July 30, 2025 • 16 mins
Math & Magic host Bob Pittman shares some iconic stories from the launch of MTV in this episode preview of Tetragrammaton, a podcast by record industry legend Rick Rubin. Find the full episode here. For more from Rick, visit his website and YouTube channel.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Tetra grammaton.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
August one eighty one we launched, and that world was
a world of no information. There were three TV networks, ABC, NBCCBS,
and they decided when you were going to see programming.
HBO had come along in the in the mid seventies.
There had been no really advertised to supported networks, which
(00:47):
of course MTV was, and there was an idea at
the time that the consumer wanted choice, which we know
is always true, and that instead of network programmers deciding
when you could see kids, programming, music, programming, news, sports,
you would go to these twenty four hour channels and
(01:08):
get it at any time. So you put together your
own array of programming the match your needs.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
That was a really new thing.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Think of it as a poor man's on demand. I mean,
there's no technology for undemand then, so this was a
way where you're going to get choice. So Turner launched CNN,
A bunch of guys up in Bristol launched ESPN. Those
are in the seventies now, it was about nineteen eighty.
I guess along when we went there, we're all right
there together.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
How many homes had cable at this time?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Think about fifteen million, and so we developed this idea
for a music service, all music. And I think the
music had been on TV off and on for years
and years, never particularly successful, and our thesis was it
wasn't successful because they kept trying to make music fit
the TV form, which was a narrative.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So with MTV said we're going to make TV fit
the music form, which is mood. Emotion makes you feel
a certain way.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Music's better than any drug for taking you to certain
moods or where you want to go. And you had
a generation that had grown.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Up with TV.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
We were the first of the TV babies my generation
and rock and roll, but the two had never come together.
So the idea was we're going to put it together.
And there were all these little video clips that have
been produced. No one had been able to figure out
what to do with them, so that was the general
concept of what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
The venture was owned by Warner.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
And American Express fifty to fifty called Warner AMEX. The
board of directors wouldn't aprove the idea, thought it was
way too risky. So he got a meeting with Jim Robinson,
who was the CEO of American Express. His lieutenant as
president was lou Gershner, who went on to fame at
Nabisco and IBM, and Steve Ross from Warner Communications David Horwitz,
you'll probably remember, off.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
To the president Warner.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
We got a meeting with him to pitch them the idea,
and we think the hard cell is going to be
the American Express. And inside Warner there's this other thing
brewing that the music company were saying, wait a minute,
if you do a music channel, we should do.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
It, not that joint venture.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
And so there was, you know, lots of turmoils and
dramas there always are. And toward the end of the meeting,
Jim Robinson, who is the chairman of American Express, looks
at Steve and goes.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I'm in for my ten million, Steve, how about you?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And he called the question and Steve goes, yeah, man,
And that was the way we got approval.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Amazing was that the first time you ever met Steve Ross.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Now I met Steve a couple of times before, and
Steve had David Horowitz sort of fell in love with me.
And David was responsible for the cable company and the
Warner MX joint venture.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And had brought me to meetings.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
And Steve got as we launched him TV, got very
interested in it, and Steve wound up being one of
my great mentors. And Steve would you know, later put
his arm around me and just say come on with
me too. Whatever meetings had nothing to do with music
or MTV, but he was just let me in and
letting me see stuff and see how it worked. And
I had been involved with some of the other stuff
(04:05):
because originally I came over from MBC. The first channel
we were going to do was a pay service sort
of like an HBO. It was called the Movie Channel.
At that time, HBO is only on in prime time,
it was off the rest of the day really, so
we did a twenty four hour all movie service, which
said a great and then HBO realized what we were doing,
(04:26):
so they started what is called a fighting brand. I
had no idea what a fighting brand was, but learned
very quickly called Cinemax, and they made it cheaper to
the cable operator and they got more movies. So it
was just a rip off of what you were doing. Yeah, yeah,
obviously we proved that there was an opening. They came
in and so I had known Steve through the Movie
Channel and through what we were doing with the Movie
(04:48):
Channel and movies, but MTV is.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Really what sort of turbo charged my relationship with him.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
It's an amazing story. I remember the impact it had
on my life. It felt like there was the world
before MTV and after MTV.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You were a kid at that time, and you know
what's interesting is it had some interesting ancillary benefits which
we didn't realize. The three networks controlled what you saw,
and they made everything look like it basically was des moined.
Everything was Middle America. You didn't see what people in
New York were wearing or London. And when MTV came on,
(05:21):
suddenly all these kids across America got to see what
people in New York and la and London were wearing,
and fashions changed immediately. I think it was nineteen eighty four.
I got a CFDA awould, the Council Fashion Designers Award
for the impact MTV had on fashion.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
And we also changed sort of the graphic look.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
At the time we launched MTV, every graphic design looked
like Star Wars logos and you know, the car dealer,
everybody had it. And we came out with this a
radically different design and opened people's eyes to no, No,
it doesn't have.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
To be the way you've said it has to be.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Tell me about the I want my MTV.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, the problem was that the cable operators really didn't
want to take MTV because they were at that time
charging companies for the access to the cable like twenty
five cents a month. We didn't have twenty five cents
a month. So we said, well, another idea. One of
the guys that worked for me was Harvard MBA and
(06:21):
was always whispering.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
To me all the stuff. He goes, we should do
consumer pull and I go, what's that?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
He goes, that's where you get the consumers to demand
the product instead of push distribution where you buy it.
I go, great, sign me up. And so we hit
upon this idea that we would come up with ad
campaign advertise MTV and that the cable operator them would
think they had to carry it because they said consumer outcry.
And a guy named George Lewis and a guy named
(06:47):
Dale Pond, who'd been my promotions director at WNBC, they
had an agency together. We hire them and they came
back originally with some spot that said America is becoming
a land of cable brats and bladh blah blah blah blah,
but embedded and they call your cable company and say,
I want my MTV. Well, Tom Freston was our marketing guy,
and John Sykes was our promotion guy, and Fred Seibert
(07:09):
was the on air look guy. They I remember they
all came over to my apartment on a one night
I was on Central Park West, and we go through
all this and we go, you know, I'm going to land.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
At cable brats.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
It's sort of cheesy, and then didn't connect, but that
I Want my MTV is exactly what we want, so
we sort of recrafted the whole spot to.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Be I Want my MTV.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And George Lewis had done a campaign in the sixties
called I Want My Maypo with Mickey Mantle and as
often happens, or repurposed it for I Want My MTV.
And we didn't have a lot of money, but we
would go market by market where they weren't carrying MTV
and we run this campaign and the kids would all
call a cable company and they would flood the cable
(07:50):
company and tie up all their phones and they go, okay,
we'll put it on. And after about two or three markets,
we actually didn't have to put on. We just had
to threaten that we were going to do it because
everybody had heard and go, okay, we're getting read advertised
in your market. You sure you don't want to go
and put it on? Yeah, yea, yeah, we'll put it on.
And so that drove it. And it's interesting because MTV
was a sort of success with the consumer immediately, but
(08:12):
a dismal failure economically with advertisers and with the cable operators.
So we really had to go redo this sort of
business side of it. And that's ultimately how I went
from being the creative guy they had creative guy to
running the network.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So tell me about going from the creative guy to
the business guy. It's very different.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Hat They came to me and said, look, this thing's
not working. We projected we going to do ten million
revenue first year. I think we did half a million
dollars in alf revenue. Thought the cable operas were all
come flying, and you know, as we said, what they
want my MTV campaign didn't quite work out that way.
And I was doing the marketing, you know, all the
marketing and the creative stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
There was another guy who was doing all the sales stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
And they came to me and said, hey, Kit, do
you think you can run this thing? And of course
this every twenty eight or twenty nine year old ago igo. Yeah, sure,
And in my head, my calculus was I was so
sick of having to convince salespeople that I had a
good idea and they had this veto go, oh, we
can't sell that. I got to do that, So I go, hey,
(09:16):
I have total for creative freedom. Now I'm running this thing.
I can't choose anything. Of Course, what I failed to
realize was once I'm running the business side, I got
no time to be the creative. But that's sort of
how I made the jump, and I discovered I actually
loved the business side and it was just as creative
as the creative side, and bringing a lot of creativity
and a new approach and willing to take chances. And
(09:38):
by the way, not knowing too much turned out to
be a real benefit.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, it seems like it's often the case like you
don't know what you don't know, and that works your advantage, right.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Right, But I also was so focused I knew what
we were trying to do. So I had this great prism.
It's great filter of what MTV was and what it
wasn't and I think every product has this. I was
the keeper of the vision, like I was the editor
in chief. I would say that belongs that doesn't.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
It's not that that's a good idea, that's a bad idea.
They just they don't fit together.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And you're probably also better at managing and dealing with
creative people because you understood there absolutely you were not
a being counter no.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And by the way, I was still actively involved, you know.
Making that jump was just sort of opened up my
life and I began to see, oh, it all turns
into dollars and cents, and I love the profit motive.
My dad was nonprofit, was a minister, and I heard
many dinner table conversations, oh so, and so you just go, Wow,
(10:36):
it's really hard because you got to keep everybody happy,
and everybody's got conflicting agendas. In business, it's like it's
a profit. I mean, ultimately it's a business, and we
should get a return on investment. And that's the reason
somebody invest in MTV instead of a railroad because they
get a better return or they like likelihood's a better return,
and once you figure.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
That out, you go, okay, well, let's sort of figure
this out.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
And the advertising front, no one wanted to buy cable advertising.
It was like the agencies were like, no way, and
everybody thought that these ads supporting networks would never work
because the audiences were so small compared to the three
big broadcast networks, even though we were targeted. So we
figured out the agencies were probably not our friends. They
(11:21):
had no vest at interest. So like, if somebody spending
one hundred dollars on TV and they only have to
buy three networks, why would they want to encourage the
people to spend it on twenty networks the same hundred
dollars because it was just dribe their cost up, I
get it.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So we figured out what we've.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Got to do is we've got to go to the
clients and get them to demand it, and fortunately had
a wonderful guy named Roger and Rico who ran Pepsicola,
and Roger figured out very quickly kids loved this.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
There were no ratings, they just had the user gut.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
And by the way, Coca Cola didn't advertise on MTV
for sixty years because it was not measurable. At first
there were no ratings. Then when the ratings came out,
we said we didn't get their criteria. They needed sixty
five percent reach of the country and at three national rating,
we didn't have any of that, so forget it go away. Oh,
by the way, in that period of time, Roger and
(12:14):
Rico moved the market share the most it's ever been
moved before. After in Pepsi when he had an exclusive
on MTV Wow, and it was so powerful having that exclusive.
That Coke, if you recall, came out with the New Coke.
They thought they had a product problem. Yes, so they
developed a whole new product called New Coke.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
It turns out it wasn't that. It was that Pepsi
was advertising on MTV and Coke was missing. And when
Coke finally figured that out, they outspent Pepsi two to
one for the next ten years. But we went to
people like Pepsi, and the way we get pepsis not
by saying we buy some spots. It was like, we'll
do some great stuff with you. We'll do a special
about music and Pepsi. And it was really using our
(12:53):
creative chops, which I had in which our people had
to talk to advertisers in a different way, and we
would go to the movie companies so would say, hey,
let's do a world premiere of your picture.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
And we did.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
I remember we did prints and I forgot what was
that movie after Purple Rain?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
After it was Under the Cherry Moon.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Under the Cherry Moon, and we did a contest where
people would send in and we'd pick one and we
did the premiere in their town. Turned out to be
Shared in Wyoming, and you can imagine prints and Shared
in Wyoming and all the MTV people descending.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
On that town.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
But we would come up with ideas that would cause
the advertising oh I want that, and then we say, well,
you got to spend a million dollars on media as
well to be able to get that, and they would
call the agency and said buy MTV. And so that's
the way we broke through, and we were the first
profitable basic cable network. We had the highest ad revenue
of any of the basic cable networks at the time.
(13:48):
You know, from our standpoint, we sort of cracked the
code on it. The other thing we cracked the code
on is how to do stuff cheaper. TV production was
very expensive. It was rooted in the past. When I
was at NBC, I did a TV show after Saturday
Night Live, sort of a little teaser for what MTV.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Became, and it was called album Tracks.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Ironically, my co host was a guy m Yarl Moone
called Lee Masters on the air at the time Amazing,
who was also doing the morning show at WNBC, and
the president of NBC, Herb Schlosser, loved me.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Said you're going to TV. I want you to get
some TV experience. Here, do anything you want to after
Saturday Night Live. Take this short time slop.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But in that process I could sort of see how
they were producing and it seems so slow and antiquated.
And NBC was bragging about the fact that they'd gone
from two operators for every video tape machine to one.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They cut the cost of people in half.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
To run their video tape machines. When we launched MTV,
we had one operator for thirty machines. So we figured
out how to just take quantum.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Leaps and like, yeah, and efficiency.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Sounds quaint today, but back then, let's go to the
new tech. Let's use the new technology, not the old.
Let's think about things in a new way. And again
going back to the point you made, not knowing it
was our greatest gift and everybody and we were marked
at a couple of times. Is nobody at MTV had ever
done the job they had before?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
In general, do you try to find people who you
think are smart and creative and who haven't done a
job before when you're looking for people?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, you know, it's funny. I am willing to do that.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
And by the way, my big breaks in life were
because people gave me the shot.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
To do that. I probably don't do it as much
as I should.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
It requires you really to get in and understand the
person and have faith in them. But I do think
every time I give somebody a job that's a big
jump from where they were. They are spectacular performers, and
often when you get people the same job for the
third time, the performance is pretty Listen to the rest
(16:02):
of this episode at tetragramaton dot com, slash Podcasts, or
on your favorite podcast app.
Tetra grammaton.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
Nineteen eighty one.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
August one eighty one we launched, and that world was
a world of no information. There were three TV networks, ABC, NBCCBS,
and they decided when you were going to see programming.
HBO had come along in the in the mid seventies.
There had been no really advertised to supported networks, which
(00:47):
of course MTV was, and there was an idea at
the time that the consumer wanted choice, which we know
is always true, and that instead of network programmers deciding
when you could see kids, programming, music, programming, news, sports,
you would go to these twenty four hour channels and
(01:08):
get it at any time. So you put together your
own array of programming the match your needs.
Speaker 1 (01:13):
That was a really new thing.
Speaker 3 (01:15):
Think of it as a poor man's on demand. I mean,
there's no technology for undemand then, so this was a
way where you're going to get choice. So Turner launched CNN,
A bunch of guys up in Bristol launched ESPN. Those
are in the seventies now, it was about nineteen eighty.
I guess along when we went there, we're all right
there together.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
How many homes had cable at this time?
Speaker 3 (01:36):
Think about fifteen million, and so we developed this idea
for a music service, all music. And I think the
music had been on TV off and on for years
and years, never particularly successful, and our thesis was it
wasn't successful because they kept trying to make music fit
the TV form, which was a narrative.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
So with MTV said we're going to make TV fit
the music form, which is mood. Emotion makes you feel
a certain way.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Music's better than any drug for taking you to certain
moods or where you want to go. And you had
a generation that had grown.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
Up with TV.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
We were the first of the TV babies my generation
and rock and roll, but the two had never come together.
So the idea was we're going to put it together.
And there were all these little video clips that have
been produced. No one had been able to figure out
what to do with them, so that was the general
concept of what we were doing.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
The venture was owned by Warner.
Speaker 3 (02:30):
And American Express fifty to fifty called Warner AMEX. The
board of directors wouldn't aprove the idea, thought it was
way too risky. So he got a meeting with Jim Robinson,
who was the CEO of American Express. His lieutenant as
president was lou Gershner, who went on to fame at
Nabisco and IBM, and Steve Ross from Warner Communications David Horwitz,
you'll probably remember, off.
Speaker 2 (02:52):
To the president Warner.
Speaker 3 (02:53):
We got a meeting with him to pitch them the idea,
and we think the hard cell is going to be
the American Express. And inside Warner there's this other thing
brewing that the music company were saying, wait a minute,
if you do a music channel, we should do.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
It, not that joint venture.
Speaker 3 (03:09):
And so there was, you know, lots of turmoils and
dramas there always are. And toward the end of the meeting,
Jim Robinson, who is the chairman of American Express, looks
at Steve and goes.
Speaker 2 (03:19):
I'm in for my ten million, Steve, how about you?
Speaker 3 (03:21):
And he called the question and Steve goes, yeah, man,
And that was the way we got approval.
Speaker 1 (03:27):
Amazing was that the first time you ever met Steve Ross.
Speaker 3 (03:30):
Now I met Steve a couple of times before, and
Steve had David Horowitz sort of fell in love with me.
And David was responsible for the cable company and the
Warner MX joint venture.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
And had brought me to meetings.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
And Steve got as we launched him TV, got very
interested in it, and Steve wound up being one of
my great mentors. And Steve would you know, later put
his arm around me and just say come on with
me too. Whatever meetings had nothing to do with music
or MTV, but he was just let me in and
letting me see stuff and see how it worked. And
I had been involved with some of the other stuff
(04:05):
because originally I came over from MBC. The first channel
we were going to do was a pay service sort
of like an HBO. It was called the Movie Channel.
At that time, HBO is only on in prime time,
it was off the rest of the day really, so
we did a twenty four hour all movie service, which
said a great and then HBO realized what we were doing,
(04:26):
so they started what is called a fighting brand. I
had no idea what a fighting brand was, but learned
very quickly called Cinemax, and they made it cheaper to
the cable operator and they got more movies. So it
was just a rip off of what you were doing. Yeah, yeah,
obviously we proved that there was an opening. They came
in and so I had known Steve through the Movie
Channel and through what we were doing with the Movie
(04:48):
Channel and movies, but MTV is.
Speaker 2 (04:50):
Really what sort of turbo charged my relationship with him.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
It's an amazing story. I remember the impact it had
on my life. It felt like there was the world
before MTV and after MTV.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
You were a kid at that time, and you know
what's interesting is it had some interesting ancillary benefits which
we didn't realize. The three networks controlled what you saw,
and they made everything look like it basically was des moined.
Everything was Middle America. You didn't see what people in
New York were wearing or London. And when MTV came on,
(05:21):
suddenly all these kids across America got to see what
people in New York and la and London were wearing,
and fashions changed immediately. I think it was nineteen eighty four.
I got a CFDA awould, the Council Fashion Designers Award
for the impact MTV had on fashion.
Speaker 1 (05:37):
Amazing.
Speaker 2 (05:37):
And we also changed sort of the graphic look.
Speaker 3 (05:41):
At the time we launched MTV, every graphic design looked
like Star Wars logos and you know, the car dealer,
everybody had it. And we came out with this a
radically different design and opened people's eyes to no, No,
it doesn't have.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
To be the way you've said it has to be.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
Tell me about the I want my MTV.
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Well, the problem was that the cable operators really didn't
want to take MTV because they were at that time
charging companies for the access to the cable like twenty
five cents a month. We didn't have twenty five cents
a month. So we said, well, another idea. One of
the guys that worked for me was Harvard MBA and
(06:21):
was always whispering.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
To me all the stuff. He goes, we should do
consumer pull and I go, what's that?
Speaker 3 (06:27):
He goes, that's where you get the consumers to demand
the product instead of push distribution where you buy it.
I go, great, sign me up. And so we hit
upon this idea that we would come up with ad
campaign advertise MTV and that the cable operator them would
think they had to carry it because they said consumer outcry.
And a guy named George Lewis and a guy named
(06:47):
Dale Pond, who'd been my promotions director at WNBC, they
had an agency together. We hire them and they came
back originally with some spot that said America is becoming
a land of cable brats and bladh blah blah blah blah,
but embedded and they call your cable company and say,
I want my MTV. Well, Tom Freston was our marketing guy,
and John Sykes was our promotion guy, and Fred Seibert
(07:09):
was the on air look guy. They I remember they
all came over to my apartment on a one night
I was on Central Park West, and we go through
all this and we go, you know, I'm going to land.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
At cable brats.
Speaker 3 (07:20):
It's sort of cheesy, and then didn't connect, but that
I Want my MTV is exactly what we want, so
we sort of recrafted the whole spot to.
Speaker 2 (07:27):
Be I Want my MTV.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
And George Lewis had done a campaign in the sixties
called I Want My Maypo with Mickey Mantle and as
often happens, or repurposed it for I Want My MTV.
And we didn't have a lot of money, but we
would go market by market where they weren't carrying MTV
and we run this campaign and the kids would all
call a cable company and they would flood the cable
(07:50):
company and tie up all their phones and they go, okay,
we'll put it on. And after about two or three markets,
we actually didn't have to put on. We just had
to threaten that we were going to do it because
everybody had heard and go, okay, we're getting read advertised
in your market. You sure you don't want to go
and put it on? Yeah, yea, yeah, we'll put it on.
And so that drove it. And it's interesting because MTV
was a sort of success with the consumer immediately, but
(08:12):
a dismal failure economically with advertisers and with the cable operators.
So we really had to go redo this sort of
business side of it. And that's ultimately how I went
from being the creative guy they had creative guy to
running the network.
Speaker 1 (08:27):
So tell me about going from the creative guy to
the business guy. It's very different.
Speaker 3 (08:32):
Hat They came to me and said, look, this thing's
not working. We projected we going to do ten million
revenue first year. I think we did half a million
dollars in alf revenue. Thought the cable operas were all
come flying, and you know, as we said, what they
want my MTV campaign didn't quite work out that way.
And I was doing the marketing, you know, all the
marketing and the creative stuff.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
There was another guy who was doing all the sales stuff.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
And they came to me and said, hey, Kit, do
you think you can run this thing? And of course
this every twenty eight or twenty nine year old ago igo. Yeah, sure,
And in my head, my calculus was I was so
sick of having to convince salespeople that I had a
good idea and they had this veto go, oh, we
can't sell that. I got to do that, So I go, hey,
(09:16):
I have total for creative freedom. Now I'm running this thing.
I can't choose anything. Of Course, what I failed to
realize was once I'm running the business side, I got
no time to be the creative. But that's sort of
how I made the jump, and I discovered I actually
loved the business side and it was just as creative
as the creative side, and bringing a lot of creativity
and a new approach and willing to take chances. And
(09:38):
by the way, not knowing too much turned out to
be a real benefit.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Yeah, it seems like it's often the case like you
don't know what you don't know, and that works your advantage, right.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
Right, But I also was so focused I knew what
we were trying to do. So I had this great prism.
It's great filter of what MTV was and what it
wasn't and I think every product has this. I was
the keeper of the vision, like I was the editor
in chief. I would say that belongs that doesn't.
Speaker 2 (10:03):
It's not that that's a good idea, that's a bad idea.
They just they don't fit together.
Speaker 1 (10:07):
And you're probably also better at managing and dealing with
creative people because you understood there absolutely you were not
a being counter no.
Speaker 3 (10:14):
And by the way, I was still actively involved, you know.
Making that jump was just sort of opened up my
life and I began to see, oh, it all turns
into dollars and cents, and I love the profit motive.
My dad was nonprofit, was a minister, and I heard
many dinner table conversations, oh so, and so you just go, Wow,
(10:36):
it's really hard because you got to keep everybody happy,
and everybody's got conflicting agendas. In business, it's like it's
a profit. I mean, ultimately it's a business, and we
should get a return on investment. And that's the reason
somebody invest in MTV instead of a railroad because they
get a better return or they like likelihood's a better return,
and once you figure.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
That out, you go, okay, well, let's sort of figure
this out.
Speaker 3 (10:59):
And the advertising front, no one wanted to buy cable advertising.
It was like the agencies were like, no way, and
everybody thought that these ads supporting networks would never work
because the audiences were so small compared to the three
big broadcast networks, even though we were targeted. So we
figured out the agencies were probably not our friends. They
(11:21):
had no vest at interest. So like, if somebody spending
one hundred dollars on TV and they only have to
buy three networks, why would they want to encourage the
people to spend it on twenty networks the same hundred
dollars because it was just dribe their cost up, I
get it.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
So we figured out what we've.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Got to do is we've got to go to the
clients and get them to demand it, and fortunately had
a wonderful guy named Roger and Rico who ran Pepsicola,
and Roger figured out very quickly kids loved this.
Speaker 2 (11:50):
There were no ratings, they just had the user gut.
Speaker 3 (11:53):
And by the way, Coca Cola didn't advertise on MTV
for sixty years because it was not measurable. At first
there were no ratings. Then when the ratings came out,
we said we didn't get their criteria. They needed sixty
five percent reach of the country and at three national rating,
we didn't have any of that, so forget it go away. Oh,
by the way, in that period of time, Roger and
(12:14):
Rico moved the market share the most it's ever been
moved before. After in Pepsi when he had an exclusive
on MTV Wow, and it was so powerful having that exclusive.
That Coke, if you recall, came out with the New Coke.
They thought they had a product problem. Yes, so they
developed a whole new product called New Coke.
Speaker 1 (12:31):
Yes.
Speaker 3 (12:31):
It turns out it wasn't that. It was that Pepsi
was advertising on MTV and Coke was missing. And when
Coke finally figured that out, they outspent Pepsi two to
one for the next ten years. But we went to
people like Pepsi, and the way we get pepsis not
by saying we buy some spots. It was like, we'll
do some great stuff with you. We'll do a special
about music and Pepsi. And it was really using our
(12:53):
creative chops, which I had in which our people had
to talk to advertisers in a different way, and we
would go to the movie companies so would say, hey,
let's do a world premiere of your picture.
Speaker 2 (13:03):
And we did.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
I remember we did prints and I forgot what was
that movie after Purple Rain?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
After it was Under the Cherry Moon.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
Under the Cherry Moon, and we did a contest where
people would send in and we'd pick one and we
did the premiere in their town. Turned out to be
Shared in Wyoming, and you can imagine prints and Shared
in Wyoming and all the MTV people descending.
Speaker 2 (13:25):
On that town.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
But we would come up with ideas that would cause
the advertising oh I want that, and then we say, well,
you got to spend a million dollars on media as
well to be able to get that, and they would
call the agency and said buy MTV. And so that's
the way we broke through, and we were the first
profitable basic cable network. We had the highest ad revenue
of any of the basic cable networks at the time.
(13:48):
You know, from our standpoint, we sort of cracked the
code on it. The other thing we cracked the code
on is how to do stuff cheaper. TV production was
very expensive. It was rooted in the past. When I
was at NBC, I did a TV show after Saturday
Night Live, sort of a little teaser for what MTV.
Speaker 2 (14:06):
Became, and it was called album Tracks.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
Ironically, my co host was a guy m Yarl Moone
called Lee Masters on the air at the time Amazing,
who was also doing the morning show at WNBC, and
the president of NBC, Herb Schlosser, loved me.
Speaker 2 (14:24):
Said you're going to TV. I want you to get
some TV experience. Here, do anything you want to after
Saturday Night Live. Take this short time slop.
Speaker 3 (14:31):
But in that process I could sort of see how
they were producing and it seems so slow and antiquated.
And NBC was bragging about the fact that they'd gone
from two operators for every video tape machine to one.
Speaker 2 (14:47):
They cut the cost of people in half.
Speaker 3 (14:50):
To run their video tape machines. When we launched MTV,
we had one operator for thirty machines. So we figured
out how to just take quantum.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Leaps and like, yeah, and efficiency.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
Sounds quaint today, but back then, let's go to the
new tech. Let's use the new technology, not the old.
Let's think about things in a new way. And again
going back to the point you made, not knowing it
was our greatest gift and everybody and we were marked
at a couple of times. Is nobody at MTV had ever
done the job they had before?
Speaker 1 (15:22):
In general, do you try to find people who you
think are smart and creative and who haven't done a
job before when you're looking for people?
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Yeah, you know, it's funny. I am willing to do that.
Speaker 3 (15:33):
And by the way, my big breaks in life were
because people gave me the shot.
Speaker 2 (15:38):
To do that. I probably don't do it as much
as I should.
Speaker 3 (15:41):
It requires you really to get in and understand the
person and have faith in them. But I do think
every time I give somebody a job that's a big
jump from where they were. They are spectacular performers, and
often when you get people the same job for the
third time, the performance is pretty Listen to the rest
(16:02):
of this episode at tetragramaton dot com, slash Podcasts, or
on your favorite podcast app.
Host
Bob Pittman
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