And
what we did with MTV is basically the m became
(29:17):
a canvas for artists, so that any artists could put
their own imprint on it and not feel like it
wasn't theirs. And the shape thing at Nickelodeon gave every
artist a chance to be themselves and it worked. We
wanted these networks to feel like a human. We wanted
to have a personality. So let's jump we've talked about
Fred Cybert maybe two point oh, let's go to Red
(29:39):
Cyber three point oh animation. You went on to be
president of Hanna Barbera. You had your own animation studio,
you began this living expert on animation. How the hell
did you get interested in animation? Where did that come from? Well?
I always love cartoons as a kid, the exact same
way that several years later I fell in love with
Rock and Roll. I remember buying a Bugs Bun t
(30:00):
shirt when I was in college and thinking it was
the coolest thing, you know, in the world. When we
first got to MTV, 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? I said, are we gonna do jingles? He went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles. And I said, what do we do?
(30:20):
He said, how about this? Imagine It's like a picture
of a cow, you know, a drawn 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,
(30:42):
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. So in that process I
started talking to lots of people who did animation. I'm
sort of a curious guy, and I just asked them
a million questions and a few of them started telling
me how the cartoon business works. So I started reading
(31:02):
books about the history of the cartoon business. So one day,
Nickelodeon comes to me, takes me to breakfast and said,
you know, we've been licensing all of our programming. I
said yeah. They said, you know, it's getting really expensive
because the more viewers we get, the more they want
to charge us. And you know, our most popular cartoon
is this thing from England called Danger Mouse. We think
(31:24):
we are going to pay enough that we ought to
start thinking about making our own. I said, oh great,
and they said what should we do? Silence? I go
what They said, Well, what do you think we should
do for cartoons? I said, why are you asking me?
Will you do our animation? I said, well, one I
don't animate to anything, and two I essentially take your
(31:46):
logo and wiggle it for ten seconds. Please. So well,
you're the only person I know, I said, okay, Well
I think you should make cartoons the way Looney Tunes did,
and I just start improvising and they didn't want to
do it the way that I wanted to do it.
And you know, me like, if they don't take my idea,
I get really upset. And as a consultant, they never
quite take your idea. So long story short, I helped
(32:09):
them make a deal on a library of cartoons, and
I wanted a bonus, and they wouldn't give me the bonus,
and I got so mad that I just started complaining
to everybody. And one of those people I complained to
with Scott's ass of the president of Turner Entertainment. He said,
how did you do that deal? You make logos? I said, yeah,
but it was logical. I did X, Y and Z.
(32:29):
You know. All that time was fine, and they were
Hanna Barbara cartoons. Eighteen months later, he calls me up
and he said, hey, you know, we just bought Hanna Barbera.
I said, yeah, I heard I read in the paper.
He goes, why don't you come round Hanna Barbera. I'm like,
huh what I said, Look, I don't know anything about cartoons,
be just don't worry about it. It's a disaster there.
You can't go wrong. If you don't make a hit,
(32:51):
they haven't had a hit since the Smurfs, nobody will
blame you. And if you do have a hit, everyone
don't think you're a genius. So here was the kicker.
I literally look at my watch, and on my watch
are four Hanna Barbera characters, completely by coincidence. It's ten
thirty five in the morning. I said, I have ninety days.
I have to wind down the agency's will wait the
(33:11):
first time I walk in the Hanna Barbara building, I'm
president of the company. I made two cartoons, full series,
ten million dollars disasters. They fail like immediately, two Stupid
Dogs and Swat Cats the Radical Squadron. Okay, yeah, So
I go back to Ted Turner. I go, Ted, I
(33:31):
know I'm out of budget, but I need another ten
million dollars. He goes what I said, Well, you know,
I I gotta get you some hits. I need another
ten million dollars. What are you gonna do with the
ten million dollars? I said, I'm gonna make forty eight
short cartoons, because well, you just had two failures, Like,
what makes you think you're gonna where. I said, Ted,
if I do something forty eight times, don't you think
(33:52):
I'll do something right? And you know the natural entrepreneur.
And Ted was like, you're right, go for it. And
that was that. And the hits were Power Puff Girls,
Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Courage, The Cowardly Dog, Cow and Chicken,
and I Am Weasel. So you're at Hanna Barbera. You
(34:13):
now have a hit. Now you begin to think you're
a animator. Actually, to be honest with you, I figured
that animation was sort of a sideline that I was
going to do for those years, and that was gonna
be it. Ted announces one day that he's selling the company,
and he's selling at the time, Warner I'm one of
those guys that runs around the edge of the field
to get to the goal, like I can't run through
(34:35):
the scrum, and Warner Brothers was a scrum and it
just wasn't the right fit for me. And I figured
I'd come back to New York and go back to
doing the things that I had done in TV. Somehow,
I didn't know how. Somewhere between Judy McGrath herb Scandal
was running Nickelodeon and Tom Freston, who was running MTV Networks.
They said, hey, well, why don't you come back and
be a consultant. I said, I'm never going to be
(34:56):
a consultant again, but I gotta make things like I'm
a maker. They said, okay, well you can make cartoons
for Nickelodeon as long as you come and consult with
us once a month. I'm like, okay, I could do that,
and I don't care if you listen to my ideas.
And I started Frederator. You know in rest his history,
So this is a podcast about math and magic. How
(35:17):
do you use both? I didn't know what to do
for m TV because I was the head of promo,
but we had no shows. And in television promos are
watch Bill Cosby in a very special episode Thursday at eight.
We didn't have that. I remember actually going out with
Dale and we go out to the beach and I'm
against it, and I just said walk with me, and
(35:37):
we walked back and forth on the beach for five
or six hours while I tried to figure out what
the promo should be. And I realized that the problem
that MTV had was twofold. One is nobody knew what
the hell it was, and so telling them to watch
this or watch that wasn't gonna be very useful. So
I realized I had to tell them a story. But
(35:58):
I also realized something else that we had learned in radio,
which is at the end of every song, people have
a reason to tune away. So that meant in MTV
every three minutes people could leave. The ratings. Lesson I
had learned was time spent listening was more important than
how many people listen, because if you can get somebody
(36:19):
to listen for fifteen minutes for a few songs and
through the commercial, you made more money. And if they
listen that long, more people were going to listen. So
I realized that at MTV our job was actually not
be cool. We knew how to be cool, not be
crazy and creative, though we were going to do that anyway,
(36:40):
not tell people what time the shows. Wrong, it was
to get them to listen longer, time spent viewing. So
fast forward Nickelodeon. One of the great things about Jerry
is she was very research crazy, and she said, we
don't understand why no one watches. As you remember, one
show had a rating and everything else had hash marks
basically zero, and I said, well, what do you know
(37:00):
should Well, here's what we know. We can't figure it
out of everyone who has cable tunes into Nickelodeon once
a week and stays for less than six minutes. I said, oh, okay,
so that's the problem to solved. You what do you mean,
I said, we just have to get them watching longer.
We go back and we work out a promotional clock,
because the way Nickelodeon did it was like nuts. It
(37:23):
was well, if you have a minute here, we'll put
a promo, and if there's not another minute for two hours,
then we'll do it. There was no organization, and as
you well know, with media, a dependable, organized wheel makes
all the difference. So I go back to Jerry to
the next meeting. I said, Jerry, I found twenty five
million dollars for you to market. What are you talking about?
(37:45):
I said, Well, the whole deal is this time spend
viewing thing. We worked out a clock and there's gonna
be two minutes of promos an hour, and they're gonna
be distributed this way. We'll have to recut some of
the shows, but we we have no new shows. We
have to do that too. Well, where's the twenty million dollars?
And I said, well, you're right, for your spots are
five a piece, and if you add up how many
(38:05):
there are over the course of year, it's twenty five
million dollars. And we're going to use them like an
ad campaign, not like a television channel. We have a
story to tell. I don't care about your shows. The
only thing I care about is your kids that watch
them and the story that we are telling them. I
remember having a fight with my accountant at MTV at
(38:27):
the time and him screaming about how much money you
were giving us, and I said, would it surprise you
to know that I not only know how much every
second of video costs, but I can tell you how
many times that second will run in a year. Fast forward.
He's my CFO. Now. We've been friends ever since because
counting Dale Palm taught me another lesson when in doubt,
(38:49):
count and counting together with a creative approach, makes for
as you say here, math and magic. I almost want
to end the show on them. It's a great way
to do I don't want to ask you just a
couple of more things, though we're talking about creativity, talk
to me about the role of the old dogs like
us and creativity. We sort of know the power of
(39:11):
young fresh thinking. We were that once upon a time.
Do you think there is a role there is this
a young person's game. I think there's always a role
for anybody who gives a crap one way or the other.
I decided a long time ago that I have three
rules for myself that you know, have not always made
me wealthy, but they worked out really nicely. Which is
my first rule is I want to have a good time.
(39:32):
My second rule is I want to make some money.
And my third rule is I want to stand the
people that I work with. And I figure, at any point,
if I get two of those things, like, I'm onto something.
There was a period of time where I was still
fresh enough to that work that we had done in
the early eighties that when I would meet with a
new team of people, I go, well, you know, what
(39:53):
we did at MTV was this, and what we did
at Nickelodeon was that. And I realized I was starting
to be the get off your long guy, you know.
And I decided instead that what I needed to be
was what people had been with me, which is the
favorite uncle. I would go through the point of view
that I had and why I had that point of view,
because it's still as fresh in my mind today as
(40:15):
it was, you know, thirty years ago, forty years ago.
I realized that people need room to be themselves. The
way I call what I do now is I'm the
bumpers in the bowling alley. You might not get a strike,
but you'll never get a gutter ball, And by never
getting a gutter ball, you have the confidence to be
able to do something wonderful. The first person that I
(40:37):
brought into Nickelodeon was a guy that you know called
Scott Webb, who had been a movie channel producer for us,
and he made a bunch of promos and he comes
and shows them to me and I go, what the
hell are you doing? He goes, well, this is what
they wanted. I said, I didn't hire you to do
what they wanted. If they knew what they wanted, they
wouldn't have hired me, and I wouldn't have hired you. Now,
(41:00):
you better start doing the things that you believe in,
not the things that they believe in. And from that
day on, he not only was brilliant, but the thing
that very few people know about Scott Is. He was
legally blind but became the worldwide creative director of Nickelodeon
while being legally blind. Why because what we gave him
the opportunity to do is what he had always imagined
(41:23):
rather than what he was told to do. To me,
that's our role. Our role is to give people the
room to screw up. Because if you let them screw
up and they're good, the next time, it won't be
a screw up, it'll be a home run. Let's move
to the way we always end this podcast. This is
about math and magic, the two keys that come together
(41:44):
to make great marketing and products. And there are experts
and icons in both. Your favorite math person, del Pon,
your favorite magician, the Beatles, Red cyber Genius and friends.
Thanks Bell, Thank you, Bob, thanks for having me. I
really appreciate it. Here's a couple of things I take
(42:06):
away from Fred Cyber. One, when it comes to logos,
Fred's philosophies dominate the space. Two, Fred's secret to great
hiring is to determine in the interview whether he wants
to spend more time with the candidate. It's such a
simple metric, but if he hears them say something intriguing
or wants to help them grow. It's an easy decision.
(42:27):
Three On the flip side, one of Fred's keys to
success has been figuring out who to work for. In
his words, doesn't matter what the job is, work for
the smartest person you can find. It's what made him
take the leap from radio to television and then to
working cartoons for Ted Turner. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
(42:53):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
(43:16):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at my
Heart Radio. When we first got to MTV, 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? Are we gonna do jingles?
Went oh, no, we can't do jingles? And I said,
(00:23):
well what do we do? He said, how about this?
Imagine It's like a picture of a cow, you know,
a drawn 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.
(00:43):
I went, oh my god, I can do anything I want.
I am Bob Pittman. And this is Math and Magic
Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we or the
insights side of marketing the creative side, and how they
come together to create the truly remarkable ideas and successes. Today,
(01:07):
on this episode, we have someone who is a true iconoclast.
Somebody would call him a Frankie creative genius, Fred Cyber.
Welcome Fred, Fred and I were part of the birth
of MTV. Were at the first twenty four hour day
movie pace service the movie channel before that, playing around
(01:29):
with the concept of making a channel the thing instead
of just letting the shows set the image of the network.
Bred and I also shared roots and radio as our start.
Fred gets most of the credit for the original groundbreaking
look unfield of MTV. He also helped Jerry Laborn when
she created the first tween a network, which is Nickelodeon.
I can still remember when he pitched the brand image
(01:51):
for Nickelodeon and it was like orange, that's it Orange,
And of course, all these years later it was as
impactful as the look of MTV. Bred went on to
do so much more in branding, network creative and a
major career and a major influence and animation from his
time as the head of Hanna Barbera to his own Frederator.
He also discovered and developed some great talent one of
(02:13):
his superpowers. We're here to get into all that and more,
but first, Fred, we're gonna do you in sixty seconds.
Just give us quick reactions, just to warm us up. So, Fred,
do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs, hoodies or button downs?
Button downs? Power puff Girls or Johnny Bravo. Oh, definitely
(02:33):
power puff Girls. Mets are Yankees, Martha Quinn or Nina Blackwood,
Martha cup Or Cone Cone Disney or Hannah Barbara Barbara.
For sure, it's about to get harder. What's your favorite city?
New York City? Favorite cartoon? Bugs Bunny. What would you
eat for your last meal? Probably the same thing I
(02:54):
eat for my first meal, some yogurt and some chicken.
And you've always eaten met since I've known you. Smartest
you know? Bob Pittman, Oh, right, childhood? He wrote, that's
tough too. I don't know my parents. I guess first
job working in my parents pharmacy. Favorite book, Dashell Hammett
anything that he wrote. Quote to Live by something by
(03:15):
Winston Churchill about success is after a lot of failures?
Worth bad or fashion trend you've participated in? Probably my
khakis and white button down shirts. You've never changed. God
bless you. Who would play you in a movie? Everyone
says that I look like the late Harold Remus. What
would be the title of your memoir? He tried really hard,
(03:36):
proud professional achievement. There's nothing I've ever done that I
didn't have a great time doing it. So how about
this creating the catalog for a jazz label called Mosaic Records.
God bless you. What's your favorite ice cream flavor? A
mixture of vanilla and chocolate yogurt flavor? Plain? Best live
concert b B King at the Fillmore East done? Excellent?
(03:58):
Was that was a good set of questions. But before
we go back to your beginnings, let's talk about people,
because I do think this is one of your superpowers.
Let's talk about people who you hired, mentored, or help develop.
Seth McFarlane from Family Guy, famed Judy McGrath who went
on to be CEO of MTV Networks, who, by the way,
has been here. She said. The interview went is what
music do you like? She said somebody? You said wrong
(04:20):
And the rest of the time you talked and she
got the jobs she said Bruce Springsteen and I said wrong.
And Foley who helped build Showtime Programming and they headed that. Well,
you developed her? Why we all did? But all did?
But you know, you've had a really great track record.
How do you spot talent? You know, it's a really
mystical process. When you asked me to come and talk
(04:44):
to you about working with you. I said, you know,
I only watched TV. I don't make and you said,
come talk to me anyway, and we had a quick
cup of coffee like at the Four Seasons or something
like that, and I didn't think another thing about it
until you called and said you're hired, and it was like,
I wonder why. And I think that almost everybody that
I've met with it's that same kind of process. Basically,
(05:06):
it's having a conversation with somebody and go, you know,
I just want to spend more time with them. And
it really comes down to did they say something or
did we have a dialogue that made me go, boy,
I would really like to help this person. So how
do you empower them to develop breakthrough not ordinary ideas.
(05:27):
What I feel like I've done is one let people
know that my major goal at work is to have fun,
because I think you can make money from having fun.
The second thing is to provide structure in a way
that doesn't seem overly structured. You know, in my TV days,
it was making sure that spots were thirty seconds and
(05:47):
not a second longer or shorter. When you and some
of our other colleges say it doesn't matter how long
they are, Like, I don't know, discipline seems like a
good idea. Or when we made cartoons to begin with,
and I was in love with Looney Tunes, I said, well,
it's making the same length as Looney Tunes. They said why,
I said, because Looney Tunes are the greatest cartoons ever made.
(06:08):
What I found over the years is that by giving
people structure and almost nothing else other than sort of
a philosophy of where you'd like them to go, if
they don't want to be there, they leave, they quit.
They don't vibe with you one way or the other.
And if they do, they've sort of accepted the structures
and the strictures, and as long as I don't over
(06:30):
note them. In our business, it's all about the notes
that you give and all that type of stuff. In
the cartoon business, I just would say to people, well,
what cartoon do you really want to make? If you
have one you really want to make, will do it.
And if you tell me you have fifty you want
to make, I don't want to do it. It means
you don't care about anything. So I'm just looking for
people who care about something. When you were talking about Judy,
(06:54):
and I asked her who she liked, and she said Bruce,
And I said, wrong, because I don't have a good
thing about Bruce. The fact she cared, you know, the
Bruce haters are coming after you right now. I believe me,
They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact
that she cared meant all the difference to me in
the world, not that I agreed. You've got these people.
How would you describe your coaching technique getting the best
(07:15):
out of people? I asked them to tell me what
they want to do. The way that I sort of
think about it is there's a big circle of ball,
and everything in it in that ball is what I love.
And then they have their own circle in their own ball,
and it's everything that they love. And I said, why
don't we just like find the places where we touch,
just where we kiss, and then we're both gonna be really,
(07:36):
really happy. And the only thing I want is like
for us all to be happy. Well we've been able
to do for a living over our lifetime is kind
of magical in that I think that what I've done
my whole life is make people happy. The people that
I work with want people to be in love with
the work that they do because people are really passionate
about their work. I never hired anybody who actually knew
(07:58):
what they were doing, that had on it before. That
was one of our hallmark. We had these creative promo departments.
Once people came in and started saying, well, I worked
on promos over here, like, I didn't want to hire them.
If they were a wonderful writer, that was great. If
they were wonderful director, that was great. One of the
earliest people I hired had just come out of film
school and his first job was cutting negatives film negatives
(08:21):
at a porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you know,
like whatever, So let's jump back a little bit. I
want to get some insights from your youth about you.
Your parents were both pharmacists, owned the pharmacy and Long Island,
you worked there, and you were going to Columbia to
become a pharmacist. Yeah. Anything in that, what is it
tell us about you? I have no idea other than that.
I was very influenced by my parents. Everyone in my
(08:42):
family are pretty much scientists. There's biochemists, there's neurosurgeons, there's
other pharmacists, chemists, and I decided at six I was
going to be a chemist, and you know, I would
blow up the basement with you know, experiments and all
that type of stuff. But when I was twelve, a
lightning bolt struck that changed my life. It's like this,
you know the Beatles movie that's just come out yesterday.
(09:03):
It was like that, And in fact it was the Beatles.
It was the day they went on Ed Sullivan, and
my life changed. I went and bought a guitar, taught
myself guitar. I was already a musician, I started bands,
I did all the things that everybody did. But I
was a chemist and I was a science math kid,
and I went to college for that. And I'm in
(09:24):
a zoology class one day where you know, we had
been dissecting frogs great and the next week we're going
to dissect rats. So I get there and all the
rats are alive. And the first thing the zoology teacher
said is now I'll show you how to kill the
rat before you dissect it. And I looked at my
lab partner and I said, you know, I like the
Beatles more than this. And I walked out and I
(09:45):
walked right to the college radio station. My path changed instantly.
So your parents, who are the pharmacists. What do they
say this, Oh, great, Fred, you're leaving this wonderful career
to go be a radio something. We did not have
a decent conversation for the next ten years. Actually, really yeah,
they were very, very upset. When they became less upset
is when I went to work in radio and I
(10:06):
was forced to wear a suit to work, and they thought, oh,
it'll all be okay. Well, actually, just make you feel better.
My parents told me for the first ten years I
was where I can get out of radio. That's a
crazy business. Go back to college, man, each college should
be a normal kid. And then about in my thirties
sometimes they said, gosh, I sure, I'm glad you didn't
listen to us exactly. Well, I finally said to my folks,
I'm doing everything you taught me, all the ways you
(10:29):
taught me to do it. I just took my own
path in doing it. And they finally sort of calmed down.
And even though pretty much for my entire career until
I started making cartoons, they had no idea what I
did for a living. After you're leaving this possible career
as a pharmacist, you eventually wound up as the promotions
director at a country music station w h N in
New York. One of your great supporters, who I had
(10:51):
worked with and who I love dearly, Dale Pond, recommended
you to me pre MTV. It was in the early
days of pay TV. You came over to join us
in the cable revolution, at the beginning of the cable
network space. Why did you make that jump? Well, you
know this is gonna sound flattering. I did it completely
because of you. Dale had left the country music radio
(11:12):
station and left me alone. And the guy I was
working for at that time in radio, I had no
respect for whatsoever. Pretty much anything I did, he told
me it wasn't any good. So you called me one day,
you said you want to be in televisioned and no,
You said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went
to Dale's files and he had files on everyone in
the business, and there was one article about you about
(11:33):
your promotion at w NBC. We're w NBC and we're
gonna make you rich. 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
(11:53):
just talked to is so much smarter than my boss
in radio. He goes, what do you think about that?
I said, well, here's what Dale talk 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. That's what that's flattering. So any
career lessons and that for the folks listening, go work
for the person, not the job. I tell people that
(12:14):
all the time working for smart people. Has always worked,
working for Ted Turner, working for Scott Sasso, working for you.
I would go in at ground level at a job
and I always came out at the top floor, and
then I go off on my own for a while,
and then when I screwed that up, I go back,
you know, to a job. We started experimenting with network
(12:35):
branding with Movie Channel, although the Movie Channel has been
lost in history, so it's really some pioneering work done there.
How would you describe that. I mean, that was very
early and we were about the only people that were
doing that approach to let's make the network the star,
not the program. The stuff in eighty when we started
together May eighth. Wow, what a memory. Yeah, the average
(12:58):
home in America had to annals of television. I lived
in New York City, so we had seven, but you know,
the average home had two. However, in the same town
that had seven TV stations, they were about seventy seventy
five radio stations. And over the years before radio had
learned to compete because they only each had a sliver
(13:20):
of the thing. And what that effectively came out to
is they each had personalities. You and I had either
the benefit or the curse of having come out of
that business where we had to compete like crazy. At
a television station, they just turn on one light switch
and the other switch opens a hole in the ceiling
and money drops on their head. Because it was just
easy to make money in television. So we started from
(13:45):
the premise that you had to have a personality. It
turned out that in television that was called an innovation.
And by the way, we were probably about thirty years
too soon. Yeah, but indeed that was the demise of
TV as we know it, when the loyalty was to
the program, not the network. When you asked me to
come back and work on Nickelodeon. There were only thirty
(14:05):
cable networks, which we thought was amazing, and that Nickelodeon
was number thirty and people are like, what do you
mean only thirty? What you know? And and there I
have to tell you what. At MTV time, I was
so freaked out that there were thirty that the resulting
work came out because I was like, oh my god,
(14:27):
Oh my god, what are we gonna do to stand out?
What are we gonna do to stand out? And a
lot of it just came out of the panic of
getting lost in the mush, So let's move on to
starting MTV. The board would not approve the idea, but
I did get us a budget to develop it in
that period. Did you ever think we weren't going to
get approval to launch MTV? How did you believe in it?
(14:47):
Truth be told. 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 crummy 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 was too naive to know that you
(15:10):
had to have faith, like you told me it was
gonna happen. Was it youth totally? 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. I think that's really true. Well,
you know, we went to the head of Warner Communications
(15:32):
and American Express that on the joint venture Warner m
X where we got started, and we got a meeting
with Steve Ross, who was the CEO of of Warner,
along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And we
got Jim Robinson and his deputy Louke Gershner from American Express.
I don't know if you remember, but we were worried
that when we showed these videos too, from American Express
(15:53):
called so he said, let's find the tamest one. I
think we found Olivia Newton John as THEDO to talk
about the launch of of MTV we if you remember,
but in the meeting, they said, do you have to
play that kind of stuff, implying Olivian Newton John was too.
But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay,
(16:13):
I'm in from my half. Howbout Steve? So we locked out.
Let's go to the launch of MTV and talk about
some of the things that really, I think still stand
out today. The logo. We had no money for a logo.
I was probably the cheapest man in the world and
had expectations you could create a lot out of nothing.
Well we had, we really started, but not like venture
(16:33):
capital guys. Well again, here's the metric I use. A
guy comes to see me for a job in the
promo department from CBS Channel two in New York, and
I said, how much do you get paid? And he
was getting paid twice as much as I was. That
was the metric. We all earned intern wages. If somebody
had a dollar and we were asked him to spend
ten cents, we knew they'd be bad. We found people
(16:55):
that had a penny and we gave him the dime.
They thought they had all the money to people all
the time. Absolutely, Just hold on a second, because we've
got so much more to talk about. We'll be back
after a quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic.
We're here with Fred Cyberg. So talk about the logo.
(17:17):
You set out, you got the mission. You and I
had these discussions. I've naively said, we'll do our own
Star Wars logo because everybody has a Star Wars loging
and 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 cheap. So tell me about the logo. Well,
the logo itself actually came about because I was too
(17:37):
scared to go to someone famous. I wanted to go
to Milton Glazer, who was one of the most famous
graphic designers of the last fifty years. And I was like, oh,
well he's gonna be really expensive and we'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 years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky, had
(17:58):
just started a little design firm behind find a tie
Chee studio above Bigelow Chemists on Sixth Avenue. And Frank
had been the guy, because he's a year older than
me who would 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,
and I knew that Frank loved music. So I go
down to his little tie chee studio place and I go,
(18:19):
will you guys design a logo for this rock channel
we're starting? And they're 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,
and boy do I wish I had that memo. So
for a year they designed logos and I just rejected everything,
(18:43):
probably five hundred designs. So finally they come in the
office one day. We're actually going to go on the
air soon, right, and we still don't have anything, and
they bring up pile and I'm like, no, no, I'm
going through the whole pile. And at the bottom of
the pile is a he's of tracing paper. Remember that,
you know the paper you could see through and it
(19:03):
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 kind of
He and I now disagree. But what I had heard
is that the woman. There's three partners, and one of
them wasn't really a designer. She was a production manager
(19:25):
and she had done it, and Frank saw it and
hated him, 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 it
was good story. The only reason I said yes is
that Dale had taught me one lesson about design. You
need to dominate the space, and that big block g
(19:47):
M 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,
and in a day when the screen was square exactly right.
So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors.
You know, a logo is supposed to be a thing
that you make and it never changes. So they come
(20:11):
to my office with about ten different boards. Everything was
on boards in those days, and then a little board
where Frank had illustrated ten or twelve of them on
acrylic overlays. 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 finally
(20:32):
we had to do something. And I looked at them.
I'm just staring at all of them. They were all like,
really kind of cool, and I said, why don't we
just use them all at once? All the time. I
don't know who I was talking to, and I was
like what I said, Well, we're television, we move, shouldn't
the logo move? And to be honest with you, that
(20:52):
was my first real revelation that I was in television,
that we had come up with an idea that only
worked in television. The other thing you did when you
did those promos, the great stuff, you laid the music
bed down first and cut the music, and everybody else
in that era people forget this. They don't realize that
(21:13):
was an innovation that everybody else did the video first
and then rolled to music undress. So I got that
all from Dale. I was an audio guy, and I
was a really good audio guy. I was a mixer
and all that engineer. 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
(21:36):
guy tells me, no, you have to first do the picture.
And then he goes, Fred, we own the audio studio.
It's free. If you get it right in the audio studio,
then the three hour video studio will go much faster.
By the time we got to MTV, I realized that
he was absolutely right. I was hiring basically kids, you know,
(21:59):
one just out of school, and we didn't have any money.
Now fast forward twenty years. I go to MTV one day.
I'm running their online business for a little while, and
I go, who's the promo department now? And they tell
me and I go down and I introduced myself to
a couple of people in the one you what what
you're the one? Well, what are you talking about? They said,
(22:22):
they make us do the audio first, we're filmed. People
like why. So twenty years later they were still doing it.
But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm and energy.
It brought the backbeat of rock and roll into those spots.
Everything was beat. You know, I'm in radio. I love audio.
People don't realize how much of your emotion is not
(22:45):
driven by what you're looking at. That's what you're hearing.
I used to joke all the time that we could
make the spots black and they would have the same
effect horror films. You go in the next room, listen
to turn off the sound. It's not very scary. So
let me. I'm not to spend all of our time
on MTV, but I want to hit one other thing here.
The cable operators wanted us to pay them. As you say,
(23:06):
we had intern wages and no money. So our good
friend Mao Stunts, who actually had a Harvard MBA, said
we should use consumer pull. What the hell is consumer pull?
And he goes will get the consumer to demand it. Great,
So you and Tom Preston came over to my apartment
one night to show me a Cable Brats spot. Embedded
(23:28):
in the Cable Brats was this memorable line, I want
my MTV. 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
(23:51):
really horrendous tasting. He had sports stars like Mickey Mantel
and Joe Namath crying like I want my babo, and
he redid it with Mick Jagger and you know whoever,
David Bowie and Pete Towns and all that type of stuff,
and they showed us this spot. So we went and
(24:13):
we pitched it to you. I think you saw the
feeling of it right away. 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 to
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
(24:33):
two million dollars. Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a
strategist and a creative guy. And as a strategist, what
he understood is that we had no money to spend
on this app. And he did an incredible data dump
of where could MTV be put on against how much
(24:58):
media cost in particular market, and he did three or
four or five cross tabs to figure out the most
likely places that if we put on these spots that
we would get people calling and making the cable operators insane.
And that's exactly what happened. He literally took what Mayo
said and put on the beginning of the spot. He
(25:22):
had Pete Towns in doing it. America demand your MTV.
Then people go, I want my MTV, I want my MTV,
and then Pete Towns and again with a telephone going
call your cable operator and say I want and God knows,
I think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy.
(25:43):
Within four weeks, I had a guy stopped me at
a cable show cable operator and said, I hate you,
and I go, why why do you hate me? And
he goes, because my phone rings all day with those
people saying I want my m t BA can't get
any work done. Demand is bad. We reverse that demand
end curve. And by the way, I just sort of
flip it. A couple of years, one of the major
(26:04):
cable operators decided they were going to take MTV off
the air. And you called up and you said, we
need new spots, and I went, what's that. You said,
we have to get people to keep them from turning
off MTV, And we went and filmed a lot of
rock stars, half in shadow and all in black and
white going there trying to take away your MTV. And
(26:24):
we put those on the air, and lo and behold,
they did not cancel our channels. God bless him. So
let's jump to Jerry Labor. Let's jump to Nickelodeon. You
mentioned Nickelodeon was number thirty. It was a toddler's channel,
invented to help Time Warner Cable get some cable franchises.
It's exactly the way that Netflix uses kids on their
(26:45):
service now. It is a come on that no family
can resist and for us had basically no value. We
have this idea, we're gonna turn into a tween channels. Actually,
Jerry said, this is great. An old school teacher, I
got a great idea. We relaunched it to that point.
Only MTV had an image as a network and your mission.
You need to do with Nickelodeon what we did with MTV.
(27:07):
How on earth did you end up with Orange? After
the MTV logo thing, which was really the most visible
manifestation of the creative work, designers came out of the
woodwork wanting to work with us. We found somebody up
in Boston, a guy called Tom Corey and his partner
Scott Nash. We asked him to come up with some
ideas for logo. So they came up with a bunch
(27:28):
of things, and all of them were pretty standard logos,
truth be told, I picked a really standard one. We
were about to go in and pitch it when Alan said,
you know, our thing is this moving logo, and they
have one here. Why didn't we pick that? I said, well,
it's orange. It's only one color. And so we called
Tom and we go, how come like orange? Like you said?
(27:50):
He goes, well, you know this is the color. It's
uh pantone O to one and it is not found
in nature. Anything we put it on it will stand
out from that. So we go in to pitch it
to Jerry and her team and she's like, but you're
the MTV guys, how come we don't get lots of colors?
(28:11):
And I think you said probably something similar and we
just o and I think we just tap danced really
hard and at that point you were willing to give
us our heads. And the thing that was really brilliant
about their solution is that it wasn't an orange logo.
It was white type that was always exactly the same.
(28:35):
One of the key elements of the logos. You have
to have something that is fixed. But the orange thing
ended up being thousands of different shapes around it, and
sometimes they were real shapes, like a boy riding a
bicycle or a girl's head, and sometimes it was just
an abstract design, a blob, a splat color burst, you know,
(28:57):
or something like that, and we realized that we could
have fun using it. The thing about designers is they
hate the work that anyone else has done. So you
give them a logo that somebody else designed, the first
thing they're gonna want to do is change it. And
what we did with MTV is basically the m became
(29:17):
a canvas for artists, so that any artists could put
their own imprint on it and not feel like it
wasn't theirs. And the shape thing at Nickelodeon gave every
artist a chance to be themselves and it worked. We
wanted these networks to feel like a human. We wanted
to have a personality. So let's jump we've talked about
Fred Cybert maybe two point oh, let's go to Red
(29:39):
Cyber three point oh animation. You went on to be
president of Hanna Barbera. You had your own animation studio,
you began this living expert on animation. How the hell
did you get interested in animation? Where did that come from? Well?
I always love cartoons as a kid, the exact same
way that several years later I fell in love with
Rock and Roll. I remember buying a Bugs Bun t
(30:00):
shirt when I was in college and thinking it was
the coolest thing, you know, in the world. When we
first got to MTV, 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? I said, are we gonna do jingles? He went, oh, no,
we can't do jingles. And I said, what do we do?
(30:20):
He said, how about this? Imagine It's like a picture
of a cow, you know, a drawn 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,
(30:42):
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. So in that process I
started talking to lots of people who did animation. I'm
sort of a curious guy, and I just asked them
a million questions and a few of them started telling
me how the cartoon business works. So I started reading
(31:02):
books about the history of the cartoon business. So one day,
Nickelodeon comes to me, takes me to breakfast and said,
you know, we've been licensing all of our programming. I
said yeah. They said, you know, it's getting really expensive
because the more viewers we get, the more they want
to charge us. And you know, our most popular cartoon
is this thing from England called Danger Mouse. We think
(31:24):
we are going to pay enough that we ought to
start thinking about making our own. I said, oh great,
and they said what should we do? Silence? I go
what They said, Well, what do you think we should
do for cartoons? I said, why are you asking me?
Will you do our animation? I said, well, one I
don't animate to anything, and two I essentially take your
(31:46):
logo and wiggle it for ten seconds. Please. So well,
you're the only person I know, I said, okay, Well
I think you should make cartoons the way Looney Tunes did,
and I just start improvising and they didn't want to
do it the way that I wanted to do it.
And you know, me like, if they don't take my idea,
I get really upset. And as a consultant, they never
quite take your idea. So long story short, I helped
(32:09):
them make a deal on a library of cartoons, and
I wanted a bonus, and they wouldn't give me the bonus,
and I got so mad that I just started complaining
to everybody. And one of those people I complained to
with Scott's ass of the president of Turner Entertainment. He said,
how did you do that deal? You make logos? I said, yeah,
but it was logical. I did X, Y and Z.
(32:29):
You know. All that time was fine, and they were
Hanna Barbara cartoons. Eighteen months later, he calls me up
and he said, hey, you know, we just bought Hanna Barbera.
I said, yeah, I heard I read in the paper.
He goes, why don't you come round Hanna Barbera. I'm like,
huh what I said, Look, I don't know anything about cartoons,
be just don't worry about it. It's a disaster there.
You can't go wrong. If you don't make a hit,
(32:51):
they haven't had a hit since the Smurfs, nobody will
blame you. And if you do have a hit, everyone
don't think you're a genius. So here was the kicker.
I literally look at my watch, and on my watch
are four Hanna Barbera characters, completely by coincidence. It's ten
thirty five in the morning. I said, I have ninety days.
I have to wind down the agency's will wait the
(33:11):
first time I walk in the Hanna Barbara building, I'm
president of the company. I made two cartoons, full series,
ten million dollars disasters. They fail like immediately, two Stupid
Dogs and Swat Cats the Radical Squadron. Okay, yeah, So
I go back to Ted Turner. I go, Ted, I
(33:31):
know I'm out of budget, but I need another ten
million dollars. He goes what I said, Well, you know,
I I gotta get you some hits. I need another
ten million dollars. What are you gonna do with the
ten million dollars? I said, I'm gonna make forty eight
short cartoons, because well, you just had two failures, Like,
what makes you think you're gonna where. I said, Ted,
if I do something forty eight times, don't you think
(33:52):
I'll do something right? And you know the natural entrepreneur.
And Ted was like, you're right, go for it. And
that was that. And the hits were Power Puff Girls,
Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Courage, The Cowardly Dog, Cow and Chicken,
and I Am Weasel. So you're at Hanna Barbera. You
(34:13):
now have a hit. Now you begin to think you're
a animator. Actually, to be honest with you, I figured
that animation was sort of a sideline that I was
going to do for those years, and that was gonna
be it. Ted announces one day that he's selling the company,
and he's selling at the time, Warner I'm one of
those guys that runs around the edge of the field
to get to the goal, like I can't run through
(34:35):
the scrum, and Warner Brothers was a scrum and it
just wasn't the right fit for me. And I figured
I'd come back to New York and go back to
doing the things that I had done in TV. Somehow,
I didn't know how. Somewhere between Judy McGrath herb Scandal
was running Nickelodeon and Tom Freston, who was running MTV Networks.
They said, hey, well, why don't you come back and
be a consultant. I said, I'm never going to be
(34:56):
a consultant again, but I gotta make things like I'm
a maker. They said, okay, well you can make cartoons
for Nickelodeon as long as you come and consult with
us once a month. I'm like, okay, I could do that,
and I don't care if you listen to my ideas.
And I started Frederator. You know in rest his history,
So this is a podcast about math and magic. How
(35:17):
do you use both? I didn't know what to do
for m TV because I was the head of promo,
but we had no shows. And in television promos are
watch Bill Cosby in a very special episode Thursday at eight.
We didn't have that. I remember actually going out with
Dale and we go out to the beach and I'm
against it, and I just said walk with me, and
(35:37):
we walked back and forth on the beach for five
or six hours while I tried to figure out what
the promo should be. And I realized that the problem
that MTV had was twofold. One is nobody knew what
the hell it was, and so telling them to watch
this or watch that wasn't gonna be very useful. So
I realized I had to tell them a story. But
(35:58):
I also realized something else that we had learned in radio,
which is at the end of every song, people have
a reason to tune away. So that meant in MTV
every three minutes people could leave. The ratings. Lesson I
had learned was time spent listening was more important than
how many people listen, because if you can get somebody
(36:19):
to listen for fifteen minutes for a few songs and
through the commercial, you made more money. And if they
listen that long, more people were going to listen. So
I realized that at MTV our job was actually not
be cool. We knew how to be cool, not be
crazy and creative, though we were going to do that anyway,
(36:40):
not tell people what time the shows. Wrong, it was
to get them to listen longer, time spent viewing. So
fast forward Nickelodeon. One of the great things about Jerry
is she was very research crazy, and she said, we
don't understand why no one watches. As you remember, one
show had a rating and everything else had hash marks
basically zero, and I said, well, what do you know
(37:00):
should Well, here's what we know. We can't figure it
out of everyone who has cable tunes into Nickelodeon once
a week and stays for less than six minutes. I said, oh, okay,
so that's the problem to solved. You what do you mean,
I said, we just have to get them watching longer.
We go back and we work out a promotional clock,
because the way Nickelodeon did it was like nuts. It
(37:23):
was well, if you have a minute here, we'll put
a promo, and if there's not another minute for two hours,
then we'll do it. There was no organization, and as
you well know, with media, a dependable, organized wheel makes
all the difference. So I go back to Jerry to
the next meeting. I said, Jerry, I found twenty five
million dollars for you to market. What are you talking about?
(37:45):
I said, Well, the whole deal is this time spend
viewing thing. We worked out a clock and there's gonna
be two minutes of promos an hour, and they're gonna
be distributed this way. We'll have to recut some of
the shows, but we we have no new shows. We
have to do that too. Well, where's the twenty million dollars?
And I said, well, you're right, for your spots are
five a piece, and if you add up how many
(38:05):
there are over the course of year, it's twenty five
million dollars. And we're going to use them like an
ad campaign, not like a television channel. We have a
story to tell. I don't care about your shows. The
only thing I care about is your kids that watch
them and the story that we are telling them. I
remember having a fight with my accountant at MTV at
(38:27):
the time and him screaming about how much money you
were giving us, and I said, would it surprise you
to know that I not only know how much every
second of video costs, but I can tell you how
many times that second will run in a year. Fast forward.
He's my CFO. Now. We've been friends ever since because
counting Dale Palm taught me another lesson when in doubt,
(38:49):
count and counting together with a creative approach, makes for
as you say here, math and magic. I almost want
to end the show on them. It's a great way
to do I don't want to ask you just a
couple of more things, though we're talking about creativity, talk
to me about the role of the old dogs like
us and creativity. We sort of know the power of
(39:11):
young fresh thinking. We were that once upon a time.
Do you think there is a role there is this
a young person's game. I think there's always a role
for anybody who gives a crap one way or the other.
I decided a long time ago that I have three
rules for myself that you know, have not always made
me wealthy, but they worked out really nicely. Which is
my first rule is I want to have a good time.
(39:32):
My second rule is I want to make some money.
And my third rule is I want to stand the
people that I work with. And I figure, at any point,
if I get two of those things, like, I'm onto something.
There was a period of time where I was still
fresh enough to that work that we had done in
the early eighties that when I would meet with a
new team of people, I go, well, you know, what
(39:53):
we did at MTV was this, and what we did
at Nickelodeon was that. And I realized I was starting
to be the get off your long guy, you know.
And I decided instead that what I needed to be
was what people had been with me, which is the
favorite uncle. I would go through the point of view
that I had and why I had that point of view,
because it's still as fresh in my mind today as
(40:15):
it was, you know, thirty years ago, forty years ago.
I realized that people need room to be themselves. The
way I call what I do now is I'm the
bumpers in the bowling alley. You might not get a strike,
but you'll never get a gutter ball, And by never
getting a gutter ball, you have the confidence to be
able to do something wonderful. The first person that I
(40:37):
brought into Nickelodeon was a guy that you know called
Scott Webb, who had been a movie channel producer for us,
and he made a bunch of promos and he comes
and shows them to me and I go, what the
hell are you doing? He goes, well, this is what
they wanted. I said, I didn't hire you to do
what they wanted. If they knew what they wanted, they
wouldn't have hired me, and I wouldn't have hired you. Now,
(41:00):
you better start doing the things that you believe in,
not the things that they believe in. And from that
day on, he not only was brilliant, but the thing
that very few people know about Scott Is. He was
legally blind but became the worldwide creative director of Nickelodeon
while being legally blind. Why because what we gave him
the opportunity to do is what he had always imagined
(41:23):
rather than what he was told to do. To me,
that's our role. Our role is to give people the
room to screw up. Because if you let them screw
up and they're good, the next time, it won't be
a screw up, it'll be a home run. Let's move
to the way we always end this podcast. This is
about math and magic, the two keys that come together
(41:44):
to make great marketing and products. And there are experts
and icons in both. Your favorite math person, del Pon,
your favorite magician, the Beatles, Red cyber Genius and friends.
Thanks Bell, Thank you, Bob, thanks for having me. I
really appreciate it. Here's a couple of things I take
(42:06):
away from Fred Cyber. One, when it comes to logos,
Fred's philosophies dominate the space. Two, Fred's secret to great
hiring is to determine in the interview whether he wants
to spend more time with the candidate. It's such a
simple metric, but if he hears them say something intriguing
or wants to help them grow. It's an easy decision.
(42:27):
Three On the flip side, one of Fred's keys to
success has been figuring out who to work for. In
his words, doesn't matter what the job is, work for
the smartest person you can find. It's what made him
take the leap from radio to television and then to
working cartoons for Ted Turner. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening.
(42:53):
That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening
to Math and Magic, a production of I Heart Radio.
This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to
Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which
is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax
and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch,
and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and
(43:16):
everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until
next time,
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