August 13, 2020 • 33 mins
It’s hard to imagine what this pandemic would look like without the internet to keep us all connected, and we have Jan Brandt’s marketing genius to thank for that technological revolution. As the CMO of AOL in the 1990s, she grew their subscription base by being keenly attuned to customers’ desires—and to the potential for home internet access to transform their lives. Listen to Jan explain why she loves being “the queen of no,” why she’d never fire someone for making a mistake, and how her drive comes from the “moxie” she’s admired since she was a kid watching her mother deftly navigate tough negotiations as a small business owner.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. At an age of eight, my father abandoned
my mother and my sister and brother, and I had
just brought into a restaurant in Jersey City. There, I
watched my mother, who had been the person who walked
(00:23):
me to school and made lunch for me, all of
a sudden was thrown into the position of having to
be a business person and run this restaurant. She had
no experience. I'm like eight years old. I'm listening to
her called vendors and she would say something like the
accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bills, I want you
to mock ten percent off your bill. And you can
(00:44):
hear on the other side saying why would we do that,
and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
top of the pile, or it could be on the
bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
watched what I could only call now Moxie. When I
did this negotiate for discs, I was ruthless. And that's
(01:04):
who was sitting on my shoulder, him Bom Pittman. And
welcome to another of our at home episodes of Math
and Magic. Stories from the frontiers of marketing. Today, we
have as our guest a great friend, incredible marketer, had
a great storyteller, So get ready for some useful lessons
(01:24):
and insights. She's the person responsible for that huge marketing
success of AOL in the nineteen nineties, taking a O
L from a few hundred thousand subscribers to over thirty million.
And if you wonder who was behind the carpet bombing
of a O L disc back, then well here's your culprit.
Jan Brandt, the former vice chair and CMO of America Online.
(01:51):
Jan was born in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was the home
of cool. She grew up in New Jersey. Had a
really interesting career marketing with a particular unique skill set
in direct marketing. And to prove it, she has won
numerous awards, received a lot of recognition almost every possible forum.
She loves dogs, travel, and people, and she has a
(02:12):
wicked sense of humor. Jan welcome, Well, thank you Bob.
Before we dig into all the stories and your lessons,
I want to do a little feature. We call you
in sixty seconds. You're ready. Do you prefer sunrise or sunset? Sunset? California,
Virginia California, Instagram or Twitter Twitter feature mountains, spring rottum
(02:34):
Omaha steaks or Kansas City Steaks, steaks, aim or a
well chat rooms, rooms, cats or dogs. Dogs. You've got
mail or sleepless in Seattle. You've got mail, dial up
or broadband. Okay, it's about to get harder. Smartest person
(02:56):
you know? One clean first a O L. S Green name,
private dancer, childhood hero, the lone ranger, first job, copywriter,
favorite magazine, parenting, favorite city, Paris, guilty pleasure, watching movies
all night long? And who would play you in a movie?
(03:16):
Barbara Streisand all right, let's get going. Let's start with
your most enduring legacy. A O L floppy disk and
then CDs everywhere, mailboxes, computer boxes, newspaper inserts, even frozen steaks.
You joined A O L in n near its beginning,
and a few years before I joined, if I remember correctly,
(03:38):
A O L just had a couple hundred thousand subs
back then. But Steve Case and the management group had
a very big vision. Can you describe that moment and
how you pivoted to mass marketing. I think I was
brought on to see how fast and how far we
could grow the service. I don't think we ever expected
it to be quite as fast as it was, but
(03:58):
that was my mission. I was brought in specifically to
grow the business. It was really an interesting point in
time because people didn't have home computers very much. The
penetration was fairly lowed. Mostly people were familiar with computers
in the workplace. They were starting to migrate to the home.
Those computers that people had at home, they didn't have modems,
(04:19):
so a person actually had to have a computer and
a modem in order to use the service. The first
program started with a direct mail test that I did,
mailing the discs out. It was a very very expensive proposition,
and it was one that people thought was kind of
a crazy thing to do because it was so expensive.
A package in the mail directed or targeted to someone
(04:42):
at that time probably was thirty five cents apiece. The
disc alan was a dollar nineteen, so putting in the
package of the mail probably caused us a dollar seventy
five beats. But I felt that the only way that
we could possibly describe the service to one was to
let them try it themselves. It's really hard to imagine
(05:04):
now and saying to someone, well, you're gonna be talking
on your screen, You're going to be typing, and someone
else is going to see what you're writing. We didn't
have screen sharing then, people didn't have computers. They thought
you were crazy. They would say, well, wanted could just
pick up a phone and call the person, and so
it was impossible to really describe the service and do
it any justice. We sent that mailing out to maybe
(05:25):
twelve lists. We needed about a three to five percent
response difference in order to make it work, and we
got that and more so we were off to the
races at that point. When you took over, though, I'm
gonna go back just a little bit. The view was
that the only possible audience for this, we're sort of
computer geeks. What was it that caused you and Steve
(05:47):
and whoever else made this decision that, yeah, you know,
all these people that don't even have a computer yet
are barely have a computer and certainly don't know how
operated are going to be the target market, and that's
how we're gonna be. For me, I always have to
look at any marketing endeavor and put myself in the
position of the customer. One of my hidden talents is
(06:08):
that I have a capacity for imagining that I'm the customer,
and when Steve and I were first talking, he gave
me a disk. I happened to have a Mac computer
at the time and still do, and I started using
the service. It was amazing. All of a sudden, I
(06:29):
have all of these friends that live in my computer.
And at that point there weren't many customers. We may
have had three chat rooms open in the range of
a hundred or fewer people on it, and I could
see what was happening there. I could see the connections
that were being made into me. It was always about community,
and it was always about connecting people, whether it was
(06:50):
through email or later instant messenger or shared interests. I
really felt that that was at the core of it,
and I felt the tug I felt and could understand
what people, once they started using it, would get out
of it. Our society was becoming more and more fragmented,
(07:12):
more and more distant. There was a lot of upward mobility.
There was a lot of geographic mobility, and to me,
the secret sauce was the ability of a well to
connect people. I didn't know it was gonna be thirty
four million paid subscribers but I had every confidence that
we were going to be able to reach larger and
larger numbers. So now I see why you started it,
(07:33):
why you decided to take that risk. You pushed out
this very expensive direct marketing. What were the early results?
Generally for a typical direct marketing package, you would expect
a one to three percent response, you know, three percent
would be on the higher level. And this was a test.
So I was picking things that I thought might work,
(07:56):
but I had no history. The results of that first
test would was I think about a hundred or hundred
and twenty thousand pieces. Was twelve within that twelve percent,
because that's an average. There were lists that were pulling
twent I had never before, never since ever seen anything
(08:18):
like that. And keep in mind that this isn't just
taking a free offer or a trial. It was a
trial offer, but that the person had to take the
credit card, give the credit card information, put the credit
card information into a computer, and send it out into
cyberspace and they would be built unless they canceled. It
(08:38):
was staggering. It's clear it's a success. And I know
you went on the drive cost down ridiculously low. At
one point, I think you have more CDs and production
for a O L than existed anywhere else in the world.
But every time a competitor would do an offer, you
did this very interesting thing is you would replicate the
(08:59):
offer with the A Well name on it and tested
to see if it was better than what you were doing.
Why on earth do you think a Prodigy and compy
Serve in the early days and MSN later didn't do
that day O Well. What used to keep me up
at night is coming into the office in the morning
and seeing that Prodigy or CompuServe or Microsoft had copied
(09:22):
what we were doing, just copied it. I can give
you an idea of why some people didn't do this.
Co worker Ted Leonsis did a lot of public speaking.
Someone either from Prodigy or CompuServe went up to Ted
and said, what the hell is going on in your company?
That marketing person is spending so much money, you guys
(09:45):
are nuts. Ted just shook his head when he came
back to report that to me. I said, now here's
what you say to them next time. That you've been
trying to get that dumb broad fired for you know,
the last two years, and it's driving you crazy and
you can't believe that she's blowing that much money out
because I just didn't want them to know how well
it was working. And here's the error that they were
(10:07):
all making. So they didn't understand the man, even though
these were smart people. There is this fixation that people
have on what's something cost. But the equation on an
acquisition cost, which is what really matters, is the cost
relative to the number of people that you bring in.
If I spend five times as much but I bring
(10:29):
in twenty times as many customers, it's in my favor.
So the cost is clearly the hurdle. And I think
you're right. I see it today and I'm sending it
everywhere in my career too. They don't focus on value.
They focus on cost. You found some other truisms too.
You found out that the mention of any price always
depressed results, no matter how good the price was. Yet
(10:51):
every competitor kept talking about their price. What else did
you consistently find truths that others clearly not see. I
initiated a cancel safe program where rather than just processing
a cancelation as other services were doing, we train reps
to find out why the person actually got onto the service.
(11:15):
To begin with what we're looking for. What inspired you? Oh,
I see your lessening sounds Greek? Is that true? Or
you a Greek heritage Oh yes, well we have a
whole section about the Greek islands online, or we have
a whole travel section and we have a whole history section. Oh,
you wanted to work with your child, here's the encyclopedia.
(11:36):
Part of it was never taking no for an answer,
and another truism in the early stages, which was very
counterintuitive again to people who just weren't paying attention or
weren't analyzing it. People say, why are you sending us
somebody just we actually built databases, you know, probably not
as an exacting way as we would have the capability
(11:57):
to do now. But back then where we knew how
many disks that we were sending out to people. Now
we couldn't track what they were finding in Barnes and
Noble or what they were finding at their gas station.
But in terms of the actual mail, we knew that
in certain lists, on average we got response after they
(12:17):
had received four efforts. We were actually tracking that. By
the end of the Nannies, A o L had half
the traffic of the Internet in the US, going through
a well, we won't compy served, Prodigy was left by
the wayside. MSN couldn't get a a well, why didn't
any of the other services catch on that the key
variable was easy convenient. I went to the mat a
(12:40):
number of times where they wanted to put it on
two discs, and I remember having knocked down Dragon Fight,
saying no, it has to be easy, it has to
be simple. Likewise, I was under a lot of pressure
to go from floppy disks to c d s because
c d s would fix that problem. And I knew that,
but my customs didn't have c d s. I didn't
(13:02):
want to switch the c d s when of our
customers had a disk drive. The CD drive was an
external add on. You may have been with me on
this meeting, but I was out with Steve Jobs right
after he returned to Apple, and he was getting ready
to tell me about this new thing he had called
the iMac, and his innovation was he said, I believe
(13:25):
the computer is part of the Internet, and I'm gonna
build the modem into a computer. Today it lives like huh,
But back then it was such a step forward. He
understood easy. Why do you think all these other smart
people at these companies. A lot of resources didn't hit
on easy. Everybody else have more, they have better, they
(13:47):
had this, but nobody had easy except us. I can't
explain that other than I really think that you really
have to live and breathe a customer in order to
really at it. I want to talk some about the
Walled Garden, the early view of the Internet, but first
I want to go to early Jan. You were born
(14:08):
in Brooklyn, moved to New Jersey. I think when you
were about eight. There's this wonderful story and very telling
about you, about a five year old Jan who wanted
a library card. Can you repeat that story? Gosh, how
do you know that story? I know everything. Wow. So
my mother, who at that time was a stay at
home mother, she was an Avid and everyone in my
(14:29):
family were avid Avid readers, newspapers, books, fiction, nonfiction, just
voracious readers. And she would take me to the library
and on her library card she was able to get
four adult books and two children's books. And I would
be with her and I said, I want four books.
(14:51):
I don't want two books because I'd have to wait
a whole week in order to get other ones. And
so we went to the librarian and asked her to
get a library part from me. And so she asked
me to sign my name, and so of course I
signed it in print, which you know, block letters, whatever
they were. And she said, now we can't allow that.
(15:11):
We have to have your name in script. And my
mother had explained to me what script was. And after
arguing with the librarian, we went home and my father
took a piece of paper and he drew out my
name several times, and he said, just sit here and trace.
And so for a whole week I traced my name
(15:32):
over and over and over and over again. I must
have traced it ten thousand times. And the following week
we went back to the library, I signed the card
and got my own library card. Well, I've seen you
repeat that lesson many times in your career. So this
world you grew up in the fifties sixties, tell us
a little bit about the world as you saw it
then and how that affected you. We didn't have any money.
(15:54):
We were poor. I mean, we were what they used
to call back then, working class. You know. I grew
up with two parents, and then my father, at an
age of eight, abandoned my mother and my sister and
brother and I he had just brought into a restaurant
in Jersey City. We end up moving pretty quickly New
Jersey City. There, I watched my mother, who had been
(16:17):
the person who walked me to school and made lunch
for me and played catch with me while I watched
baseball games on t V. All of a sudden was
thrown into the position of having to be a business
person and run this restaurant. She had no experience. This
was a restaurant that was open seven in a busy
business area. She had an office that was in the
(16:38):
basement and kind of smelled. I would sit there, I'd
open up one of the drawers of the file cabinet
lean on it while she'd be on the phone or
doing the payroll or doing something like that. I'm like
eight years old or nine years old. I'm listening to
her called endors and she would say something like the
accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bill, I want you
(17:00):
to mock ten off your bill. And you can hear
on the other side saying why would we do that,
and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
top of the pile, or it could be on the
bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
watched what I can only call now Moxie. When I
did this negotiating for discs, I was ruthless and that's
(17:24):
who was sitting on my shoulder because my view was okay.
So if they say no, they say no, no one
is ever going to stop me from coming back and
saying okay, any right, you know, I'll take that higher price.
It wasn't about my ego. People get into a negotiation
and it becomes a lot about their ego, and to me,
it was always about the company. I remember jan times
(17:47):
that we really had to dig deep to hit our numbers,
and you would say, you know, I think I get
a little more out of this vendor, and you always
went to that well, and you know what, there always
was a little more. So that was a great childhood lesson.
We all benefited from it. It It worked with you. Let's
move up a little bit. You went to Boston University
School of Communications. You worked for Xerox. You got your
(18:11):
MBA while while still working there. You're a copywriter for
Xerox Education Publications, the company that published my Weekly Reader,
which any one of my age remembers and was I
think one of the biggest publications of its day. Why
Xerox and why copyrighting? Where did that come from? Well?
I wanted to be a writer. I really want to
be a journalist, and so I had a lot of
(18:31):
journalism courses and also media courses in undergraduate school. And
how I fell into copyrighting. And it was the summer
after college and I was visiting my boyfriend in Connecticut.
I was sitting at the pool and I would tell
everyone that I was looking for a job. I had
no job. I never had a real job of waitressing
before that. And I went into this gentleman who said, well,
(18:55):
you know, there's this company, Zerrx Education Publications up the road.
I don't know if any jobs that are open, but
why don't you give them a call. I quickly ran
into the house. I called them on the phone. They
asked me to send a resume in and I said, oh,
no problem, I'm really close by. I'm just going to
drop it off. And so I showered, a dressed and
(19:17):
you know everything, really quickly did my hair and went
over and handed it to them. And I got a
phone call from them within a few days. And that
was it. I mean, that's how I got hired. So
where did you become the marketer? Actually it was a xerox.
I was a copywriter, and so product managers and marketing
managers would come into me and direct me, essentially to
(19:39):
sell their product. I went into my boss, Cathy House,
who is my first great mentor. I said to her,
you know, I don't really agree with what these people
are saying that coming in and asked me to write
things in certain ways. I'm willing to do that, but
I want to know what I have to do because
I want to be the person directing. And so she
(20:01):
told me that I needed to be like a product
manager or marketing manager. I didn't even know what that
really meant exactly. When I looked in the back of
some trade magazines at those positions, all of the s
for these positions said NBA preferred or necessary or so forth.
So I signed up to my n B A. I
went to night school. While I was still working there,
(20:22):
I switched over to the marketing room, so I actually
started my marketing for a year there. More on math
and magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to
math and Magic. Let's hear more from my conversation with
(20:44):
Jan Brandt. You go to California. You were CEO of
a direct marketing agency with clients and included Greenpeace, Ted Kennedy,
the California Democratic Party. You had your own company for
four years in the mid eighties and Mountain View, California,
and you helped start Paring magazine, and then you moved
back East and finally in ninete you were hired at
(21:05):
senior VP at A Well. That was about two years
before I got there on the board in three years
before I joined the management. Can you paint the picture
of a O Well in n It was really the
wild West. It was a lot of really energetic, smart
people we used to call a building and flying it
(21:26):
at the same time, and many of them not without
a lot of experience and with not a lot of
adult supervision. I used to look at myself as someone
who was almost a transitional figure in the company in
that I had worked in both small and large companies,
and I thought I knew how to take from both
(21:48):
models and try to make things work. I was able
to traverse the growth, I think a little bit better
than other people in those early days, trying to bring
some sense of process, ways of trying to mentor people
and bring them along when they had been doing it
on their own for a while. That was being brought
(22:09):
in to make the company bigger, and there are a
lot of things that really had to change in order
to do that. We had one person in the HR department,
and that was tragic. If you had a new hire
coming in at night, you go into people's offices and
steal trash, baskets and pencils. It was. It was really crazy.
(22:33):
I had a lot of latitude though. I remember we
had an I T department. If my computer broke, they
couldn't get it fixed right away. I didn't really care.
I would just send my assistant and I'd say, you know,
go to the computer store and get me a computer
and we'll figure this out later. So it's not exactly
the way things were supposed to happen, but as they say, now,
(22:55):
you had to break a lot of glass. So let's
advance a little bit. Some people don't remember are realized
that actually A O L, along with Prodigy and copy Serve,
began as proprietary computer networks. It was not the Internet.
And as a matter of fact, even when I joined
the board in there's still discussion about whether the Internet
was friend or foe, and how much it should be
(23:17):
embraced or whether it should be embraced. Obviously, a will
jumped in with both feet, but product and copy serve didn't.
And our big mission was to make the Internet as
important to consumers as their telephones and TVs. It seems
like a rather quaint goal looking back on it. And
in that time Microsoft offered consumers but I think it
(23:38):
was three dollars to switch to MSN from A O L.
Other I s p s were free. We were charging
over twenty dollars a month. There was a new threat
almost every day. I don't know about you, but I
sort of didn't want to wake up in the morning
to find out what was lurking there that morning. How
did you keep your bearings through all that? And that
such rapid change, such fear competition, and companies with much
(24:02):
bigger balance sheets than we had coming after us every day.
We had such enormous energy, we had such maniacal focus.
It had to have it to be around me. I
became known in the early days as the Queen of No.
What that meant was, no, we're not working on that, No,
we're not working on that. Either this is what we're
(24:24):
working on, and keeping people really, really, really focused. I've
never seen a company and a group of people, especially
in those earlier days, who really were trying their best
to all ruin the same direction. We all swim in
the same direction. Whatever that's saying is. There wasn't really
(24:44):
a big focus on me, me, me, you know, what's
my next job? Was my next salary, what's my next raise?
How much stock options my getting? There wasn't a lot
of focus on that because we were so energized by
what we were doing. And what I can see and
I have seen over and over and over again in
larger companies, is that there becomes a sense of entitlement,
(25:05):
there becomes a feeling of alienation, of not really being
part of a bigger mission. We were on a mission.
Of course, the stock options and the money and all
of that helped, but we were on a mission. It
wasn't just a job for most of us. We were
also incredibly nimble. The amount of nimbleness, the fact that
the buck stopped here and that I could see something
(25:27):
going on in a company threatening us, and I could
go boom, you know, get this done, do this. I
didn't have to go through a lot of channels and committees.
People didn't get in my way. No, they didn't get
in your way. I can attest to that. Yet everyone
was scared to death to cross you. I would say
in a meeting, step beside, or I'm going to run
(25:48):
over you. It really allowed for an enormous amount of nimbleness.
It also gave me the freedom to make mistakes and
correct for them. And you can't have an environment as
many larger companies have in which you're judged by how
many mistakes you make. If you don't make mistakes, you're
really not gonna get anywhere big. You're gonna do everything incrementally.
(26:09):
My great mentor, Steve Ross, who built Warner Communications and
Time Warner, used to tell me, Bob, you'll never be
fired here from making a mistake. Here, you'll be fired
for not making a mistake. Because you're not making mistakes,
tells me and not trying anything new. And that's your
life blood, right. I never fired anyone making mistake. Make
the same mistake, you know, two or three times, and
(26:30):
you you know you're gonna be on thin ice. You
need to hire people smarter than you and be confident
My feeling has always been you want my job, come
get it, come earn it. I have only benefited throughout
my life in hiring the smartest people that I could
convince it to working with me. So let's jump a
(26:51):
little bit. I want to jump to the big crisis
we have. Actually, the day I joined in management off
the board in nine to run the A wall service,
theef case and the company announced unlimited pricing, and almost
immediately we had a crisis. Too much demand, not enough supply,
Consumers are getting busy, signals couldn't get online. We were
called America Offline. It was certainly the biggest business crisis
(27:14):
of my career, other than maybe COVID. Right now, can
you take us back to that time and what did
you learn from it? My first feeling was they love us,
they really love us, and that faded, of course, as
we dealt with the crisis. I think that we expected
some lips. There was no presidents for we were just
all been wanting as fast as we could. A O
(27:38):
well was really the best example probably over the last
twenty years of the Walled Garden. Despite lots of pressure,
we did not interot with other services deliberately and strategically,
if you wanted to communicate with someone on All, you
had to join ALL. Therefore, the more people in a well,
the more people joined. It was sort of the perfect example,
and you were a great defender of it. You could
(28:00):
smell people trying to sneak around the wall or breach
the wall. After my time at ALL and yours, someone
opened up the walled garden. Facebook is probably the best
example of the New world garden. You think they appreciate
that lesson about a O L. I think they go
to great lanes to keep you on their service. When
I look at Facebook, I see AOL all over. We
(28:22):
had a lot of the services that they had. We
were probably early in introducing some of them. We did
have these pages where you can collect your friends, your family.
It was really you know, Facebook point five, not even
Facebook one point oh well certainly got derailed with the
All Time Warner merger, and probably if All had stated
(28:43):
an independent company would have been the future of all. Yes,
you point out many of the service developer actually being
worked on at the time. There are many many services
that I'll send a text or an email to say
we did that, but we were early and it was
a different time. So let me jump a little bit.
As we began to come towards the end, If you
(29:06):
could give your twenty one year old self some advice,
what would it be? Wow? Someone gave me advice when
I was about twenty one years old. He was a
market He was my boss at my first company when
I moved over to the marketing department, and he said
to me, the problem with you is that you want
(29:27):
to be something. You need to want to do something.
I didn't quite get what he was saying at that point,
but I did a few years later and realized that
really my passion was marketing. My passion was connecting with
people in that way, and it was what led me, frankly,
to end up at a o L as opposed to
(29:50):
I was interviewing other companies at that time, companies that
people had actually heard of back then it was American Airlines,
or I was interviewing your time ach at the time.
You know. I went to a well because I felt
that it was the best chance for me to spread
my wings and to do what I was really passionate about.
And I was passionate about marketing, and so I think
(30:11):
that well, I couldn't have given myself that advice someone
else did give it to me. Let's wind up today.
We always end math and magic by looking at those
two sides of marketing, the analytics math and the creative
the magic. When you look back on all you've seen,
who would you give the shout out to is the
greatest math person in the marketing equation, in the brand
(30:36):
of marketing that I was most involved in. You couldn't
really separate the two. But it really couldn't have been
a direct market or without being able to do both
of those things. One of the reasons I think I
was so successful is because I actually am very good
at both sides. Yes you were, Let me jump to
the other side. Then tell me who's the best magician.
(30:56):
Every Bill Jamie, who was a copywriter, a great renown.
Anyone from my error or before or even a little
bit after, would have known him. He was prolific, did
a lot of work in publishing, and he brought magic
to paper. He was very expensive to use, and getting
him to work on one of your projects you had
(31:18):
a campaign for it. So Jan this has been great
A O. L had to be the biggest success of
my career and certainly one of the most exciting rides.
Doing it you was inspiring. I loved being in the
foxhole with you. I loved all the stories we have together.
I have to thank you for all those great times,
great memories, and thanks for sharing some just a little
(31:40):
bit of your brilliance with us today. Thanks well, thank you.
Here are a few things I picked up in my
conversation with Jam. One. Be willing to make mistakes, as
Jan says, if you don't make mistakes, you're not gonna
get anywhere big. To keep it simple when introducing a
(32:02):
new product like a o L. Consumers value simplicity, and
ease of use O were just about anything else. Three.
Cost is relative, as Jan often had to explain, her
marketing efforts cost the company a lot of money, but
her results were spectacular and worth it for. To stay focused,
you sometimes have to say no. In the early days
(32:25):
of a o L, Jan harnessed the tremendous energy of
the company and kept everyone focused on achieving the core
mission by not allowing her team to work on things
that didn't move them all in the same direction. Thanks
for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for Listening to Math and Magic, a
(32:47):
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. Nikki
Eatre for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Asar for
their acording helped our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Gaile Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
bring this show to your ears. Until next time, m
(33:31):
HM
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Heart Radio. At an age of eight, my father abandoned
my mother and my sister and brother, and I had
just brought into a restaurant in Jersey City. There, I
watched my mother, who had been the person who walked
(00:23):
me to school and made lunch for me, all of
a sudden was thrown into the position of having to
be a business person and run this restaurant. She had
no experience. I'm like eight years old. I'm listening to
her called vendors and she would say something like the
accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bills, I want you
to mock ten percent off your bill. And you can
(00:44):
hear on the other side saying why would we do that,
and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
top of the pile, or it could be on the
bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
watched what I could only call now Moxie. When I
did this negotiate for discs, I was ruthless. And that's
(01:04):
who was sitting on my shoulder, him Bom Pittman. And
welcome to another of our at home episodes of Math
and Magic. Stories from the frontiers of marketing. Today, we
have as our guest a great friend, incredible marketer, had
a great storyteller, So get ready for some useful lessons
(01:24):
and insights. She's the person responsible for that huge marketing
success of AOL in the nineteen nineties, taking a O
L from a few hundred thousand subscribers to over thirty million.
And if you wonder who was behind the carpet bombing
of a O L disc back, then well here's your culprit.
Jan Brandt, the former vice chair and CMO of America Online.
(01:51):
Jan was born in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was the home
of cool. She grew up in New Jersey. Had a
really interesting career marketing with a particular unique skill set
in direct marketing. And to prove it, she has won
numerous awards, received a lot of recognition almost every possible forum.
She loves dogs, travel, and people, and she has a
(02:12):
wicked sense of humor. Jan welcome, Well, thank you Bob.
Before we dig into all the stories and your lessons,
I want to do a little feature. We call you
in sixty seconds. You're ready. Do you prefer sunrise or sunset? Sunset? California,
Virginia California, Instagram or Twitter Twitter feature mountains, spring rottum
(02:34):
Omaha steaks or Kansas City Steaks, steaks, aim or a
well chat rooms, rooms, cats or dogs. Dogs. You've got
mail or sleepless in Seattle. You've got mail, dial up
or broadband. Okay, it's about to get harder. Smartest person
(02:56):
you know? One clean first a O L. S Green name,
private dancer, childhood hero, the lone ranger, first job, copywriter,
favorite magazine, parenting, favorite city, Paris, guilty pleasure, watching movies
all night long? And who would play you in a movie?
(03:16):
Barbara Streisand all right, let's get going. Let's start with
your most enduring legacy. A O L floppy disk and
then CDs everywhere, mailboxes, computer boxes, newspaper inserts, even frozen steaks.
You joined A O L in n near its beginning,
and a few years before I joined, if I remember correctly,
(03:38):
A O L just had a couple hundred thousand subs
back then. But Steve Case and the management group had
a very big vision. Can you describe that moment and
how you pivoted to mass marketing. I think I was
brought on to see how fast and how far we
could grow the service. I don't think we ever expected
it to be quite as fast as it was, but
(03:58):
that was my mission. I was brought in specifically to
grow the business. It was really an interesting point in
time because people didn't have home computers very much. The
penetration was fairly lowed. Mostly people were familiar with computers
in the workplace. They were starting to migrate to the home.
Those computers that people had at home, they didn't have modems,
(04:19):
so a person actually had to have a computer and
a modem in order to use the service. The first
program started with a direct mail test that I did,
mailing the discs out. It was a very very expensive proposition,
and it was one that people thought was kind of
a crazy thing to do because it was so expensive.
A package in the mail directed or targeted to someone
(04:42):
at that time probably was thirty five cents apiece. The
disc alan was a dollar nineteen, so putting in the
package of the mail probably caused us a dollar seventy
five beats. But I felt that the only way that
we could possibly describe the service to one was to
let them try it themselves. It's really hard to imagine
(05:04):
now and saying to someone, well, you're gonna be talking
on your screen, You're going to be typing, and someone
else is going to see what you're writing. We didn't
have screen sharing then, people didn't have computers. They thought
you were crazy. They would say, well, wanted could just
pick up a phone and call the person, and so
it was impossible to really describe the service and do
it any justice. We sent that mailing out to maybe
(05:25):
twelve lists. We needed about a three to five percent
response difference in order to make it work, and we
got that and more so we were off to the
races at that point. When you took over, though, I'm
gonna go back just a little bit. The view was
that the only possible audience for this, we're sort of
computer geeks. What was it that caused you and Steve
(05:47):
and whoever else made this decision that, yeah, you know,
all these people that don't even have a computer yet
are barely have a computer and certainly don't know how
operated are going to be the target market, and that's
how we're gonna be. For me, I always have to
look at any marketing endeavor and put myself in the
position of the customer. One of my hidden talents is
(06:08):
that I have a capacity for imagining that I'm the customer,
and when Steve and I were first talking, he gave
me a disk. I happened to have a Mac computer
at the time and still do, and I started using
the service. It was amazing. All of a sudden, I
(06:29):
have all of these friends that live in my computer.
And at that point there weren't many customers. We may
have had three chat rooms open in the range of
a hundred or fewer people on it, and I could
see what was happening there. I could see the connections
that were being made into me. It was always about community,
and it was always about connecting people, whether it was
(06:50):
through email or later instant messenger or shared interests. I
really felt that that was at the core of it,
and I felt the tug I felt and could understand
what people, once they started using it, would get out
of it. Our society was becoming more and more fragmented,
(07:12):
more and more distant. There was a lot of upward mobility.
There was a lot of geographic mobility, and to me,
the secret sauce was the ability of a well to
connect people. I didn't know it was gonna be thirty
four million paid subscribers but I had every confidence that
we were going to be able to reach larger and
larger numbers. So now I see why you started it,
(07:33):
why you decided to take that risk. You pushed out
this very expensive direct marketing. What were the early results?
Generally for a typical direct marketing package, you would expect
a one to three percent response, you know, three percent
would be on the higher level. And this was a test.
So I was picking things that I thought might work,
(07:56):
but I had no history. The results of that first
test would was I think about a hundred or hundred
and twenty thousand pieces. Was twelve within that twelve percent,
because that's an average. There were lists that were pulling
twent I had never before, never since ever seen anything
(08:18):
like that. And keep in mind that this isn't just
taking a free offer or a trial. It was a
trial offer, but that the person had to take the
credit card, give the credit card information, put the credit
card information into a computer, and send it out into
cyberspace and they would be built unless they canceled. It
(08:38):
was staggering. It's clear it's a success. And I know
you went on the drive cost down ridiculously low. At
one point, I think you have more CDs and production
for a O L than existed anywhere else in the world.
But every time a competitor would do an offer, you
did this very interesting thing is you would replicate the
(08:59):
offer with the A Well name on it and tested
to see if it was better than what you were doing.
Why on earth do you think a Prodigy and compy
Serve in the early days and MSN later didn't do
that day O Well. What used to keep me up
at night is coming into the office in the morning
and seeing that Prodigy or CompuServe or Microsoft had copied
(09:22):
what we were doing, just copied it. I can give
you an idea of why some people didn't do this.
Co worker Ted Leonsis did a lot of public speaking.
Someone either from Prodigy or CompuServe went up to Ted
and said, what the hell is going on in your company?
That marketing person is spending so much money, you guys
(09:45):
are nuts. Ted just shook his head when he came
back to report that to me. I said, now here's
what you say to them next time. That you've been
trying to get that dumb broad fired for you know,
the last two years, and it's driving you crazy and
you can't believe that she's blowing that much money out
because I just didn't want them to know how well
it was working. And here's the error that they were
(10:07):
all making. So they didn't understand the man, even though
these were smart people. There is this fixation that people
have on what's something cost. But the equation on an
acquisition cost, which is what really matters, is the cost
relative to the number of people that you bring in.
If I spend five times as much but I bring
(10:29):
in twenty times as many customers, it's in my favor.
So the cost is clearly the hurdle. And I think
you're right. I see it today and I'm sending it
everywhere in my career too. They don't focus on value.
They focus on cost. You found some other truisms too.
You found out that the mention of any price always
depressed results, no matter how good the price was. Yet
(10:51):
every competitor kept talking about their price. What else did
you consistently find truths that others clearly not see. I
initiated a cancel safe program where rather than just processing
a cancelation as other services were doing, we train reps
to find out why the person actually got onto the service.
(11:15):
To begin with what we're looking for. What inspired you? Oh,
I see your lessening sounds Greek? Is that true? Or
you a Greek heritage Oh yes, well we have a
whole section about the Greek islands online, or we have
a whole travel section and we have a whole history section. Oh,
you wanted to work with your child, here's the encyclopedia.
(11:36):
Part of it was never taking no for an answer,
and another truism in the early stages, which was very
counterintuitive again to people who just weren't paying attention or
weren't analyzing it. People say, why are you sending us
somebody just we actually built databases, you know, probably not
as an exacting way as we would have the capability
(11:57):
to do now. But back then where we knew how
many disks that we were sending out to people. Now
we couldn't track what they were finding in Barnes and
Noble or what they were finding at their gas station.
But in terms of the actual mail, we knew that
in certain lists, on average we got response after they
(12:17):
had received four efforts. We were actually tracking that. By
the end of the Nannies, A o L had half
the traffic of the Internet in the US, going through
a well, we won't compy served, Prodigy was left by
the wayside. MSN couldn't get a a well, why didn't
any of the other services catch on that the key
variable was easy convenient. I went to the mat a
(12:40):
number of times where they wanted to put it on
two discs, and I remember having knocked down Dragon Fight,
saying no, it has to be easy, it has to
be simple. Likewise, I was under a lot of pressure
to go from floppy disks to c d s because
c d s would fix that problem. And I knew that,
but my customs didn't have c d s. I didn't
(13:02):
want to switch the c d s when of our
customers had a disk drive. The CD drive was an
external add on. You may have been with me on
this meeting, but I was out with Steve Jobs right
after he returned to Apple, and he was getting ready
to tell me about this new thing he had called
the iMac, and his innovation was he said, I believe
(13:25):
the computer is part of the Internet, and I'm gonna
build the modem into a computer. Today it lives like huh,
But back then it was such a step forward. He
understood easy. Why do you think all these other smart
people at these companies. A lot of resources didn't hit
on easy. Everybody else have more, they have better, they
(13:47):
had this, but nobody had easy except us. I can't
explain that other than I really think that you really
have to live and breathe a customer in order to
really at it. I want to talk some about the
Walled Garden, the early view of the Internet, but first
I want to go to early Jan. You were born
(14:08):
in Brooklyn, moved to New Jersey. I think when you
were about eight. There's this wonderful story and very telling
about you, about a five year old Jan who wanted
a library card. Can you repeat that story? Gosh, how
do you know that story? I know everything. Wow. So
my mother, who at that time was a stay at
home mother, she was an Avid and everyone in my
(14:29):
family were avid Avid readers, newspapers, books, fiction, nonfiction, just
voracious readers. And she would take me to the library
and on her library card she was able to get
four adult books and two children's books. And I would
be with her and I said, I want four books.
(14:51):
I don't want two books because I'd have to wait
a whole week in order to get other ones. And
so we went to the librarian and asked her to
get a library part from me. And so she asked
me to sign my name, and so of course I
signed it in print, which you know, block letters, whatever
they were. And she said, now we can't allow that.
(15:11):
We have to have your name in script. And my
mother had explained to me what script was. And after
arguing with the librarian, we went home and my father
took a piece of paper and he drew out my
name several times, and he said, just sit here and trace.
And so for a whole week I traced my name
(15:32):
over and over and over and over again. I must
have traced it ten thousand times. And the following week
we went back to the library, I signed the card
and got my own library card. Well, I've seen you
repeat that lesson many times in your career. So this
world you grew up in the fifties sixties, tell us
a little bit about the world as you saw it
then and how that affected you. We didn't have any money.
(15:54):
We were poor. I mean, we were what they used
to call back then, working class. You know. I grew
up with two parents, and then my father, at an
age of eight, abandoned my mother and my sister and
brother and I he had just brought into a restaurant
in Jersey City. We end up moving pretty quickly New
Jersey City. There, I watched my mother, who had been
(16:17):
the person who walked me to school and made lunch
for me and played catch with me while I watched
baseball games on t V. All of a sudden was
thrown into the position of having to be a business
person and run this restaurant. She had no experience. This
was a restaurant that was open seven in a busy
business area. She had an office that was in the
(16:38):
basement and kind of smelled. I would sit there, I'd
open up one of the drawers of the file cabinet
lean on it while she'd be on the phone or
doing the payroll or doing something like that. I'm like
eight years old or nine years old. I'm listening to
her called endors and she would say something like the
accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bill, I want you
(17:00):
to mock ten off your bill. And you can hear
on the other side saying why would we do that,
and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
top of the pile, or it could be on the
bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
watched what I can only call now Moxie. When I
did this negotiating for discs, I was ruthless and that's
(17:24):
who was sitting on my shoulder because my view was okay.
So if they say no, they say no, no one
is ever going to stop me from coming back and
saying okay, any right, you know, I'll take that higher price.
It wasn't about my ego. People get into a negotiation
and it becomes a lot about their ego, and to me,
it was always about the company. I remember jan times
(17:47):
that we really had to dig deep to hit our numbers,
and you would say, you know, I think I get
a little more out of this vendor, and you always
went to that well, and you know what, there always
was a little more. So that was a great childhood lesson.
We all benefited from it. It It worked with you. Let's
move up a little bit. You went to Boston University
School of Communications. You worked for Xerox. You got your
(18:11):
MBA while while still working there. You're a copywriter for
Xerox Education Publications, the company that published my Weekly Reader,
which any one of my age remembers and was I
think one of the biggest publications of its day. Why
Xerox and why copyrighting? Where did that come from? Well?
I wanted to be a writer. I really want to
be a journalist, and so I had a lot of
(18:31):
journalism courses and also media courses in undergraduate school. And
how I fell into copyrighting. And it was the summer
after college and I was visiting my boyfriend in Connecticut.
I was sitting at the pool and I would tell
everyone that I was looking for a job. I had
no job. I never had a real job of waitressing
before that. And I went into this gentleman who said, well,
(18:55):
you know, there's this company, Zerrx Education Publications up the road.
I don't know if any jobs that are open, but
why don't you give them a call. I quickly ran
into the house. I called them on the phone. They
asked me to send a resume in and I said, oh,
no problem, I'm really close by. I'm just going to
drop it off. And so I showered, a dressed and
(19:17):
you know everything, really quickly did my hair and went
over and handed it to them. And I got a
phone call from them within a few days. And that
was it. I mean, that's how I got hired. So
where did you become the marketer? Actually it was a xerox.
I was a copywriter, and so product managers and marketing
managers would come into me and direct me, essentially to
(19:39):
sell their product. I went into my boss, Cathy House,
who is my first great mentor. I said to her,
you know, I don't really agree with what these people
are saying that coming in and asked me to write
things in certain ways. I'm willing to do that, but
I want to know what I have to do because
I want to be the person directing. And so she
(20:01):
told me that I needed to be like a product
manager or marketing manager. I didn't even know what that
really meant exactly. When I looked in the back of
some trade magazines at those positions, all of the s
for these positions said NBA preferred or necessary or so forth.
So I signed up to my n B A. I
went to night school. While I was still working there,
(20:22):
I switched over to the marketing room, so I actually
started my marketing for a year there. More on math
and magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to
math and Magic. Let's hear more from my conversation with
(20:44):
Jan Brandt. You go to California. You were CEO of
a direct marketing agency with clients and included Greenpeace, Ted Kennedy,
the California Democratic Party. You had your own company for
four years in the mid eighties and Mountain View, California,
and you helped start Paring magazine, and then you moved
back East and finally in ninete you were hired at
(21:05):
senior VP at A Well. That was about two years
before I got there on the board in three years
before I joined the management. Can you paint the picture
of a O Well in n It was really the
wild West. It was a lot of really energetic, smart
people we used to call a building and flying it
(21:26):
at the same time, and many of them not without
a lot of experience and with not a lot of
adult supervision. I used to look at myself as someone
who was almost a transitional figure in the company in
that I had worked in both small and large companies,
and I thought I knew how to take from both
(21:48):
models and try to make things work. I was able
to traverse the growth, I think a little bit better
than other people in those early days, trying to bring
some sense of process, ways of trying to mentor people
and bring them along when they had been doing it
on their own for a while. That was being brought
(22:09):
in to make the company bigger, and there are a
lot of things that really had to change in order
to do that. We had one person in the HR department,
and that was tragic. If you had a new hire
coming in at night, you go into people's offices and
steal trash, baskets and pencils. It was. It was really crazy.
(22:33):
I had a lot of latitude though. I remember we
had an I T department. If my computer broke, they
couldn't get it fixed right away. I didn't really care.
I would just send my assistant and I'd say, you know,
go to the computer store and get me a computer
and we'll figure this out later. So it's not exactly
the way things were supposed to happen, but as they say, now,
(22:55):
you had to break a lot of glass. So let's
advance a little bit. Some people don't remember are realized
that actually A O L, along with Prodigy and copy Serve,
began as proprietary computer networks. It was not the Internet.
And as a matter of fact, even when I joined
the board in there's still discussion about whether the Internet
was friend or foe, and how much it should be
(23:17):
embraced or whether it should be embraced. Obviously, a will
jumped in with both feet, but product and copy serve didn't.
And our big mission was to make the Internet as
important to consumers as their telephones and TVs. It seems
like a rather quaint goal looking back on it. And
in that time Microsoft offered consumers but I think it
(23:38):
was three dollars to switch to MSN from A O L.
Other I s p s were free. We were charging
over twenty dollars a month. There was a new threat
almost every day. I don't know about you, but I
sort of didn't want to wake up in the morning
to find out what was lurking there that morning. How
did you keep your bearings through all that? And that
such rapid change, such fear competition, and companies with much
(24:02):
bigger balance sheets than we had coming after us every day.
We had such enormous energy, we had such maniacal focus.
It had to have it to be around me. I
became known in the early days as the Queen of No.
What that meant was, no, we're not working on that, No,
we're not working on that. Either this is what we're
(24:24):
working on, and keeping people really, really, really focused. I've
never seen a company and a group of people, especially
in those earlier days, who really were trying their best
to all ruin the same direction. We all swim in
the same direction. Whatever that's saying is. There wasn't really
(24:44):
a big focus on me, me, me, you know, what's
my next job? Was my next salary, what's my next raise?
How much stock options my getting? There wasn't a lot
of focus on that because we were so energized by
what we were doing. And what I can see and
I have seen over and over and over again in
larger companies, is that there becomes a sense of entitlement,
(25:05):
there becomes a feeling of alienation, of not really being
part of a bigger mission. We were on a mission.
Of course, the stock options and the money and all
of that helped, but we were on a mission. It
wasn't just a job for most of us. We were
also incredibly nimble. The amount of nimbleness, the fact that
the buck stopped here and that I could see something
(25:27):
going on in a company threatening us, and I could
go boom, you know, get this done, do this. I
didn't have to go through a lot of channels and committees.
People didn't get in my way. No, they didn't get
in your way. I can attest to that. Yet everyone
was scared to death to cross you. I would say
in a meeting, step beside, or I'm going to run
(25:48):
over you. It really allowed for an enormous amount of nimbleness.
It also gave me the freedom to make mistakes and
correct for them. And you can't have an environment as
many larger companies have in which you're judged by how
many mistakes you make. If you don't make mistakes, you're
really not gonna get anywhere big. You're gonna do everything incrementally.
(26:09):
My great mentor, Steve Ross, who built Warner Communications and
Time Warner, used to tell me, Bob, you'll never be
fired here from making a mistake. Here, you'll be fired
for not making a mistake. Because you're not making mistakes,
tells me and not trying anything new. And that's your
life blood, right. I never fired anyone making mistake. Make
the same mistake, you know, two or three times, and
(26:30):
you you know you're gonna be on thin ice. You
need to hire people smarter than you and be confident
My feeling has always been you want my job, come
get it, come earn it. I have only benefited throughout
my life in hiring the smartest people that I could
convince it to working with me. So let's jump a
(26:51):
little bit. I want to jump to the big crisis
we have. Actually, the day I joined in management off
the board in nine to run the A wall service,
theef case and the company announced unlimited pricing, and almost
immediately we had a crisis. Too much demand, not enough supply,
Consumers are getting busy, signals couldn't get online. We were
called America Offline. It was certainly the biggest business crisis
(27:14):
of my career, other than maybe COVID. Right now, can
you take us back to that time and what did
you learn from it? My first feeling was they love us,
they really love us, and that faded, of course, as
we dealt with the crisis. I think that we expected
some lips. There was no presidents for we were just
all been wanting as fast as we could. A O
(27:38):
well was really the best example probably over the last
twenty years of the Walled Garden. Despite lots of pressure,
we did not interot with other services deliberately and strategically,
if you wanted to communicate with someone on All, you
had to join ALL. Therefore, the more people in a well,
the more people joined. It was sort of the perfect example,
and you were a great defender of it. You could
(28:00):
smell people trying to sneak around the wall or breach
the wall. After my time at ALL and yours, someone
opened up the walled garden. Facebook is probably the best
example of the New world garden. You think they appreciate
that lesson about a O L. I think they go
to great lanes to keep you on their service. When
I look at Facebook, I see AOL all over. We
(28:22):
had a lot of the services that they had. We
were probably early in introducing some of them. We did
have these pages where you can collect your friends, your family.
It was really you know, Facebook point five, not even
Facebook one point oh well certainly got derailed with the
All Time Warner merger, and probably if All had stated
(28:43):
an independent company would have been the future of all. Yes,
you point out many of the service developer actually being
worked on at the time. There are many many services
that I'll send a text or an email to say
we did that, but we were early and it was
a different time. So let me jump a little bit.
As we began to come towards the end, If you
(29:06):
could give your twenty one year old self some advice,
what would it be? Wow? Someone gave me advice when
I was about twenty one years old. He was a
market He was my boss at my first company when
I moved over to the marketing department, and he said
to me, the problem with you is that you want
(29:27):
to be something. You need to want to do something.
I didn't quite get what he was saying at that point,
but I did a few years later and realized that
really my passion was marketing. My passion was connecting with
people in that way, and it was what led me, frankly,
to end up at a o L as opposed to
(29:50):
I was interviewing other companies at that time, companies that
people had actually heard of back then it was American Airlines,
or I was interviewing your time ach at the time.
You know. I went to a well because I felt
that it was the best chance for me to spread
my wings and to do what I was really passionate about.
And I was passionate about marketing, and so I think
(30:11):
that well, I couldn't have given myself that advice someone
else did give it to me. Let's wind up today.
We always end math and magic by looking at those
two sides of marketing, the analytics math and the creative
the magic. When you look back on all you've seen,
who would you give the shout out to is the
greatest math person in the marketing equation, in the brand
(30:36):
of marketing that I was most involved in. You couldn't
really separate the two. But it really couldn't have been
a direct market or without being able to do both
of those things. One of the reasons I think I
was so successful is because I actually am very good
at both sides. Yes you were, Let me jump to
the other side. Then tell me who's the best magician.
(30:56):
Every Bill Jamie, who was a copywriter, a great renown.
Anyone from my error or before or even a little
bit after, would have known him. He was prolific, did
a lot of work in publishing, and he brought magic
to paper. He was very expensive to use, and getting
him to work on one of your projects you had
(31:18):
a campaign for it. So Jan this has been great
A O. L had to be the biggest success of
my career and certainly one of the most exciting rides.
Doing it you was inspiring. I loved being in the
foxhole with you. I loved all the stories we have together.
I have to thank you for all those great times,
great memories, and thanks for sharing some just a little
(31:40):
bit of your brilliance with us today. Thanks well, thank you.
Here are a few things I picked up in my
conversation with Jam. One. Be willing to make mistakes, as
Jan says, if you don't make mistakes, you're not gonna
get anywhere big. To keep it simple when introducing a
(32:02):
new product like a o L. Consumers value simplicity, and
ease of use O were just about anything else. Three.
Cost is relative, as Jan often had to explain, her
marketing efforts cost the company a lot of money, but
her results were spectacular and worth it for. To stay focused,
you sometimes have to say no. In the early days
(32:25):
of a o L, Jan harnessed the tremendous energy of
the company and kept everyone focused on achieving the core
mission by not allowing her team to work on things
that didn't move them all in the same direction. Thanks
for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Thanks so much for Listening to Math and Magic, a
(32:47):
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. Nikki
Eatre for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Asar for
their acording helped our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Gaile Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
bring this show to your ears. Until next time, m
(33:31):
HM
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