December 26, 2019 • 41 mins
Known as the "fairy godmother of Nickelodeon," Gerry Laybourne took a channel for pre-schoolers and turned it into a cultural phenomenon. Hear how she led Nickelodeon into tween entertainment; why the channel truly spoke to its audience (it was the first one to take kids' side!), and the real story behind why Nickelodeon started sliming kids. Plus, we get into how Gerry transformed the Disney channel; launched her own network, Oxygen, with Oprah; and how her new project, CHKN ,is creating a new type of sandbox for kids.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart radio.
I actually kept a notebook of what I would not
do when I got to be the boss. When you
gave me the opportunity, you kind of looked at me
and said, I don't know what you can do, but
let's see. Oh my god, nothing could be better than that.
(00:23):
Just straight on challenge. We needed to be a rebellion.
We were taking back Nickelodeon for kids. I am Bob Pittman,
and welcome to this episode of Math and Magic Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we explore the combination
(00:45):
of analytics and creativity, Math and magic that's at the
heart of so many marketing and business successes. Today. We
have someone who led the birth of and transformed a
number of major TV networks. She was also one of
the first women to break through the men barrier in
the entertainment media business. Jerry Leiborne. Her mom was a creative,
(01:12):
her dad was in business. She clearly inherited both skills.
She started out on a track and architecture, moved education,
then advocacy for responsible TV for kids, produced kids TV
program and then joined Nickelodeon at its birth to do
the pro social Kids TV when it was a non
commercial service for preschoolers. Later, as the head of the network,
(01:32):
she transformed it to the first tweens TV network, added
advertising and changed American culture. She went on too Disney,
starting new networks, and finally started her own network, Oxygen.
She's been on corporate boards, served as a mentor to
countless women and executives. She lived through some to Redstones, takeover, Viacom,
Michael Ovit's short tenure at Disney, and partner with Oprah,
(01:56):
and her well known smile never left her face ever. Jerry, Welcome, Bob.
It's so great to be here. You and I are
old friends, so I know some stories even our best
researchers can't find. But before we get into that, I
want to do you in sixty seconds. Are you ready?
Do you prefer Rugrats or Doug Doug, a silver bouncing
(02:16):
ball or a green slime Green Slime cats or dogs
Dogs Philly or New York New York Copper Cone Cone,
The Dick Van Dyke Show, or Get Smart Dick Van Dyke,
Texting or calling calling l A or tell your ride
l A. Dennis the Menace or Mr Ed Mr Ed.
(02:37):
Of course, cable TV or the Internet. Oh boy, that's
a killer Internet Nickelodeon or Disney Channel Nickelodeon. Okay, it's
about to get harder. What's your favorite city? Montreal? Secret talent?
I can tie cherry stems in my mouth. I can
tie a knot. We'll take your word for it. I
(02:58):
can beat anybody at it except my daughter. Greatest motivator you.
Oh that's nice. Thank you, smartest person you know. Danny
hillis childhood hero Cat Moon, favorite novel, Plain Song by
Kent har Roof. Who would play you in a movie?
Lauren Mca? What would the title be of your memoir?
Raised my Kids, Proudest professional achievement, the Global Mentors Walk?
(03:23):
What did you want to be when you're growing up? Well?
I wanted to be a doctor, and then I discovered
that I have a condition that makes me faint if
anybody tells me about an illness, and that kind of
took that away. Okay, I promise we won't talk about
any illness. Is thank you? If you could have one superpower,
what would it be? World? Well, that's a good one. Okay.
(03:44):
Let's jump back in time to us as young managers
at what was then called wonder MX Satellite Entertainment Corporation,
then in our day was MTV Networks and now it's Viacom.
I had just moved up from the programming and marketing
guy who led the product at MTV to be each
chief operating officer of the company and turned my attention
to Nickelodeon, a commercial, free, pro schoolers TV network where
(04:08):
you were the key programmer. This was the mid eighties.
We were just launching targeted or as we called it,
the narrowcast TV networks, and you had a better idea
for Nickelodeon. You wanted to go for tweens, older kids, preteens,
and young teens. And by the way, one of my
best executive decisions ever was to listen to you and
(04:29):
invest in you and support that. Can you tell us
about that vision and where it came from, Well, it
came from being a teacher and a researcher with kids.
I love kids, I'm a natural kid advocate, and I
thought that television routinely looked down at kids and condescended
to them and gave them subpar creators. And I felt
(04:52):
like if you listened to kids and you treated them
as if they were really smart, you could do some
pretty interesting stuff. If you remember, we had no money
that we couldn't do what anybody else did. But I
would research everything that people said about kids TV, like
program only two boys, girls will watch anything, kids will
(05:12):
only watch animation. I'm such a contrarian. It's like, Okay,
if everybody else is going that direction, we're going to
go this direction. So it was very much like MTV,
because MTV was a contrarian network. Most of your shows
were Canadian. They were cheap, but they were breakthrough. At
one point, we had more Canadian content on Nickelodeon than
(05:34):
any network in Canada except Windsor Ontario. Nickelodeon. You think
of orange and green slime, Where did that green slime
come from? It came out of you can't do that
on television, which truly was I think the most important
show ever produced kids because it took kids side and
(05:54):
it used reverse psychology. It made kids feel better after
watching it. But the premise of it was we had
everyday kids and it was shot in Ottawa and so
these were everyday Canadian kids. And the producer, Roger Price,
wrote the show based on the personalities of the kids,
so he wasn't making them be anything they weren't. He
(06:16):
was just multiplying it, and they started to get kind
of uppity and kind of like Hollywood kids. So he
decided that he would start sliming. It was triggered by
them saying, I don't know which he would write in
the script for whoever needed to be put in their place.
It ended up backfiring on him because they loved being slimmed.
(06:39):
Have you ever been slimed? I was never slimed. I
think I avoided the sliming. I got slimed in the
office one day. It is wonderful. Well, I'm going to
take your word for that, because I'm not dying to
be slimed. So if anybody look so good on you,
don't slime me. So you were talking about MTV being contrarian.
We had just introduced the idea of a network identity
(07:00):
as opposed to a network delivering programs with the viewers
affinity attached to just the program, and we decided that
Nickelodeon could do the same thing. How did you define
that and how did you make the big move from
a somewhat corny silver bouncing ball for preschool or Nickelodeon
to the cool new Nick you created. Well. First of all,
(07:24):
I just have to say we never turned our back
on preschoolers. We had the best preschool programming ever, but
we had to be very careful to put it in
its own buckets, so we called it Nick Jr. Our
target was ten and tween, so that was a key
thing because we were known for being a baby channel.
I think you know the story of my son throwing
(07:47):
his Nickelodeon hat in the closet when he was five, sobbing,
and I said, what's the matter and he said, they say,
Nickelodeon's a baby channel. Honestly, my inspiration for Nickelodeon was Sam.
He was the coolest little five year old you ever saw,
and we just grew up with them. But I'd also
say that I was a student of what you were doing.
(08:08):
I saw how right it was that if you focus
on the audience and delight them and let the creative
community do their best work without man handling or woman
handling them, that you're going to get a really interesting result.
That's what we did. We created, just like you did,
a list of promises that we were the first network
(08:30):
for kids. We were completely on their side. We were
going to bring them the best creative we possibly could.
Frett Cybert, who had done the original on airlook from
TV and by the way, it has been on Math
and Magic when he was on talk some about helping
in that original creation of owning Orange. I remember when
you guys presented it to me. My reaction was, Orange,
(08:51):
that's it. From your vantage point, how did you get
from that bouncing ball to this very cool image and
attitude in that graphic look. Well, the bouncing ball was
created by an outside agency that the guy before me
had hired. It was very secretive. Nobody was a part
(09:12):
of it. They had no relationship to kids, and they
just thought, Okay, kids like this kind of stuff. No
kid can attach themselves to a silver ball. It just
isn't possible. And so Fred was incredibly collaborative, direct, honest.
He would say you're wrong, and I'm going to tell
you why. And I didn't get upset by that. It
(09:36):
was like, okay, tell me why. We learned together. I
think Fred feels like he was my partner, which he was.
We had a collaborative process. We had a wonderful guy
named Tom Corey and Tom Papa Cello, who were true geniuses.
We got delighted by anything. So creative agencies wanted to
(09:59):
work with us be because we would say, give us
ten ideas and we'll pick three, and we won't tell
you how to change them. We just set rules the
same way MTV. You were a container, you wanted people
to connect with it. One of the things we did
when we started taking advertising we would get buckets of mail.
(10:21):
They would be decorated on the outside with kids own shapes.
Because the idea behind Nickelodeon is it's like a kid's
mind constantly transforming. We knew that if we took an
envelope that was decorated on the outside, we could take
it into a sales meeting and just let them open
the letters. And it worked. It worked. But that was
(10:42):
a lesson from MTV. Get identification that kids can make
their wrong Before we get into the impact of Nickelodeon
and your networks. After that, let's go further back to
your childhood to get some perspective. Your mom had been
a writer, actor, and producer of soap operas. Your dab
was a stockbroker. Were they true to their stereotypes? Was
that a creative in a business person? Absolutely? And what
(11:05):
was the impact on you from having that range, there
was a third element. My mother was an advocate for kids,
so it was really like a trifecta. And also my
mother broke every rule, including how to open a milk cart,
so we had sloppy milk my entire childhood. She didn't
like to go the same way twice. I was the
(11:27):
middle daughter. My older sister was beautiful and perfect, my
younger sister was brilliant and charismatic. And there's me, eighteen
months apart, squeezed in and my dad when I was five,
said you're going to be my business daughter, and he
made me treasurer of the family. I took out bank
accounts for my irresponsible siblings. I went to business meetings
(11:49):
with my dad when I was eight nine. That's pretty cool.
So you grew up in New Jersey. This was the
fifties and sixties. Paint the picture of those times. What
was the spot Cara? Schools were very science focused. I
went to public school. I had thirteen hours of biology.
As a freshman, I got the lowest grade in my class,
(12:11):
seven sixteen on my college boards. One year, we had
half session. I organized our clubhouse for the other half day.
I made people do debates and plays, and I was
so nerdy. I rode away to every foreign embassy and
my hobby was alphabetizing. That is nerdy, wonderfully nerdy. You
(12:32):
know it's da people don't realize. In those days we
didn't have the internet. There's no kids TV programming on TV.
I rode away to observatories and asked them for pictures
of planets with letters and stamps, and I got a
surprising number back. Did you pay much attention to TV
inter youth? I did. There wasn't that much that was
(12:54):
really oriented to kids. There were some local shows like
the Herb Briner show, I Love Top Long Cassidy. When
TV was installed, they had actually a guy who came
in plugged in our TV, turned it on and my
mother said, well, hello television, and the television said right
back to her, hello out there in television land. So,
(13:16):
as a three year old, I thought TV could see me.
I would take a bath, get dressed up and sit
in front of the television so hoppy could see me.
In your high school era, were you a sixties radical
or a mainstream suburban kid. I would say I was
a suburban kid. I didn't get radicalized. Till later. You've
(13:38):
been a long time and major supporter of Vassar. Why
did you go to Vassar? Well, my sister was there.
I was deciding between Cornell and Vassar, and ironically, I'd
always had really great relationships with boys in high school
and not that many close relationships with girls, and I
(13:59):
thought that if I was going to be a good,
effective human, I better learn how to have female friends.
The other thing about Vasser that was appealing to me
is Vasser is a contrarian place. Every student there is
taught to question everything and go to the source and
not to take other people's interpretations of things, and that
(14:21):
was sort of made for me. What did you get
out of that experience looking back all these years later, Well,
they actually taught me how to run things. I'm not
sure that I was the best student in the world,
but I really was dedicated to helping the administration and
also the student body. They put me on the master
(14:43):
Planning committee that was studying how to turn Vasser from
a female college to a co ed college. And I
got to run committee meetings and have architects and you know,
it was just they took us seriously. What was the
big issue that Vasser was facing and moving from all
women to co ed well. At the time, the men's
(15:04):
schools were jealous of Harvard because Harvard had Radcliffe right
next door, so they felt to be competitive with Harvard,
they have to have their own girls. It was really
like Gale wanted to date us and marry us and
barry us. That's too harsh, but harsh. They just wanted
to be competitive in attracting the best and the brightest.
(15:29):
So that was going on at Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, everywhere, Wesleyan, Williams,
and for us to be successful, we had to go
co educational. It's a very special place and it's always
been about access. First it was access to women. Then
it was access to men who wanted an equal co education.
(15:52):
Now it's access to diverse economic populations. So you graduated,
you worked briefly in an arctic actual firm, and then
as a school teacher, you got your masters from the
University of Pennsylvania, pen and then you co founded the
Media Center for Children in nineteen four. What was that about.
It was about looking at kids and watching them look
(16:14):
at very avant garde film. We tried all kinds of
crazy National Film Board of Canada Short Films and we
got into the independent creative community in that way, so
Eli Noise and Drew Takahashi. We were just trying to
see what is true about what kids would be interested
(16:35):
in tolerate. We also worked with schools and libraries to
get kids to be interactive with media, so it was
really like the perfect background. 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
(16:57):
and Magic. We're here with Jerry Leborne. You left to
join Nickelodeon in nine. What attracted you to Nickelodeon? In
that mission, we had a grant. Our mission was to
market the work of independent filmmakers to television, and Nickelodeon
was our first client and we were the first producers
that they ever hired. And we had this crazy show
(17:20):
video dream Theater where we would animate kids into their
own dreams using color, xerox or masks. Julie Tamar, who
went on to do The Lion King and lots of everything,
she was our maskmaker. It was just a really creative,
fabulous thing. By the way, horrible television kids dream about abandonment,
(17:45):
suffocation and it's just terrible, but I got hired. You
had a boss at Nickelodeon before you were the boss.
Where did you learn from that boss? Well, he was
a very conventional, top down manager. I don't think we
had a single team meeting the whole time he was
vice president of Nickelodeon. I was the first president, thank you.
(18:08):
He had low expectations. He sent all of our good
creative problems to old crony friends outside, and he didn't
encourage us to work together. I actually kept a notebook
of what I would not do when I got to
be the boss. So when you gave me the opportunity,
(18:31):
I don't know if you remember this, but you kind
of looked at me and said, I don't know what
you can do, but let's see. It wasn't like, okay,
you're now the executive vice president of Nickelodeon. It was
just I know enough not to get rid of you.
Let's see what you can do. Oh my god, nothing
could be better than that, Just a straight on challenge.
(18:52):
I took the twenty people that were working for Nickelodeon
off to a conference room and we put all the
things we know about Nickelodeon here's what's not working, here's
what's working. And at the end of the day I
knew which people were going to be on the team
and which we're not. I fired seven people. We needed
(19:15):
to be a rebellion. We were taking back Nickelodeon for
Kids after the switch to add support in the replaunch
of Nickelodeon's The Twain Channel. You really struck gold. Can
you talk a little bit about one what that felt
like and to why you think Nickelodeon caught on like that? Well,
first of all, it helps to be the first, to
(19:37):
have really no competition, and to be true to your audience.
We literally did not put anything on the air that
hadn't been tested with kids, and we were adventuresome. We
had some big flops. I remember promising you The Moon
with Turkey TV was going to be comedy clips like
(19:58):
MTV for kids, and the day it arrived on Memorial
Day weekend five, it was even worse than Video Dream Theater.
My son, who at this point was ten, just started
to sob. This is horrible. You will never work in
(20:18):
TV again. I called everybody back to the office and
we spent six days re editing everything. You know. You
let me off the hook on that. Well, one thing
we all know is you don't come close to getting
it right. In fact, it's the big flops that we
got to take the chances. And we worked for a
guy named Steve Ross who ran Warner Communications and then
(20:40):
Time Warner. And Steve used to say, you know, bomb
around here, you a number of you fired for making
a mistake. You'll be fired for not making a mistake.
You're not making mistakes. Tells me you're not trying anything new.
And that was our lifeblood. But it was just so
much fun. And the other thing was if you were
working at Nickelodeon, you really had to let kids. I
had this trick question which I would ask any employee,
(21:02):
probably illegal, what were you like as a kid, And
they tell you everything, how they get along with their siblings,
how they're going to work in a team, and what
they care about. Let's talk a minute about how it
was to be a woman in this very big job,
in this very highly visible environment. Well, I had this boss,
(21:23):
Bob Pittman. The first day that I was invited into
the executive suite, there were only four of us, Tom Preston, you,
Bob Burgante and me. I made my husband quiz me
for four hours about sports metaphors. It was terrifying to me.
(21:45):
And I come in and the first sports metaphor that
I could possibly come up with I came up with,
and of course I used tennis metaphor in a basketball court.
And you looked at me and said, you can skip that.
We have you here for what you know, and I
don't care about sports. We want you to be you.
(22:06):
You have no idea how incredibly empowering that was, and
if men would do that, they would get such better results.
But it wasn't that hard for me. You wanted me
to be the nerdy, caring, creative, loving head, and you
(22:27):
encouraged me to make mistakes, and you didn't hold grudges.
Let's talk about you as a school teacher. We talked
back then about how that helped you as both a
programmer and as an executive, and by the way, was
in a big influence on your management style. Talk a
little bit about that. So I went to Penn during
the days of open classrooms, which is a very short
(22:49):
lived American experiment. Open classroom if it's done well, and
it was done well in England is the greatest kind
of education. For a kid because it's oriented towards individualized instructions.
So your job as a teacher is to find out
what's great about you lift that up. It's not remediation
(23:10):
orient So that had huge impact on my management style.
Just to illustrate the success you had there, One of
my favorite stories, and I tell it often about you,
is we tried to buy the company in the management
buyout and the TV networks which included Nickelodeon and MTV,
and it was sad and Viacom bought us, and this
(23:32):
was pre sunder Redstone Viacom. They got us to do
this for a rigorous five year plan each year, and
I remember the last one I did five years later.
I'm in my office. I get an envelope. Open up
the envelope. It's a xerox copy of the fifth year
of the Nick budget page and it was a handwritten
(23:52):
note from you on it that said, what you didn't believe?
That was it? Of course, the point was you had
crushed the five your number. I still remember walking out
of the office of my tail between my legs, being
beaten up about how could I put that dream down there?
It was on fire. You and Tom Preston actually were
the reasons some the red Stone and Tom Dooley bought Viacom.
(24:16):
I was instrumental in setting up a meeting with you
and Tom for Sumner and you had a golden career there.
You became vice chair of MTV Networks as well. You
couldn't have been bigger, more important, and more successful. And
then you left to go to Disney take over their
cable networks and even fix up the Disney Channel, which
have been your big competition, or at least they tried
(24:38):
to be. Why did you leave? Well, I I could
see some bad times ahead. I loved Nickelodeon. Leaving was
probably the hardest thing. I felt like it was, am
I going to be anybody tomorrow? When I'm not, I
don't have Nickelodeon. And by the way, I think you
and I shared that I had that fear of MTV.
(24:59):
You had fear of Nickelodeon. It was so much us,
We loved, the people we worked with was just the greatest, really,
but the structure of Viacom and MTV Networks. By this point,
Nickelodeon was making more money than MTV and there was
lots of messy stuff around v H one, and I
(25:23):
just felt like it was going to be hard for
Nickelodeon to really do what I wanted it to do.
The mission of Nickelodeon was to connect with kids and
connect kids with their world through entertainment. Now if there
isn't a better Internet mission statement, we wrote that I
look back, if HEIGHT stayed, would we have been successful
(25:47):
in doing that? But I like to grow, I like
to try things, and I felt like I was starting
to get resistance the Viacom management could not understand why
I wanted to have a different kind of participation. I
wanted to be participating in the growth of Nickelodeon because
(26:07):
when we started, Nickelodeon was worth less than nothing, and
when I left it was between eight and ten billion dollars,
which is more than Viacom is today. And so it's
a serious business concern. So you go to Disney, you
sign a four year contract, you really do improve the
(26:28):
product there, you bring in some great people, you really
revamp it, and then you left. You left two years
later to start Oxygen. Give me some insights there. I
had been courted by Iger, Eisner and Ovits in their
separate buckets, so when they all came together who do
we want to get? Jerry Leborne. I'd only had really
(26:50):
one big job, and it felt pretty good to want
to be wanted, as opposed to the pushback that you
get when you're highly successful in a company and their
sibling rivalry. And I felt like if I didn't take
a chance on myself. I always was comfortable taking a
chance for Nickelodeon and my staff, but how about me.
(27:14):
I didn't sign a long term contract that had no outs.
I had the right to quit for no reason. I
got to Disney. I met a lot of fabulous people.
I made lifetime friendships. Danny hillis who is the smartest
man in the world. We had the imagineers inventing telefusion
(27:38):
and convergence, and it was exciting. But it wasn't my
crusader kind of thing. They really wanted me to fix things,
and they didn't really want to invest in the things
they talked about, so I waited. I got two years
worth of options. I went to Michael Eisner and said,
(27:59):
I'm going to start at a new company. Do you
want to be an investor? And he said yes, and
I left. You joined Oprah and others. I want to
get to that in a minute. But I want to
stop down for just a few minutes here and download
some of what you learned from all that, because that's
a remarkable span of opportunities situations. First, talk about brands,
(28:21):
What are they? How do you think about what a
brand is and how do you build them? I believe
you don't have a brand unless your audience tells you
you have a brand. It's a relationship with your audience.
When we took over the Disney Channel, I brought Ann
Sweeney and and Rich Ross. We looked at what was
happening with the Disney Channel. All it was was taking
(28:44):
the equity of Disney. There was no equity around the
Disney Channel. There was no relationship with the audience. All
they wanted to do is a pay channel. All they
wanted to do is make sure somebody bought it. Month
after month in the seven pm slot, one they'd have
an Eisenhower documentary and the next night they'd have Dumbo.
(29:04):
But the kids were dying. That was a big, big moment,
So we tried to create an identity for the Disney Channel.
We took the old lessons and we created an identity
and then ate Nickelodeon's lunch. Let's talk about building companies,
building teams. What kind of culture do you need to
(29:27):
have a building situation? Well, you need different thinkers at
the table. You need people who are strategic, you need
people who are creative, you need people who are technical,
and you need to make sure that they feel comfortable
giving voice to their point of view and that in fact,
the team depends on them. Debbie BC was of the
(29:51):
Fred Cyberg school. You're wrong, and I'm going to tell
you why that's the best thing for a dreamer like
me to have. You couldn't have a better relationship up
We all had this philosophy that our responsibility was to
make sure everybody at the table was getting an a.
We had a program called the PIT program Presidents in Training,
(30:12):
So everybody at my executive team were presidents in training.
And I promised them, if you come in here and
look at our problems from up here, we will all
learn to be presidents together, and you won't all be
president of Nickelodeon, but you'll get to be president of something.
And many of them did. They didn't let me get
(30:34):
some personal insights here. One of your key relationships has
been probably for I think all of your adult life
has been your partnership with your husband kit wildly creative. Funny.
You both worked sometimes together, certainly in related fields. How
did you actually work like that and never get at
each other's throats. We did get at each other's throats
(30:54):
because it, you know, but it was around taxes or
something like that. He wanted to do it thoroughly, and
I had an attitude that it was worth four hours
a year to do our taxes and not endlessly crossing
teas and dotting eyes. So I took over the business
aspects of our life, and he really was a creative force.
(31:18):
He backed me up on most of the big creative choices,
and I knew that I wasn't going to go wrong.
We laugh a lot. Even when he worked on shows
for Neck or Oxygen, he never worked for me. One
of the reasons that we did so well with independent
(31:39):
producers was because I slept with the one. He would
keep reminding me how to not be a bad executive.
Your two kids are in the business, is that a surprise? Honestly?
Growing up in our house where every dinner conversation was
about what should we name this show? Or does this work?
We had a big house in Montclair, and in the
(32:01):
early years, you know, we had no budgets. Most of
Turkey TV was shot at our house in Montclair, so
my kids had to do things like throw frogs out
of the window and Sam would catch them. You know,
it just was too much fun. How could you be
a banker after that? That? So let's go back to Oxygen.
(32:23):
You talked about Nickelodeon and how you fit into the
Viacom world. You talked about Disney and these big names
and big executives there, and you got Oxygen. Although it's
your network, your partners were all world class creators, all
had vision. All it worked hard. How did you harness that? Well?
(32:45):
It probably was the hardest thing I ever did, But
there was a lot of goodwill towards Oxygen. The first
partner we had was Marcy Carcy and Carcy Werner. Marcy
is just about the most fantastic creative person you can
ever be a partner with. One day we thought, how
(33:05):
could we make this better? Is there anybody who could
bring us marketing magic? And we said Oprah. We both
knew her. We called her up, we flew out, we
had lunch. Oprah had me fly back and lie on
a couch with her for seven hours, talking about my past.
She asked me the same questions you're asking me now,
(33:27):
and she decided she was gonna come in with us.
She'd always wanted to have a cable network, but she
had a staff that was very protective of her, so
we didn't always get as much as we wanted. Everybody
wants everything from Ope. She's truly a miraculous person. So
you sold Oxygen to NBC in two thousand and seven,
(33:49):
great timing, right before the Great Recession. I was not
in favor of selling Oxygen. You know the world of
bankers better than I do. But at first they told us,
don't do any TV. It's all about the Internet. Then
the bubble happened, com bust, the dot com bust, and
so we had to trim down the Internet and focus
(34:11):
all on TV. We started making that profitable, and my
Christmas bonus the year we got profitable was that I
could go back into the Internet. And so we figured
out that women make all these visual decisions all the time.
We wanted to recreate that experience of ripping out of
a magazine, and we created this whole collage system that
(34:33):
was just genius called Ripped dot com and it was
the precursor to Pinterest. So when we sold Oxygen, not
on my brilliant timing, but on the pressure of our investors.
I didn't have the prescience to take Ripped with me.
(34:54):
That's one of your few regrets. Yeah, you've been on
the board of a number of companies, including Electronic Arts,
video game. I took your seat, you took my seat,
and you're on J. C. Penny the retailer, and a
lot in between. What do you add as a board member? Well,
I add the relationship piece, and I have a marketing orientation,
and I also question why we do something the way
(35:17):
we do it. Also just being a woman with a
different way of thinking. Okay, time to get judge. What
do you think of the state of children's TV today?
It's very scary to me. I'm thrilled that Brian Robbins
has been appointed the head of Nickelodeon because he's a producer.
He produced all that for us. He's got a creative core,
(35:39):
which I think is what really differentiated us at MTV Networks.
We worshiped creative. We were not just trying to trim
every cost. We were trying to get the best out
of people. Well, in a matter of fact, we often
talked about that if the consumers love it, we'll figure
out how to make money on it, right exactly, don't
(36:00):
reverse that order. Right. The thing that concerns me the
most right now is that YouTube has become the number
one kids brand and there's absolutely no concern on the
part of people who are putting YouTube on the air
for kids. What do you think about cell phones always
on media, social, etcetera, and impact on kids. I think
(36:22):
it's awful. I often get asked by groups of women
what can we do, and I said, well, the first
thing you can do is when you get home, put
your phone in your purse and zipp it and never
take it out in front of your kids. But I
have a small tech company that's creating a mind craft
like game called Chicken c h k N that is
(36:47):
about getting kids to create creatures out of little blocks
that have artificial intelligence. It's very fresh and original, but
it's engaging. How do we get kids to be creative
and share their creativity? So I think there are things
that can be done. I mean, it's a completely turned
upside down marketplace. I think podcasting could be great for kids.
(37:11):
I would love to get into that business. Well, you're
at the right place, and you're on the podcast. Let's
get judge you a little bit about the state of
the cable networks and TV networks. How do you view it.
I don't think we ever dreamed that the programmers would
have so much clout that they would be able to
basically ruin the industry by charging too much. If you
(37:37):
talk to cable operators, all their growth comes from broadband
and supplying small businesses with high speed internet video is
a pain in the neck. Very different when you and
I were there and we worshiped at the feet of
the cable lover right what we did for providing choice
and a reasonable economics. We were never greedy. We all flourished,
(38:02):
and then everybody got greedy. It feels to me like
this over the top of stuff is toppling the formula
we had talk about just a second on sort of
state of the Internet. You were very early in the Internet,
and you were right when you started Oxygen. TV networks
are saying Internet, who needs that? And you were saying,
I'm embracing the Internet. Did it turn out the way
(38:22):
expected it too? I didn't know what I expected because
I knew it was an order of magnitude of something
that I had never seen. But I think if I
pull out old pitches for old ideas, we might be
pretty close to where it went the downfall of retail.
(38:43):
I didn't really see that this happening so fast. So
time for some advice. What advice would you give to
someone trying to follow in your footsteps that wants to
be the next Jerry Laborn? I'd say, be serious in
learning and fun in working. What advice would you give
your twenty one year old self if you could go
(39:05):
back and do that study how to do management buyout effectively?
We end each episode where we begin Math and Magic
with a shout out to the standouts and the analytical
side of marketing and business, the math people, and also
those from the creative side, which we call the magicians.
Who would be your choice for the mathematician Danny Hillis.
(39:26):
For the magician, I would say, Steve Jobs. Jerry, you
have bridged that math and magic world very well for
your whole career. You've helped so many people along the way.
You've spent so much time giving to others, and you
still do. You're one of the greats of media. Thanks
for being here. What a pleasure. There are a few
(39:48):
things I picked up in my conversation with Jerry. One.
To build a successful team like Jerry did at Nickelodeon,
you need people with differing talents who aren't afraid to
share their unique insights or defend their point of view
for the rest of the team, who like creatives to
be creative. If you give people the room to make
mistakes like Jerry did throughout her career, sooner or later,
(40:08):
they'll make something terrific. Three. Ask your audience's opinion and
trust their answers, even if your audience is your own family.
When Jerry's young son didn't like a Nickelodeon show, she
would often rework him, sometimes KILLO. Thanks for listening. I'm
Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
(40:30):
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. Nikki Eatore for pulling research,
Bill Plaux, and Michael Asar for their recording help. Our
editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel,
Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to
your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production. I heart radio.
I actually kept a notebook of what I would not
do when I got to be the boss. When you
gave me the opportunity, you kind of looked at me
and said, I don't know what you can do, but
let's see. Oh my god, nothing could be better than that.
(00:23):
Just straight on challenge. We needed to be a rebellion.
We were taking back Nickelodeon for kids. I am Bob Pittman,
and welcome to this episode of Math and Magic Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we explore the combination
(00:45):
of analytics and creativity, Math and magic that's at the
heart of so many marketing and business successes. Today. We
have someone who led the birth of and transformed a
number of major TV networks. She was also one of
the first women to break through the men barrier in
the entertainment media business. Jerry Leiborne. Her mom was a creative,
(01:12):
her dad was in business. She clearly inherited both skills.
She started out on a track and architecture, moved education,
then advocacy for responsible TV for kids, produced kids TV
program and then joined Nickelodeon at its birth to do
the pro social Kids TV when it was a non
commercial service for preschoolers. Later, as the head of the network,
(01:32):
she transformed it to the first tweens TV network, added
advertising and changed American culture. She went on too Disney,
starting new networks, and finally started her own network, Oxygen.
She's been on corporate boards, served as a mentor to
countless women and executives. She lived through some to Redstones, takeover, Viacom,
Michael Ovit's short tenure at Disney, and partner with Oprah,
(01:56):
and her well known smile never left her face ever. Jerry, Welcome, Bob.
It's so great to be here. You and I are
old friends, so I know some stories even our best
researchers can't find. But before we get into that, I
want to do you in sixty seconds. Are you ready?
Do you prefer Rugrats or Doug Doug, a silver bouncing
(02:16):
ball or a green slime Green Slime cats or dogs
Dogs Philly or New York New York Copper Cone Cone,
The Dick Van Dyke Show, or Get Smart Dick Van Dyke,
Texting or calling calling l A or tell your ride
l A. Dennis the Menace or Mr Ed Mr Ed.
(02:37):
Of course, cable TV or the Internet. Oh boy, that's
a killer Internet Nickelodeon or Disney Channel Nickelodeon. Okay, it's
about to get harder. What's your favorite city? Montreal? Secret talent?
I can tie cherry stems in my mouth. I can
tie a knot. We'll take your word for it. I
(02:58):
can beat anybody at it except my daughter. Greatest motivator you.
Oh that's nice. Thank you, smartest person you know. Danny
hillis childhood hero Cat Moon, favorite novel, Plain Song by
Kent har Roof. Who would play you in a movie?
Lauren Mca? What would the title be of your memoir?
Raised my Kids, Proudest professional achievement, the Global Mentors Walk?
(03:23):
What did you want to be when you're growing up? Well?
I wanted to be a doctor, and then I discovered
that I have a condition that makes me faint if
anybody tells me about an illness, and that kind of
took that away. Okay, I promise we won't talk about
any illness. Is thank you? If you could have one superpower,
what would it be? World? Well, that's a good one. Okay.
(03:44):
Let's jump back in time to us as young managers
at what was then called wonder MX Satellite Entertainment Corporation,
then in our day was MTV Networks and now it's Viacom.
I had just moved up from the programming and marketing
guy who led the product at MTV to be each
chief operating officer of the company and turned my attention
to Nickelodeon, a commercial, free, pro schoolers TV network where
(04:08):
you were the key programmer. This was the mid eighties.
We were just launching targeted or as we called it,
the narrowcast TV networks, and you had a better idea
for Nickelodeon. You wanted to go for tweens, older kids, preteens,
and young teens. And by the way, one of my
best executive decisions ever was to listen to you and
(04:29):
invest in you and support that. Can you tell us
about that vision and where it came from, Well, it
came from being a teacher and a researcher with kids.
I love kids, I'm a natural kid advocate, and I
thought that television routinely looked down at kids and condescended
to them and gave them subpar creators. And I felt
(04:52):
like if you listened to kids and you treated them
as if they were really smart, you could do some
pretty interesting stuff. If you remember, we had no money
that we couldn't do what anybody else did. But I
would research everything that people said about kids TV, like
program only two boys, girls will watch anything, kids will
(05:12):
only watch animation. I'm such a contrarian. It's like, Okay,
if everybody else is going that direction, we're going to
go this direction. So it was very much like MTV,
because MTV was a contrarian network. Most of your shows
were Canadian. They were cheap, but they were breakthrough. At
one point, we had more Canadian content on Nickelodeon than
(05:34):
any network in Canada except Windsor Ontario. Nickelodeon. You think
of orange and green slime, Where did that green slime
come from? It came out of you can't do that
on television, which truly was I think the most important
show ever produced kids because it took kids side and
(05:54):
it used reverse psychology. It made kids feel better after
watching it. But the premise of it was we had
everyday kids and it was shot in Ottawa and so
these were everyday Canadian kids. And the producer, Roger Price,
wrote the show based on the personalities of the kids,
so he wasn't making them be anything they weren't. He
(06:16):
was just multiplying it, and they started to get kind
of uppity and kind of like Hollywood kids. So he
decided that he would start sliming. It was triggered by
them saying, I don't know which he would write in
the script for whoever needed to be put in their place.
It ended up backfiring on him because they loved being slimmed.
(06:39):
Have you ever been slimed? I was never slimed. I
think I avoided the sliming. I got slimed in the
office one day. It is wonderful. Well, I'm going to
take your word for that, because I'm not dying to
be slimed. So if anybody look so good on you,
don't slime me. So you were talking about MTV being contrarian.
We had just introduced the idea of a network identity
(07:00):
as opposed to a network delivering programs with the viewers
affinity attached to just the program, and we decided that
Nickelodeon could do the same thing. How did you define
that and how did you make the big move from
a somewhat corny silver bouncing ball for preschool or Nickelodeon
to the cool new Nick you created. Well. First of all,
(07:24):
I just have to say we never turned our back
on preschoolers. We had the best preschool programming ever, but
we had to be very careful to put it in
its own buckets, so we called it Nick Jr. Our
target was ten and tween, so that was a key
thing because we were known for being a baby channel.
I think you know the story of my son throwing
(07:47):
his Nickelodeon hat in the closet when he was five, sobbing,
and I said, what's the matter and he said, they say,
Nickelodeon's a baby channel. Honestly, my inspiration for Nickelodeon was Sam.
He was the coolest little five year old you ever saw,
and we just grew up with them. But I'd also
say that I was a student of what you were doing.
(08:08):
I saw how right it was that if you focus
on the audience and delight them and let the creative
community do their best work without man handling or woman
handling them, that you're going to get a really interesting result.
That's what we did. We created, just like you did,
a list of promises that we were the first network
(08:30):
for kids. We were completely on their side. We were
going to bring them the best creative we possibly could.
Frett Cybert, who had done the original on airlook from
TV and by the way, it has been on Math
and Magic when he was on talk some about helping
in that original creation of owning Orange. I remember when
you guys presented it to me. My reaction was, Orange,
(08:51):
that's it. From your vantage point, how did you get
from that bouncing ball to this very cool image and
attitude in that graphic look. Well, the bouncing ball was
created by an outside agency that the guy before me
had hired. It was very secretive. Nobody was a part
(09:12):
of it. They had no relationship to kids, and they
just thought, Okay, kids like this kind of stuff. No
kid can attach themselves to a silver ball. It just
isn't possible. And so Fred was incredibly collaborative, direct, honest.
He would say you're wrong, and I'm going to tell
you why. And I didn't get upset by that. It
(09:36):
was like, okay, tell me why. We learned together. I
think Fred feels like he was my partner, which he was.
We had a collaborative process. We had a wonderful guy
named Tom Corey and Tom Papa Cello, who were true geniuses.
We got delighted by anything. So creative agencies wanted to
(09:59):
work with us be because we would say, give us
ten ideas and we'll pick three, and we won't tell
you how to change them. We just set rules the
same way MTV. You were a container, you wanted people
to connect with it. One of the things we did
when we started taking advertising we would get buckets of mail.
(10:21):
They would be decorated on the outside with kids own shapes.
Because the idea behind Nickelodeon is it's like a kid's
mind constantly transforming. We knew that if we took an
envelope that was decorated on the outside, we could take
it into a sales meeting and just let them open
the letters. And it worked. It worked. But that was
(10:42):
a lesson from MTV. Get identification that kids can make
their wrong Before we get into the impact of Nickelodeon
and your networks. After that, let's go further back to
your childhood to get some perspective. Your mom had been
a writer, actor, and producer of soap operas. Your dab
was a stockbroker. Were they true to their stereotypes? Was
that a creative in a business person? Absolutely? And what
(11:05):
was the impact on you from having that range, there
was a third element. My mother was an advocate for kids,
so it was really like a trifecta. And also my
mother broke every rule, including how to open a milk cart,
so we had sloppy milk my entire childhood. She didn't
like to go the same way twice. I was the
(11:27):
middle daughter. My older sister was beautiful and perfect, my
younger sister was brilliant and charismatic. And there's me, eighteen
months apart, squeezed in and my dad when I was five,
said you're going to be my business daughter, and he
made me treasurer of the family. I took out bank
accounts for my irresponsible siblings. I went to business meetings
(11:49):
with my dad when I was eight nine. That's pretty cool.
So you grew up in New Jersey. This was the
fifties and sixties. Paint the picture of those times. What
was the spot Cara? Schools were very science focused. I
went to public school. I had thirteen hours of biology.
As a freshman, I got the lowest grade in my class,
(12:11):
seven sixteen on my college boards. One year, we had
half session. I organized our clubhouse for the other half day.
I made people do debates and plays, and I was
so nerdy. I rode away to every foreign embassy and
my hobby was alphabetizing. That is nerdy, wonderfully nerdy. You
(12:32):
know it's da people don't realize. In those days we
didn't have the internet. There's no kids TV programming on TV.
I rode away to observatories and asked them for pictures
of planets with letters and stamps, and I got a
surprising number back. Did you pay much attention to TV
inter youth? I did. There wasn't that much that was
(12:54):
really oriented to kids. There were some local shows like
the Herb Briner show, I Love Top Long Cassidy. When
TV was installed, they had actually a guy who came
in plugged in our TV, turned it on and my
mother said, well, hello television, and the television said right
back to her, hello out there in television land. So,
(13:16):
as a three year old, I thought TV could see me.
I would take a bath, get dressed up and sit
in front of the television so hoppy could see me.
In your high school era, were you a sixties radical
or a mainstream suburban kid. I would say I was
a suburban kid. I didn't get radicalized. Till later. You've
(13:38):
been a long time and major supporter of Vassar. Why
did you go to Vassar? Well, my sister was there.
I was deciding between Cornell and Vassar, and ironically, I'd
always had really great relationships with boys in high school
and not that many close relationships with girls, and I
(13:59):
thought that if I was going to be a good,
effective human, I better learn how to have female friends.
The other thing about Vasser that was appealing to me
is Vasser is a contrarian place. Every student there is
taught to question everything and go to the source and
not to take other people's interpretations of things, and that
(14:21):
was sort of made for me. What did you get
out of that experience looking back all these years later, Well,
they actually taught me how to run things. I'm not
sure that I was the best student in the world,
but I really was dedicated to helping the administration and
also the student body. They put me on the master
(14:43):
Planning committee that was studying how to turn Vasser from
a female college to a co ed college. And I
got to run committee meetings and have architects and you know,
it was just they took us seriously. What was the
big issue that Vasser was facing and moving from all
women to co ed well. At the time, the men's
(15:04):
schools were jealous of Harvard because Harvard had Radcliffe right
next door, so they felt to be competitive with Harvard,
they have to have their own girls. It was really
like Gale wanted to date us and marry us and
barry us. That's too harsh, but harsh. They just wanted
to be competitive in attracting the best and the brightest.
(15:29):
So that was going on at Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, everywhere, Wesleyan, Williams,
and for us to be successful, we had to go
co educational. It's a very special place and it's always
been about access. First it was access to women. Then
it was access to men who wanted an equal co education.
(15:52):
Now it's access to diverse economic populations. So you graduated,
you worked briefly in an arctic actual firm, and then
as a school teacher, you got your masters from the
University of Pennsylvania, pen and then you co founded the
Media Center for Children in nineteen four. What was that about.
It was about looking at kids and watching them look
(16:14):
at very avant garde film. We tried all kinds of
crazy National Film Board of Canada Short Films and we
got into the independent creative community in that way, so
Eli Noise and Drew Takahashi. We were just trying to
see what is true about what kids would be interested
(16:35):
in tolerate. We also worked with schools and libraries to
get kids to be interactive with media, so it was
really like the perfect background. 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
(16:57):
and Magic. We're here with Jerry Leborne. You left to
join Nickelodeon in nine. What attracted you to Nickelodeon? In
that mission, we had a grant. Our mission was to
market the work of independent filmmakers to television, and Nickelodeon
was our first client and we were the first producers
that they ever hired. And we had this crazy show
(17:20):
video dream Theater where we would animate kids into their
own dreams using color, xerox or masks. Julie Tamar, who
went on to do The Lion King and lots of everything,
she was our maskmaker. It was just a really creative,
fabulous thing. By the way, horrible television kids dream about abandonment,
(17:45):
suffocation and it's just terrible, but I got hired. You
had a boss at Nickelodeon before you were the boss.
Where did you learn from that boss? Well, he was
a very conventional, top down manager. I don't think we
had a single team meeting the whole time he was
vice president of Nickelodeon. I was the first president, thank you.
(18:08):
He had low expectations. He sent all of our good
creative problems to old crony friends outside, and he didn't
encourage us to work together. I actually kept a notebook
of what I would not do when I got to
be the boss. So when you gave me the opportunity,
(18:31):
I don't know if you remember this, but you kind
of looked at me and said, I don't know what
you can do, but let's see. It wasn't like, okay,
you're now the executive vice president of Nickelodeon. It was
just I know enough not to get rid of you.
Let's see what you can do. Oh my god, nothing
could be better than that, Just a straight on challenge.
(18:52):
I took the twenty people that were working for Nickelodeon
off to a conference room and we put all the
things we know about Nickelodeon here's what's not working, here's
what's working. And at the end of the day I
knew which people were going to be on the team
and which we're not. I fired seven people. We needed
(19:15):
to be a rebellion. We were taking back Nickelodeon for
Kids after the switch to add support in the replaunch
of Nickelodeon's The Twain Channel. You really struck gold. Can
you talk a little bit about one what that felt
like and to why you think Nickelodeon caught on like that? Well,
first of all, it helps to be the first, to
(19:37):
have really no competition, and to be true to your audience.
We literally did not put anything on the air that
hadn't been tested with kids, and we were adventuresome. We
had some big flops. I remember promising you The Moon
with Turkey TV was going to be comedy clips like
(19:58):
MTV for kids, and the day it arrived on Memorial
Day weekend five, it was even worse than Video Dream Theater.
My son, who at this point was ten, just started
to sob. This is horrible. You will never work in
(20:18):
TV again. I called everybody back to the office and
we spent six days re editing everything. You know. You
let me off the hook on that. Well, one thing
we all know is you don't come close to getting
it right. In fact, it's the big flops that we
got to take the chances. And we worked for a
guy named Steve Ross who ran Warner Communications and then
(20:40):
Time Warner. And Steve used to say, you know, bomb
around here, you a number of you fired for making
a mistake. You'll be fired for not making a mistake.
You're not making mistakes. Tells me you're not trying anything new.
And that was our lifeblood. But it was just so
much fun. And the other thing was if you were
working at Nickelodeon, you really had to let kids. I
had this trick question which I would ask any employee,
(21:02):
probably illegal, what were you like as a kid, And
they tell you everything, how they get along with their siblings,
how they're going to work in a team, and what
they care about. Let's talk a minute about how it
was to be a woman in this very big job,
in this very highly visible environment. Well, I had this boss,
(21:23):
Bob Pittman. The first day that I was invited into
the executive suite, there were only four of us, Tom Preston, you,
Bob Burgante and me. I made my husband quiz me
for four hours about sports metaphors. It was terrifying to me.
(21:45):
And I come in and the first sports metaphor that
I could possibly come up with I came up with,
and of course I used tennis metaphor in a basketball court.
And you looked at me and said, you can skip that.
We have you here for what you know, and I
don't care about sports. We want you to be you.
(22:06):
You have no idea how incredibly empowering that was, and
if men would do that, they would get such better results.
But it wasn't that hard for me. You wanted me
to be the nerdy, caring, creative, loving head, and you
(22:27):
encouraged me to make mistakes, and you didn't hold grudges.
Let's talk about you as a school teacher. We talked
back then about how that helped you as both a
programmer and as an executive, and by the way, was
in a big influence on your management style. Talk a
little bit about that. So I went to Penn during
the days of open classrooms, which is a very short
(22:49):
lived American experiment. Open classroom if it's done well, and
it was done well in England is the greatest kind
of education. For a kid because it's oriented towards individualized instructions.
So your job as a teacher is to find out
what's great about you lift that up. It's not remediation
(23:10):
orient So that had huge impact on my management style.
Just to illustrate the success you had there, One of
my favorite stories, and I tell it often about you,
is we tried to buy the company in the management
buyout and the TV networks which included Nickelodeon and MTV,
and it was sad and Viacom bought us, and this
(23:32):
was pre sunder Redstone Viacom. They got us to do
this for a rigorous five year plan each year, and
I remember the last one I did five years later.
I'm in my office. I get an envelope. Open up
the envelope. It's a xerox copy of the fifth year
of the Nick budget page and it was a handwritten
(23:52):
note from you on it that said, what you didn't believe?
That was it? Of course, the point was you had
crushed the five your number. I still remember walking out
of the office of my tail between my legs, being
beaten up about how could I put that dream down there?
It was on fire. You and Tom Preston actually were
the reasons some the red Stone and Tom Dooley bought Viacom.
(24:16):
I was instrumental in setting up a meeting with you
and Tom for Sumner and you had a golden career there.
You became vice chair of MTV Networks as well. You
couldn't have been bigger, more important, and more successful. And
then you left to go to Disney take over their
cable networks and even fix up the Disney Channel, which
have been your big competition, or at least they tried
(24:38):
to be. Why did you leave? Well, I I could
see some bad times ahead. I loved Nickelodeon. Leaving was
probably the hardest thing. I felt like it was, am
I going to be anybody tomorrow? When I'm not, I
don't have Nickelodeon. And by the way, I think you
and I shared that I had that fear of MTV.
(24:59):
You had fear of Nickelodeon. It was so much us,
We loved, the people we worked with was just the greatest, really,
but the structure of Viacom and MTV Networks. By this point,
Nickelodeon was making more money than MTV and there was
lots of messy stuff around v H one, and I
(25:23):
just felt like it was going to be hard for
Nickelodeon to really do what I wanted it to do.
The mission of Nickelodeon was to connect with kids and
connect kids with their world through entertainment. Now if there
isn't a better Internet mission statement, we wrote that I
look back, if HEIGHT stayed, would we have been successful
(25:47):
in doing that? But I like to grow, I like
to try things, and I felt like I was starting
to get resistance the Viacom management could not understand why
I wanted to have a different kind of participation. I
wanted to be participating in the growth of Nickelodeon because
(26:07):
when we started, Nickelodeon was worth less than nothing, and
when I left it was between eight and ten billion dollars,
which is more than Viacom is today. And so it's
a serious business concern. So you go to Disney, you
sign a four year contract, you really do improve the
(26:28):
product there, you bring in some great people, you really
revamp it, and then you left. You left two years
later to start Oxygen. Give me some insights there. I
had been courted by Iger, Eisner and Ovits in their
separate buckets, so when they all came together who do
we want to get? Jerry Leborne. I'd only had really
(26:50):
one big job, and it felt pretty good to want
to be wanted, as opposed to the pushback that you
get when you're highly successful in a company and their
sibling rivalry. And I felt like if I didn't take
a chance on myself. I always was comfortable taking a
chance for Nickelodeon and my staff, but how about me.
(27:14):
I didn't sign a long term contract that had no outs.
I had the right to quit for no reason. I
got to Disney. I met a lot of fabulous people.
I made lifetime friendships. Danny hillis who is the smartest
man in the world. We had the imagineers inventing telefusion
(27:38):
and convergence, and it was exciting. But it wasn't my
crusader kind of thing. They really wanted me to fix things,
and they didn't really want to invest in the things
they talked about, so I waited. I got two years
worth of options. I went to Michael Eisner and said,
(27:59):
I'm going to start at a new company. Do you
want to be an investor? And he said yes, and
I left. You joined Oprah and others. I want to
get to that in a minute. But I want to
stop down for just a few minutes here and download
some of what you learned from all that, because that's
a remarkable span of opportunities situations. First, talk about brands,
(28:21):
What are they? How do you think about what a
brand is and how do you build them? I believe
you don't have a brand unless your audience tells you
you have a brand. It's a relationship with your audience.
When we took over the Disney Channel, I brought Ann
Sweeney and and Rich Ross. We looked at what was
happening with the Disney Channel. All it was was taking
(28:44):
the equity of Disney. There was no equity around the
Disney Channel. There was no relationship with the audience. All
they wanted to do is a pay channel. All they
wanted to do is make sure somebody bought it. Month
after month in the seven pm slot, one they'd have
an Eisenhower documentary and the next night they'd have Dumbo.
(29:04):
But the kids were dying. That was a big, big moment,
So we tried to create an identity for the Disney Channel.
We took the old lessons and we created an identity
and then ate Nickelodeon's lunch. Let's talk about building companies,
building teams. What kind of culture do you need to
(29:27):
have a building situation? Well, you need different thinkers at
the table. You need people who are strategic, you need
people who are creative, you need people who are technical,
and you need to make sure that they feel comfortable
giving voice to their point of view and that in fact,
the team depends on them. Debbie BC was of the
(29:51):
Fred Cyberg school. You're wrong, and I'm going to tell
you why that's the best thing for a dreamer like
me to have. You couldn't have a better relationship up
We all had this philosophy that our responsibility was to
make sure everybody at the table was getting an a.
We had a program called the PIT program Presidents in Training,
(30:12):
So everybody at my executive team were presidents in training.
And I promised them, if you come in here and
look at our problems from up here, we will all
learn to be presidents together, and you won't all be
president of Nickelodeon, but you'll get to be president of something.
And many of them did. They didn't let me get
(30:34):
some personal insights here. One of your key relationships has
been probably for I think all of your adult life
has been your partnership with your husband kit wildly creative. Funny.
You both worked sometimes together, certainly in related fields. How
did you actually work like that and never get at
each other's throats. We did get at each other's throats
(30:54):
because it, you know, but it was around taxes or
something like that. He wanted to do it thoroughly, and
I had an attitude that it was worth four hours
a year to do our taxes and not endlessly crossing
teas and dotting eyes. So I took over the business
aspects of our life, and he really was a creative force.
(31:18):
He backed me up on most of the big creative choices,
and I knew that I wasn't going to go wrong.
We laugh a lot. Even when he worked on shows
for Neck or Oxygen, he never worked for me. One
of the reasons that we did so well with independent
(31:39):
producers was because I slept with the one. He would
keep reminding me how to not be a bad executive.
Your two kids are in the business, is that a surprise? Honestly?
Growing up in our house where every dinner conversation was
about what should we name this show? Or does this work?
We had a big house in Montclair, and in the
(32:01):
early years, you know, we had no budgets. Most of
Turkey TV was shot at our house in Montclair, so
my kids had to do things like throw frogs out
of the window and Sam would catch them. You know,
it just was too much fun. How could you be
a banker after that? That? So let's go back to Oxygen.
(32:23):
You talked about Nickelodeon and how you fit into the
Viacom world. You talked about Disney and these big names
and big executives there, and you got Oxygen. Although it's
your network, your partners were all world class creators, all
had vision. All it worked hard. How did you harness that? Well?
(32:45):
It probably was the hardest thing I ever did, But
there was a lot of goodwill towards Oxygen. The first
partner we had was Marcy Carcy and Carcy Werner. Marcy
is just about the most fantastic creative person you can
ever be a partner with. One day we thought, how
(33:05):
could we make this better? Is there anybody who could
bring us marketing magic? And we said Oprah. We both
knew her. We called her up, we flew out, we
had lunch. Oprah had me fly back and lie on
a couch with her for seven hours, talking about my past.
She asked me the same questions you're asking me now,
(33:27):
and she decided she was gonna come in with us.
She'd always wanted to have a cable network, but she
had a staff that was very protective of her, so
we didn't always get as much as we wanted. Everybody
wants everything from Ope. She's truly a miraculous person. So
you sold Oxygen to NBC in two thousand and seven,
(33:49):
great timing, right before the Great Recession. I was not
in favor of selling Oxygen. You know the world of
bankers better than I do. But at first they told us,
don't do any TV. It's all about the Internet. Then
the bubble happened, com bust, the dot com bust, and
so we had to trim down the Internet and focus
(34:11):
all on TV. We started making that profitable, and my
Christmas bonus the year we got profitable was that I
could go back into the Internet. And so we figured
out that women make all these visual decisions all the time.
We wanted to recreate that experience of ripping out of
a magazine, and we created this whole collage system that
(34:33):
was just genius called Ripped dot com and it was
the precursor to Pinterest. So when we sold Oxygen, not
on my brilliant timing, but on the pressure of our investors.
I didn't have the prescience to take Ripped with me.
(34:54):
That's one of your few regrets. Yeah, you've been on
the board of a number of companies, including Electronic Arts,
video game. I took your seat, you took my seat,
and you're on J. C. Penny the retailer, and a
lot in between. What do you add as a board member? Well,
I add the relationship piece, and I have a marketing orientation,
and I also question why we do something the way
(35:17):
we do it. Also just being a woman with a
different way of thinking. Okay, time to get judge. What
do you think of the state of children's TV today?
It's very scary to me. I'm thrilled that Brian Robbins
has been appointed the head of Nickelodeon because he's a producer.
He produced all that for us. He's got a creative core,
(35:39):
which I think is what really differentiated us at MTV Networks.
We worshiped creative. We were not just trying to trim
every cost. We were trying to get the best out
of people. Well, in a matter of fact, we often
talked about that if the consumers love it, we'll figure
out how to make money on it, right exactly, don't
(36:00):
reverse that order. Right. The thing that concerns me the
most right now is that YouTube has become the number
one kids brand and there's absolutely no concern on the
part of people who are putting YouTube on the air
for kids. What do you think about cell phones always
on media, social, etcetera, and impact on kids. I think
(36:22):
it's awful. I often get asked by groups of women
what can we do, and I said, well, the first
thing you can do is when you get home, put
your phone in your purse and zipp it and never
take it out in front of your kids. But I
have a small tech company that's creating a mind craft
like game called Chicken c h k N that is
(36:47):
about getting kids to create creatures out of little blocks
that have artificial intelligence. It's very fresh and original, but
it's engaging. How do we get kids to be creative
and share their creativity? So I think there are things
that can be done. I mean, it's a completely turned
upside down marketplace. I think podcasting could be great for kids.
(37:11):
I would love to get into that business. Well, you're
at the right place, and you're on the podcast. Let's
get judge you a little bit about the state of
the cable networks and TV networks. How do you view it.
I don't think we ever dreamed that the programmers would
have so much clout that they would be able to
basically ruin the industry by charging too much. If you
(37:37):
talk to cable operators, all their growth comes from broadband
and supplying small businesses with high speed internet video is
a pain in the neck. Very different when you and
I were there and we worshiped at the feet of
the cable lover right what we did for providing choice
and a reasonable economics. We were never greedy. We all flourished,
(38:02):
and then everybody got greedy. It feels to me like
this over the top of stuff is toppling the formula
we had talk about just a second on sort of
state of the Internet. You were very early in the Internet,
and you were right when you started Oxygen. TV networks
are saying Internet, who needs that? And you were saying,
I'm embracing the Internet. Did it turn out the way
(38:22):
expected it too? I didn't know what I expected because
I knew it was an order of magnitude of something
that I had never seen. But I think if I
pull out old pitches for old ideas, we might be
pretty close to where it went the downfall of retail.
(38:43):
I didn't really see that this happening so fast. So
time for some advice. What advice would you give to
someone trying to follow in your footsteps that wants to
be the next Jerry Laborn? I'd say, be serious in
learning and fun in working. What advice would you give
your twenty one year old self if you could go
(39:05):
back and do that study how to do management buyout effectively?
We end each episode where we begin Math and Magic
with a shout out to the standouts and the analytical
side of marketing and business, the math people, and also
those from the creative side, which we call the magicians.
Who would be your choice for the mathematician Danny Hillis.
(39:26):
For the magician, I would say, Steve Jobs. Jerry, you
have bridged that math and magic world very well for
your whole career. You've helped so many people along the way.
You've spent so much time giving to others, and you
still do. You're one of the greats of media. Thanks
for being here. What a pleasure. There are a few
(39:48):
things I picked up in my conversation with Jerry. One.
To build a successful team like Jerry did at Nickelodeon,
you need people with differing talents who aren't afraid to
share their unique insights or defend their point of view
for the rest of the team, who like creatives to
be creative. If you give people the room to make
mistakes like Jerry did throughout her career, sooner or later,
(40:08):
they'll make something terrific. Three. Ask your audience's opinion and
trust their answers, even if your audience is your own family.
When Jerry's young son didn't like a Nickelodeon show, she
would often rework him, sometimes KILLO. Thanks for listening. I'm
Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much
for listening to Math and Magic, a production of I
(40:30):
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. Nikki Eatore for pulling research,
Bill Plaux, and Michael Asar for their recording help. Our
editor Ryan Murdoch and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel,
Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to
your ears. Until next time,
Host
Bob Pittman
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