The Bobby Bones Show - Special Feature: Math & Magic - The Real Story of MTV: Founder’s Edition

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

Today MTV is a cultural institution, and this summer MTV is celebrating its 40th anniversary! But people forget what a long shot it was to get the channel off the ground. Bob Pittman led the team that created MTV. In this special episode, he reminisces with co-founders and friends John Sykes, Judy McGrath, Fred Seibert, Tom Freston and Jarl Mohn about what it was like to create the '80s version of a start-up, and lead a TV revolution by dreaming up the rules as they went along. From why the first MTV logo was designed on crinkled paper (it spent a little time in a trash bin), to how a tiny record store in Tulsa helped save the business, to why you should really think twice about going on a Lost Weekend with Van Halen... all the way to how a terrible cereal inspired one of the greatest ad slogans of all time: “I want my MTV,” we’ve packed this episode full of stories that marketers, fans and entrepreneurs will all want to hear.   Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Let's do it again. We're back March 27 aboard the luxurious Celebrity Summit, departing from Tampa, heading to beautiful destinations, Key West, Bimini, and Cozumel. Country superstar Riley Green will also be performing live on board, along with Chris Young, Lauren Elena, and Randy Howell. It's all brought to you by Signature Cruise Experiences, the gold standard and charter cruises since 2001. Open booking is live, and you can join us for more shows on board. Reserve any available state room online at top shelfcountrycruise.com.

Or you can give the Signature Cruise Experience Office a call at 888-381-4420. These spots are going fast. Book now, Topshelfcountrycruise.com or 888-381-44-2.5. You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of IHeart Radio. You actually were the guy who inspired us to do animated logos. Do you remember this? I said, well, what are we going to do in between the videos and the VJs? Are we going to do jingles?

And I said, no, no, we can't do jingles. And I said, what do we do? He said, how about this? Imagine it's a picture of a cow. I said, yeah. And he said, and all of a sudden an axe comes down and cuts the cow's head off. and it falls to the ground and you see the veins coming out and the blood spurting out and the cow vomits and in the vomit is the logo. I went, oh my God, I can do anything I want.

Hi, I'm Bob Pittman and welcome to Math and Magic stories from the Frontiers of Marketing and we're doing something special on today's episode. One of the pivotal moments of my life was leading the team that created MTV. I've had the good fortune of having all the co-founders of MTV on this podcast with me. And in each of the enter, interviews, whether it was chatting with Judy McGrath or Fred Cyber, John Sykes or Yarl Mohn, and of course Tom Preston, we've always spent a little time talking about MTV. So what we wanted to do for you today was pull together those stories. For the first time ever, tell the story of the beginning of MTV through the eyes of people who were actually in the room when it happened,

because all of us who are really in the room often laugh about how far off other people's accounts can be. So let me set the stage. It's the beginning of the 80s. Cable TV was still a crazy idea. Most business executives and most of America didn't understand it or believe in how TV was about to change. And here comes this pack of 20-year-olds with an attitude. None of us had ever done the jobs before. All we knew is we had grown up with rock and roll and we'd grown up with TV,

and the two had never successfully come together. We thought it had always failed because TV people always wanted to try to make music fit the TV form, Astoria. We intended to make TV fit the music form, mood and emotion. MTV was going to be about attitude and something people wanted to join. We were on a mission. So when IHeart's own John Sykes, at the time, a 24-year-old record executive at CBS Records in Chicago, heard what we were up to. Well, he wanted it in.

So let's talk about MTV. It's 1980. The word gets out that we're working on this due music channel. How do you hear about it? What does it mean to you? And how on earth did you really get connected to us to get on that original team? I grew up with three things in my life. Radio, television, and music.

That's all I cared about. When I wasn't listening to radio station, I was watching TV or listening to music. Those things to me shaped our culture. So I'm at school. Cable TV is just starting up. And I saw the cable channels were empty. The music was all over the radio. It was on television.

So we used to go and shoot the concerts. circus, and we tape them and send them to new channels, and we play the concerts. And people are like, oh, my God, I can see the band. And all I wanted to do at that point was put music on television. When I graduated, I went to CBS, said, let's put music on. Let's run concerts. These three martini lunch guys in New York looked at me like it was crazy. I got a job in the record business promoting radio stations.

I wanted to run the radio station. I didn't want to promote them on the radio, but that's the job I had. So then I heard from my friend Steve Casey, who was at WLS, Chicago that his great friend Bob Pittman was in New York and he was going to start a video channel. And I lost my mind. It still gives me goosebumps. I was like, this is what I was made to do. This is what I wanted to do. To me, it was like music belonged on television. So I started calling you. And I called you and I called you and I called you and thanks to your assistant Ann Plunkett. Because I was annoying so much, he said, all right, Bob, please talk to this guy. And we met that day with a

borrowed sport jacket? Exactly, because I didn't own it. But you and I connected that moment because we had the same vision. Music and television were the two biggest forces in pop culture, and they're about to be, you know, you look back on any successful product and it seems easy. You were there when we didn't even have approval from the board to do it. We just had some money to develop it.

So give us a little color for people who think things are easy and they always go exactly the way you plan, what that early development was like. It is funny. People are like, oh, my God, you're in the team that started MTV. That must have been magical and great. I don't know. I was working too hard.

We were so in the trenches all the time. It only looks glamorous today looking back. But when you're in it, it's a slug fest. There was this idea, but to make it happen, we had no money. And we all quit jobs. You were at NBC. I was at CBS. I was the promotion man of the year in Chicago, and I just said, I'm quitting.

People like us, we weren't going to fail. I never thought we were going to fail. I got scared when you'd come in and say, you know, they're going to cut the budgets. We've got a few more months. We've got to make our numbers. That just made me say, well, we're going to work hard to make our numbers. I do still remember one conversation we have where I said, okay, we're going to the board and we're going to pitch this for approval. And you go, what?

We don't have approval? I quit my job. We don't have approval. No, no, John, this was development. All the blood ran out of your face at that moment. I do remember. I had to look up because there was no internet. I had to go in the dictionary and look up the real definition of development.

So we're developing something. Go, no, development means it's not going to happen yet. But you know something? I was like, who cares? If it doesn't work, I'll go sleep on my sister's couch and get another job. We were young. John Sykes was so hungry, he pounded it on our door to let him in. He believed in music television from the start.

But my good pal Fred Seiberd, the one who came out of radio and helped create the graphic look of MTV, his reason for getting into TV was very different. one of your great supporters who I'd worked with and who I loved dearly, Dale Pond, recommended you to me pre-MTV. It was in the early days of pay TV. You came over to join us in the cable revolution. Yeah. Why did you make that jump?

Well, you know, this is going to sound flattering. I did it completely because of you. Dale had left the country music radio station and left me alone. And the guy I was working for at that time in radio, I had no respect for whatsoever. So you called me one day. You said you want to be in television. No, you said, okay, come have coffee with me. I went to Dale's files, and he had files on everyone in the business,

and there was one article about you. And I thought to myself, you know, this guy is younger than me, and I've heard of him. So that's, you know, one check. So we go, we have the coffee, and I walk out, and I called my best friend, and I said, this guy that I just talked to is so much smarter than my boss in radio. He goes, well, what do you think about that? I said, well, here's what Dale taught me. It doesn't matter what the job is, work for the smartest person you can find.

And at the time, you were the smartest person I could find. That's what that means to television. That's flattering. Truth be told, when you first told me about it, I thought it was the dumbest idea in the world because I was a music guy. And I had seen, you know, a few crummy music videos. I hadn't really thought about it too much. And then luckily, somebody played me a music video that made, you know, the little light go off. I don't know whether it was blind faith or I was too naive to know that you had to have faith.

Like you told me it was going to happen. I believed you. Was it youth? Totally. I was just talking with Alan Goodman, my soon-to-be partner at that point. And he said, you know, we didn't really know it was going to happen. But you looked at all the other people that were around you and it just had to happen. I think that's really true.

I don't know if you remember, but we went to the head of Warner Communications and American Express. And we got a meeting with Steve Ross, who is the CEO of Warner, along with his deputies, David Horowitz, etc. And we got Jim Robinson and his deputy, Lou Gershner, from American Express. We were worried that when we showed these videos to people from American Express going, what? That's not. So he said, let's find the tamest one with the mind. I think we found Olivia Newton John. If you remember, but in the meeting, they said, do we have to play that kind of stuff?

Yeah, exactly. Implying Olivia Newton John was too hard. It's too racy, right? But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first one to say, okay, I'm in for my half. How about you, Steve? So, awesome. We lucked out. The MTV crew we assembled was a bunch of lovable misfits. And future Viacom and MTV CEO, Tom Preston, was no different. It's been several years living in Afghanistan, importing clothes, and having adventures across Asia.

But when things got too political overseas, he made his way back. And just so you don't think Tom went soft sitting atop Viacom, after he left the company, he returned to Afghanistan. It even has a wonderful story about lying on a floor and a bar in Kabul with a firefight going on all around them. Bullets whizzing overhead. I was always trying to figure out where would I fit in in the business world. I wasn't an artist per se. I wasn't a writer or a musician. But I wanted to always be around creative people.

My first grown-up jobs, essentially, working in an ad agency. My first account there I worked on was G.I. Joe. Now, mind you, this was sort of at the height of the Vietnam War. And I was in an alienated state to begin with when they were going to assign me to a Charmin toilet paper. That was sort of my last straw. I called an ex-girlfriend who lived in Paris. I said, they want me to work on a toilet paper account where they had segmented the population to rollers, folders, and crumplers. And she says, well, you can't do that.

You should quit that job. Don't be a moron. Come with me. I'm going to go across the Sahara Desert. I'm in Paris. So I was on a plane like 10 days later. That was it for me. So Tom set up his clothing company, Hindu Kush, and ran that successfully for a long while.

When I was driven out of Asia, I thought whatever I do next, I wanted to be something that I also loved deeply, and that was music. So I methodically looked around getting a job in the music business. Through connections, I ended up in John Lack's office, and I told him I thought this is a fantastic idea. He says, we're looking for people who have no experience in television. I said, I'm your man. They didn't even have television where I've been living in the last eight years. We were both originally brought to the company, for other jobs, by the way, before the MTV development even began by the incredibly charismatic John Lack, who had this wonderful affliction. He liked to hire people for roles they had never had before, and you and I benefited from that.

But you got in here. The cable revolution wasn't even recognized as being a revolution yet. What did you think you were getting into? I mean, this was still sort of Mickey Mouse compared to the TV business. I thought I was getting into one of the greatest ideas that had ever come around. I had spent parts of the summers in Europe, and I was familiar with the music video, which were largely unknown to American audiences, and they were infectious. And I thought MTV, like all of us on the team, was really one of the great ideas. And all of us were essentially on a crusade.

We got paid nothing. It was the early 80s version of a startup. Very much so. And if you looked at the media environment then, nothing had really changed in years. The only thing that had come around knew had been FM radio. There was still three TV networks. Pong was only a few years old. Remember, we used to say we're going to do to FM what FM did to AM.

That was our big claim. 25 channels in the home, can you imagine? Judy McGrath was another key employee in the early days. She eventually rose to be CEO of MTV Networks. Here she is reminiscing about what it meant to make the rules up as we went along. The beauty and the wonder of MTV was that it was really filled with people that I thought could not find gainful employment anywhere else. We couldn't.

No. It would be somebody who would never really shot anything and just wanted to get their hands on a camera and try it. And we were willing to do that. So I would say, absolutely, but remember, don't fall in love with your own idea. This is about someone else, not you. This is about the person on the other side. They're like you, but you can't make this just for you.

And there are really no other rules aside from, you know, full frontal nudity, go out there and do it. And it was so much fun to have the freedom to meet people who were far more creative than I was. I mean, when I joined, I didn't know anything about television. I didn't even like it. My interview was with Fred, who said, so what kind of music do you like? And I think I said Bruce Springsteen.

I'm not sure. He said, well, you're wrong and I'll tell you why. And then about 45 minutes later, I left, not having said anything. else. And the next thing I know, they were like, well, you know, look, this is just a few of us. We're trying to get this thing going if you'd like to join. And it was kind of like, how fast can I get out the door of Condé Nass and jump on this thing, whatever it is? These people are crazy. What's funny is that when I ask Fred about it, he remembered the story exactly the same way. She said Bruce Springsteen. I said wrong because I don't have a good thing about Bruce. The fact that she cared.

You know, the Bruce haters are coming after you right now. Yeah, believe me. They've been coming after me my whole life. The fact that she cared meant all the difference to me in the world, not that I agreed. You know, I've just found the camaraderie and the purpose and the sheer invention of something that didn't exist so irresistible. And again, on the math side of it, I was saying, and I mean this with all sincerity, you had a map in the creative group. had a plan and the plan were promises. And I loved that. I am making a promise to you. You sit here. I'm going to deliver something that you've been waiting for. It is the first

music television network. It is exactly for you. And I thought, wow, I want my MTV. And I have no idea what it is, but those are powerful words. My, in an era before social media and social engagement, something for me that felt like mine and want. What a powerful word, right? I want my MTV. I took that very seriously. I took those promises to heart, 24 hours a day, terrific, in stereo, not really, but, you know, hey, it's marketing. Hey, it sounded good, didn't it? It sounded good. But for those 10 people who did have stereo, I know, I remember you saying to me, we want people to think it sounds better than regular television, and they did. It just felt to me. It just felt. me like if I could marry all the things I'm interested in with these set of principles and join

this crazy band of people who have no right in a lot of audacity and a firm belief that this can work. What a gift. I never looked back. Not one second. Let's go back to Fred and chat about that iconic MTV logo. Talk about the logo. You set out, you got the mission, you and I have these discussions, I naively say, we'll do our own Star Wars logo. Because everybody has a Star Wars logo and you go to Bob, ours will look cheap. You said, look, if we do something no one's ever seen before, they won't know it's cheap. Exactly. So tell me about the logo.

Well, the logo itself actually came about because I was too scared to go to someone famous. I wanted to go to Milton Glazer, who's one of the most famous graphic designers of the last 50 years. And I was like, oh, well, he's going to be really expensive. and he'll get all the credit. And I wanted a little credit, you know, at least. So my childhood friend, who I've known since I'm four years old, a guy named Frank Olinsky,

had just started a little design firm behind a Tai Chi studio above Bigelow Chemists on 6th Avenue. And Frank had been the guy, because he's a year older than me, who had always introduced me to every new rock band. He introduced me to the monkeys. He introduced me to the mothers of invention, to the who, to Jeff Beck. So I go down to his little Tai Chi studio. place and I go, well, you guys design a logo for this, you know, Rock Channel we're starting.

And they were like, yes. And they didn't ask me anything. They didn't ask me how much they were going to get paid or anything like that. And this was right after you sent out the first memo in June of 1980. And boy, do I wish I had that memo. So for a year, they designed logos. And I just rejected everything. Probably 500 designs. Finally, they come in the office one day. We're actually going to go on the air soon, right? And we still don't have anything. And they bring a pile. And I'm like, no, no, I'm going through the whole pile. And at the bottom of the pile is a piece of tracing paper. Remember that? You know, the paper you could see through. And it was all wrinkled. And they had flattened it out. It was just like a sketched TV. I went, okay, that's the one.

And I can see Frank like growling. He and I now disagree. But what I had heard is that there's three partners and one of them wasn't really a designer. She was a production manager and she had done it. And Frank saw it and hated and threw it in the garbage. She fished it out and put it at the bottom of the pile. He says that's not true, but, you know, who knows? Makes for a good story. The only reason I said yes is that Dale had taught me one lesson about design. You need to dominate the space. And that big block EM was the only thing they showed that when you put it on a TV screen filled the whole screen. Okay, we dominate the space in in a world of 30 channels. And in a day when the screen was square. Exactly right. So then I go, oh, you know, we need

official colors. So they come to my office with about 10 different boards and then a little board where Frank had illustrated 10 or 12 of them on acrylic overlays and said, this one will be for the heavy metal show and this one will be for the new wave show. And I'm like, Frank, we're going to have shows. You know, I put it aside. So I put all of the boards up on my pegboard and couldn't decide. And this went on literally for like weeks and weeks and weeks. And then I start looking at his little acrylic thing with all the illustration. And I said, why don't we just use them all at once all the time? Or television, we move. Shouldn't the logo move? And to be honest with you, that was my first real revelation that I was in television. That we had

come up with an idea that only worked in television. Right. You actually were the guy who inspired us to do animated logos. I said, well, what are we going to do in between the videos and the VJs? Are we going to do jingles? And he went, no, no, we can't do jingles. And I said, what do we do? He said, how about this?

Imagine it's like a picture of a cow. I said, yeah. And he said, and all of a sudden an axe comes down and cuts the cow's head off and it falls to the ground and you see the veins coming out and the blood spurting out and the cow vomits and in the vomit is the logo and went oh my god i can do anything i want this is the most exciting moment of my life and we started hiring animators to do all that stuff the other thing you did when you did those promos you laid the music bed down first yeah and cut to music people forget this they don't realize that was an innovation so i got that all from dale and when we started making our first radio

spots, we would film country music stars. And then he said, we'll go to the audio studio and cut the audio track. I went, well, the video guy tells me, no, you have to first do the picture. And then he goes, Fred, we own the audio studio. It's free. If you get it right in the audio studio, then the $300 an hour video studio will go much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I realized that he was absolutely right. Now, fast forward, 20 years. I go to MTV one day, and I go, who's the promo department now? And they went, you're the one.

What are you talking about? They said, they make us do the audio first. We're filmed people like, why? So 20 years later, they were still doing it. But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm. So we had a logo, and we were a band of believers. But part of getting MTV to stick was proving the channel. worth to the record companies. Artists love the idea being on TV, but the labels needed

to be convinced. At the time, they even said music should be heard and not seen. We needed a case study, a story to prove we sold records. I talked to John Sykes about it. We launch MTV, we get it underway. We're trying to get some evidence that it's working because the record companies are hemorrhaging money those years. They were thinking about cutting videos out of their budget, which, of course, we've been a disaster for. So we said, we've got to get some evidence ahead of the budget cycle. And you and Tom Preston go on the road to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Just hold on a second because we've got so much more to talk about.

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Tell me what happened in Tulsa. We believe this was working. We felt it, but we needed facts. We needed to convince a record business. So it was like, we need a story. Tom, John, go on the road. Don't come back. You have a story.

In Tulsa didn't happen until we went to Syracuse, Houston, and we went to the cable markets. So Tom and I, driving through Tulsa and a rental car, literally with a map of record stores, going into places. So he sold any. lease records, selling Duran Duran. You sold any tubes?

Nope, nope, nope, nope. So we kept driving, driving. I still remember it was a record store in an old house. Tom Lys drudgeon and we say, you sold this, selling that, selling Duran Duran. Duran, I sold two boxes of Duran Duran Duran Records last week. What is you sold two boxes? You sold 50 records, 25 records in a box.

Can we have your name? and can we use your phone? We called it Bob. We said, Bob, we have a story. We have a story. We have a record story that's selling music only played on MTV. And you said, great, get a name, get the information. We need an article.

And so we hang up the phone. I turned to Tom. I go, Tom, we get to go home. And we took that, and we wrote it as a case study. And we ran it in Billboard and the music magazines to influence the record companies. I have, of course you do. You have everything we ever did at MTV. you are the pack rat.

I have that one sheet. MTV sells records. Joey Smith, and boy that Joey Smith, wherever you are in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Thank you. If you're wondering why we picked those places, Syracuse, Houston, Tulsa, it's because those were the few markets

where we had enough cable density that we could make a point. These cities ended up being little laboratories where we could peek in and take measurements and show the world just how effective MTV was going to be. So it proved our worth to the record companies, but you have to remember, we still had to convince cable operators to carry MTV. They wanted to be paid to carry our channel, and frankly, we didn't have the money.

So we had to come up with a breakthrough idea and genius campaign that could do all the heavy lifting. Here are Tom Preston and Fred Seiber telling that story. Let's start with Tom. When we launched MTV, you were the head of marketing. the cable operator wouldn't put MTV on. They wanted us to pay them. One, we didn't have the money, and two, that was probably a slippery slope. And so we decided we would use a pull strategy to get distribution.

I want my MTV. Well, it was sort of a Hail Mary pass because, you know, we were about to go under. No one in the organization knew we were about to go under. So how are we going to get these cable operators to add us? When we knew, in fact, that the people who actually had it in the few towns where it existed, They loved it. They were fanatical about it. So we actually had to go over their heads.

And the idea was that campaign, I want my MAPO, which I remembered as a baby boomer in the 50s. Some obnoxious, I want my MAPO, but I want my MTV. The actual spot said they grew up with rock and roll, they grew up with television. Now they want their MTV. George Lois, who never saw something that he couldn't copy, had already copied a famous TV commercial from the,

50s called I Want My Mapo for a really horrendous tasting oatmeal. Oatmeal substance, right. And he redid it with Mick Jagger and David Bowie. And on the beginning of the spot, he had Pete Townsend doing it. America, demand your MTV. Right. And people go, I want my MTV. I want my MTV.

And then Pete Townsend again with a telephone going, call your cable operator and say, I want And they showed us this spot. If we could get major rock stars in a commercial to kind of hold our logo, validate it, hold it, and command people to call their cable company and demand their MTV, make it look cool, put some animation around it, and then put it in these markets at very high frequency. We go into a market and it would be like a blockbuster movie was opening. Most people in the market had never heard of MTV. So we went and we pitched it to you.

I think you saw the feeling of it right away. Well, there's a lesson in this, too, that you've always done very well, which is harnessing the power of partners. And in the case of I Want my MTV music stars who are willing to be in the commercial for free to help us accomplish our goals, but you also have music companies and others. Dale was this brilliant hybrid of a strategist and a creative guy.

And as a strategist, what he understood is that we had no money to spend them. on this ad. I remember going into our boss's office and saying, but HBO spending $10 million a year in advertising goes, you're lucky you have two. Somehow or other, the people in the media business didn't actually believe in advertising is the weirdest thing. And so I went to Dale, I said, look, we only have $2 million. And he did an incredible data dump of where could MTV be put on against how much media cost in that particular market. And he did three or four or five cross tabs

to figure out the most likely places that if we put on these spots, that we would get people calling and making the cable operators insane. And God knows, I think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy within four weeks. Next thing you know, every cable operator, if there were 11 of them in a market,

which would not be unusual on time, they'd all call up and surrender. So we would move at market by market for a couple of years across the country, going from like what was 7 million subscribers, ended up being 80 or 90 million. I had a guy stop me at a cable operator and said, I hate you. And I go, why do you hate me? And he goes, because my phone rings all day with those people saying, I want my MEP, I can't get any new work done. In my chats with the co-founders, there's a lot of fondness for this deviant culture we had.

MTV was fine. It was definitely anti-establishment. And the truth is, even the promotions dripped with the brand's sensibility. In some ways, they defined the brand's sensibility. There's some of the crazy stories, too. It was fun reminiscing with John Sykes about them. You were the guy who did the promotions. You came up with these great ideas, and unfortunately,

unfortunately, were the one that also executed them. You did the Paint the House Pink promotion with John Mellencamp. You did the Lost Weekend with Van Halen. What formula were you using? It goes back to that Schenectady New York thing of being a dreamer because I was the kid. I was the viewer who thought, oh my God, if only I could dot, dot, dot. So when you said, we've got to put together some promotions, we've got to go bigger than life. We go, what are we going to do?

I just said myself, okay, what would anybody give their eye teeth to do? What would be the fantasy of all fantasies? And I remember just John had done a song called Pink Houses. So let's give away a house and we're going to paint the mother pink. Tell us about the first house you bought. When you had to execute it, that means you had to go find a house. You had to go buy a house. You had to go actually get a team to paint it pink.

You had to go fly people in. So we went. And you had no money, so we had to buy the cheapest house you could find. So Bob goes, take a cashier's check and just go buy a house. And I go, okay. So I flew in Indiana and John Mellencamp, who loved the idea, sends his ex-wife to meet me to show me around to buy some house. She's a realtor.

So we go and I go, okay, I got about two hours before I get the flight back to New York. Show me four houses. First house we buy. The woman is there, just cookies for me. The kids are out front. They've cleaned it up. This was a shack. I felt so bad for her.

She was a single mom. Look at this house and I said, we can paint this pink. So I wrote on check, $32,000. Bought the house. Her jaw dropped. No realtor. I just handed the check and got in the car, drove back. We opened up Rolling Stone three weeks later.

MTV buys house on toxic waste dump. So I call you go, Bob, I had no idea. John Milencamp writes me a letter that I have today. Dear John, I'm sure you've read Rolling Stone by now. And I'm sure you wouldn't want to give a house on a toxic waste dump. And I'm going, oh, my God, we're stuck with a house. So I had to fly back and get another house. But that's not the good story.

Double the budget. Double the budget. The good story was the last weekend with Van Halen. That one really, really defined MTV as a serious, dangerous rock and roll brand to consumers. There was a movie called The Lost Weekend. Gray Maland was in there and a guy loses his mind, whatever. And so we just said, let's do a loss week with a band. Who's the craziest band out there right now?

Van Halen. Van Halen wouldn't do any promotion because they were worried about their image. We called them with the idea like, we're in, we're in. And by the way, we'll fulfill the contest. You don't have to do anything. just drop off the fans with us and we'll deliver them back on Sunday. So we did that. The kid arrives and they take him about 4 o'clock in the afternoon right into the backstage

and everything you can imagine would happen with Van Halen happened. So by the time the band goes on stage at 9 o'clock at night, this guy is fried. There's been things that were not a Warner MX condoned or MTV Network's activity. So he's standing on stage completely out of his mind. And David Lee Roth goes, we have the winner tonight of the Emmett. TV lost weekend. Joe Smith, you know, Joe, congratulations. They bring on a giant sheetcake. He's got his hands up in there and the band's around him. And they take the sheetcake and they push it into his face. And the guy is stunned. And he starts twirling around swinging punches at

the band. The pan freaks out. They take him off and they bring him backstage. We say to his friend, what's wrong with him? And he said, we forgot to tell you, he has a metal plate in his head. he was in an accident. He's not supposed to drink. So they had to put him in a room with a security guard all night. But that kind of made the legend of MTV. I wish we could take credit for that, but that was it. So the contest, maybe we're lucky we can't take credit for it. You know what those contests did? That creates the fantasy and the aspiration that makes someone want to be attracted to a product.

MTV could have been a flash in the pan, but the marketing in spirit captured an attitude that young America responded to. People tuned in just to see what was going on on MTV. It was a place to hang out. And as the word spread, the channel made money. Although MTV was the most radical of the cable channels, it was also the first cable network to actually make a profit. And we had the highest ad revenue of any of the cable networks. And remember, this was a time when people didn't believe cable networks could even be profitable.

Boy, did that feel good. But part of keeping the channel successful was continuing to think outside the mainstream and continue to come up with new ideas. Here's Fred again. We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here, I didn't want to hire them. One of the earliest people I hired had just come out of film school and his first job was cutting film negatives at a porno place. I'm like, okay, fine.

You won't remember this, but one day you called me into your office and you said, hey, I need you to be, you know, the head of production. I said, Bob, you know, I've never seen even the red light on top of a camera go on. and you went, oh, don't worry, you'll figure it out. And that was that, and all of a sudden I was in television. And you did a really great job. Thank you. But it wasn't just people like Fred who got an opportunity at MTV. Here are Judy and Tom talking about how he kept an eye out for new talent

and groomed them upward, and the culture that the two of them kept going and kept building at the company even after I left. If you think about it in the days of MTV, we're probably looking back at an extraordinary number of women. and very important roles. Today would be crowing about it probably. You know, whether you like it or not,

you have been mentoring people, you've been setting an example. How do you handle that responsibility? And what do you do consciously about that? I began to see I was sort of a better editor coach than I was a player. I can remember some things that just felt like personal milestones to be. You know, one of the great fun things I got to do would be hang out in the rehearsals for the video

music awards. And I was sitting there and I was sitting there. thinking, wow, you know, we've got a female director. We have a female on stage managing the crew. We have a young woman who's the head writer. We have a young woman in charge of seating in events, but we've got women in roles that were not traditionally women's roles. They were just really good. And I do think it's incumbent on somebody who gets an opportunity like I got to look out for underrepresented people in general. And so, you know, when Beth McCarthy Miller raised her hand,

it was an easy like, let Beth direct. Come on, like, she can do it. We know she can do it. Everybody knows she can do it. And I looked around and thought, wow, this whole thing is kind of really looking very different than most of the other sets that I've been on. I once heard Tina Fey say something about,

it was a panel where a bunch of women were sort of congratulating each other for different things and someone said they were lucky. And a bunch of other women jumped on her and said, oh my God, women always say they're lucky. Men never say they're lucky. You made your own luck. And Tina was actually very thoughtful about it. And she said, I think timing plays a role in something as well as luck and talent. And, you know, I always felt like I worked with men who are not typical and young employees

who are not typical. So how ridiculous would it be to take a typical approach to anything else? We were upending tradition all the time and not just for the sake of doing it, but because you give somebody a chance, they'll knock themselves out to show you that they can really do it. And we actually talked about it back then. We said, you know, if somebody's done three or four things and they're not great, we have empirical evidence, they won't be great. But if we give somebody a shot who's never done it, they can be the next Steven Spielberg. Exactly right.

And the only way we're going to find out is to take a shot. Exactly. And you continued to do that through your career. A lot of focus was on creating a culture that would attract creative people that would want to come and live there. I mean, we'd have at one point, Judd Apato or Ben Stiller or John Stewart, Stephen Cooper. You know, Adam Sandler would like be sleeping in the offices sometime. It was a hot house atmosphere. You were probably the first talent incubator.

I don't think they called them that back then. How did you pull that together? Because it is really remarkable, the people you had. Well, a lot of is sort of what's the vibe of the place. We always wanted to make room for deviancy. I would always say who's the oddball person, who's the intern who's going to come running in with an idea like yo MTV Raps. That was like a 21-year-old intern who came up with a demo in his basement. Because we had these networks, there was a lot of room for experimentation.

Everything you made didn't have to be really tightly organized. So there's a lot of room for improvisation and innovation. If you have a hallmark for that, people would want to step up and follow it. You just try and have good standards, provide guardrails for people, celebrate risk. You know, we give creative people a lot of freedom. One of the people who was crucial to MTV's early success was former NPR CEO, Yarl Mohn. Yarl and I went way back. We even had a show called album tracks that aired after Saturday Night Live.

But Yarl had an incredible eye for programming. And when MTV had to think behind music videos, he played a crucial role. For me, it was a great transition from the radio world to the television world because there were so many similarities. If you had picked me up and tried to drop me into a broadcast network to do scripted, filmed entertainment, I would have, I think, flailed and failed miserably. But ultimately, we all learned a lot of lessons about the fragility of this brand new thing, music videos. And that was something we all kind of had to learn in real time.

It was humbling. It was embarrassing. Why do you think it stopped working? There was so much heat around music videos at the time. and there were so many people watching and being really enthralled by it. But I think ultimately it became less interesting. It was television, and we were using a lot, I was at least, using a lot of radio rules for a different medium.

And people were making four-minute decisions of what they were going to watch and not 30-minute and 60-minute or 90-minute decisions and ultimately had to switch strategy to go-to content that people would watch for longer periods of time, long form. And that was very controversial at the time, but, you know, it worked. What were your first shows? And we started with The Week in Rock and hiring Kurt Loder from Rolling Stone magazine and taking the MTV news segments and making it a half-hour show.

And that worked. And then rockumentaries, specials is the second. The third was Club MTV. It was, let's do an American band stand for today. let's play music videos and hire downtown Julie Brown. That was a hit. Every show that went on did well. Then we're getting really cocky and thinking, man, we really know how to make hits.

But I think it was more a reflection of the fact that music videos at the time had run their course. The most controversial one, remote control, the game show. And all the research came back, said, you can't do a game show. And I remember saying to our good friend Marshall Cohen, we worked with an MTV. Research guru. Yes, I said, I think we're asking the wrong question. The question should be, if we were to do a game show, what would it look like? And the answer came back, well, it should be irreverence, be crazy.

We used all the information and hired Ken Ober and Colin Quinn and Adam Sandler was a regular on the show, and it was a monster. But the initial research, the way we asked it indicated that there would have been a disaster. It worked out great for us. And were you able to sell that to advertisers? Yep. I liked it. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So MTV started to play with new formats, but as Fresno remembers it, the limited budgets were actually an engine for creativity. We couldn't just innovate it by shuffling the music mix or changing things. That was clear. We tried everything. We just couldn't play the top ten videos all day long. There was always new shows coming around.

We would add shows on package music and like on hip-hop music with the OMTV raps and so forth. and it kind of came down to the real world. That was in 1993. And that was like, well, we've tried everything else. We should probably do a soap opera. Because young people are interested in what other young people are doing. So they came in with a presentation to me. And we had to hire writers.

And I said, well, you know, we don't have any money to hire writers. So we can't do this. So then Doug Herzog came back and said, you know, we're really good at post-production. That's our major skill. What if we just rented a loft in Soho and stuck some cameras in there? and bring these kids in and then let them live, and then we'll post it afterwards and make it into a show. And that was sort of the birth of reality TV.

It was an idea that was not born of brilliance, but born of cheapskateness. MTV was a success story, finally, but it wasn't long before the competition started circling. Here's Tom with the story of what motivated us to start VH1. Ted Turner wanted to come in and basically PNR Parade. He said he was going to launch a music channel that played none of the devil's music. say. Let me say first that the cable music channel lasted 101 days on the air and he had the fold up and go home, but we decided we can't let this happen. And if there's going to be a second music channel, we should have a second music channel. And we made the case the cable operators.

We have a second music channel. You don't want to add the Ted Turner channel because that's just going to go head to head against the one you already have. Add VH1, which we called the very hot one at the time, because it would be more compatible and it would play artists for another demo. And we would sell it to you on a combo basis. Basically, it was free if you already had MTV. So we strangled him in terms of not being able to get distribution, therefore no advertising, no revenue, no light on the end of the tunnel. And he went out of business. And we went forward. Of course, launching BH1 was one thing. It was a savvy move, a classic fighting brand. It was essential in fighting off Ted Turner's channel. But once that was over, the team had to figure out what to do with it. The network struggled

for years. Ratings were abysmal. So John Sykes, who had left MTV by then, was called back to lead the charge. Tom Preston, calls you up, says, come home, need you to fix a VH1. What did you do? As you know, Bob, because you taught me so much of the stuff, a brand is only valuable if there's an underserved segment of the audience that needs it. Hip-hop was starting to happen. Alterum music was exploding, and a lot of the traditional rock bands and R&B bands were being pushed out. And they're going like kind of off of the cliff. And I said, there's a market here. Because having run a record company, a publishing company,

we were seeing these artists that used to be called middle of the road back then, but now they were actually vibrant pop bands. They didn't have a place. And then I saw who are the most powerful buyers, young adults, young college graduates. Here's a generation that's grown up on MTV. They have money. They're affluent. And they have nowhere to go.

So I was as excited actually about VH1 as I was. was about MTV. I mean, MTV is iconic and it will be there forever. But the other thing about VH1 to me also was it was my own. And I knew if I fell, it would be on me. It would be, psychs out if VH1 fails. They used to call VH. Point 1, which is the rating would get. And for those people who are ratings, ratings are from zero to whatever and point one's zero to a hundred. Point one is not a lot. VH1 is the ugly stepchild at MTV networks. I used to say it was nails out the seat of a car to put flats in the tires of the cars behind us because we didn't want anybody compete with MTV. But I said, now it quietly has 30 million homes. There's a market for this.

And I looked in the room and half the people like, were a sleep bicycle that quit and staying. They had a job, but they didn't believe in the product, but they're collecting a paycheck. So I said, listen, if you don't believe in this, it's okay. We won't make a big thing. We're going to fire you, but we'll work out of package. You should leave because we need people who are going to believe in this. There's a market for this. And I believe that this can be a $300 million business in the next three years if we all focus on that. So people came to me and said, I don't want to do this. I was, I didn't think anybody would come.

Like, I don't think you're right. I was like, okay, well, thank you. Bye, bye, bye, bye. They all came back three years later looking for jobs. But it was about believing in yourself, believing in your idea, hiring people around you who are better than you at executing what they did. And we put together a team at VH1, who went on to run NBC, Nintendo, Bravo.

We put together an all-star trip. So it made me proud and working with Sumner Redstone. I mean, Sun at Redstone, 1994, was on his game. You walked in and said, here's my plan. Here's what I want to do. And he'd just say, fine, go do it. If you don't do it, I'll fire you.

I'll say, it's all I want to know. Just give me the rope. And he did, it was a great nine years. We shattered all the records there, but all good businesses, you've got to reinvent them. Otherwise, they paid it off. MTV was the starting point of a cable revolution. The channel and the creative engine we built gave birth to so much more.

Here's Tom talking about just that topic. I was ambitious and I was highly motivated for this to succeed. I thought that we were in this TV revolution. We had the wind at our back. It was all going to come true. It was too good of an idea to fail. You know, a lot of life is about timing and luck. And I had somehow ended up once again in the right place at the right time.

This was sort of my destiny. I was going to meet my opportunity. What you did, you know, I would say my time there, we really proved it was a business. We're the first cable network to make a profit. But it was really you and your team, including Judy McGrath, who built MTV and the other networks into this incredible media giant. What drove that?

And where did that vision come from? And how did you get there? As a compliment to you, Bob. I mean, you are the guy always keep your eye on the consumer. Find out what the consumer want. We would always see this research. the consumer wanted what we were selling, and we could tune it up a bit. And we also had this sort of slightly subversive underground feel, and, you know, there was

nothing really around like that. And we would continue to launch new networks, Comedy Central or TV land. And the whole international world of television began to deregulate in the late 80s. All these countries really only had state TV, pretty much, as you know. So the confidence I had built from my years living in Afghanistan and India was actually very transferrable, because I really knew we could go anywhere and do anything. And if we could go to Europe, we could go to Asia, we could go to Latin America. So we built really the first worldwide television networking company.

And we rolled out not just MTV, but also Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, a lot of others, right down through Africa. So the business gradually evolved from one where we would package other people's product like a music video to where we would increasingly own what we did. But at the heart of it all was a creative machine, which again was something that you put in at the inception of the company. When we first started MTV, it wasn't just entertainment. We built a channel to be the voice of young America, and that included doing good. In my time there, MTV made its mark with massive events, with important missions, Amnesty International, Band Aid, Farm Aid, and, of course, live aid. But it was rock the vote that truly took the channel into politics, and some say even got a president elected. Here's Judy talking about it.

You've always done good. Rock the vote. choose or lose, AIDS awareness. How did you think about that inside of a company? And how do you think of it for you as a person? Well, you know, inside MTV, it was very interesting. When we decided to get into, you know, and certainly rock the vote was not our idea. Politics and Jeff Aeroff.

Who are those? Jeff Araf. So Jeff was very passionate about this. And it sort of grew into Rock the Vote. And I remember talking to Tom Freston with whom I had an extraordinarily great creative relationship. And this was one of the rare instances where we had a blowout, really. We really didn't agree. But I listened to what he said. He said, this is a terrible idea. It's not going to work. This is an entertainment brand. Nobody cares about this. We're going to get laughed out of town.

We do not have permission to do this. There's nothing about us that says we should be stepping anywhere near an election or voting or any of this. So I went back and I thought about it a little bit and I thought, okay, this is where I come into the picture. I think I grew up in an era where one of the many things I loved about music was it's social commentary. And it is about the times we live in. And it's about all the things that affect you in a very deep way.

And I thought, I think there's a way to do this where it will be engaging. This was not about telling young people you need to vote. That's not the way I looked at it at all. It was saying to people who make big decisions in this country, this is a generation that is disengaged from you and you need to address them on their turf their way. And we'll invite you to do that. That's your shot.

It wasn't about trying to be parental or any of that kind of stuff to them or give them boring facts or anything like that. And so we got as smart as we could get. And I think I didn't tell anybody. That's another thing. I sent Tabith Sorin. Tabitha. New Hampshire. And she called me at like midnight. She said, you know, I got up here and like a bunch

of candidates are like, what's MTV? And she said, and then a couple of them like got back off the bus, primarily Bill Clinton, and said, I'll talk to you. And then we were sort of off and running. And, you know, that partnered with incredible creative work on those rock the vote spots. I mean, Madonna wrapped in a flag. Whatever their disagreement, Tom Preston quickly embraced the idea. We knew it was a important to our audience, I also knew it's extremely important to the employee base. Employees would feel better about working there if they knew we had some kind of social purpose associated with what we would do. And we had 168 hours a week, we could certainly squeeze it in. It also turned out it legitimized us in the eyes of advertisers who formerly wouldn't come

near us like American Express. But most importantly, the audience liked it. And then fast forward to, you know, we're going to throw an inaugural ball that's not official and see if anybody comes to the party and R.M.'s going to play. And Vogue's going to going to play. We tried to make it as spirited as MTV, but add a little bit of gravitas, if you will, and meaning. You know, like, you do matter. You are young, but you matter, and you deserve to be heard and listen to. And we're going to help you. MTV was a wonderful ride. From the very beginning, my co-founders and I knew we were doing something that was important to culture, but we had no idea we were going to change culture. MTV changed TV. It changed TV. It changed

music, it changed graphic design, and it certainly changed my life. No matter how old I get, whatever else I've done, MTV is still an important chapter of my life, and all of us as co-founders are still very much a very tight family. But the truth is, looking back, I think we all feel the same way Tom Fresden felt when he joined the team. I was happy to have a job. I couldn't believe anyone was going to hire me. And lucky for all of us, we all kept getting hired, again, and again. I'm Bob Pittman. Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of IHeart Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat.

Nikki E. Tor for pulling research, Bill Plaques and Michael Azar for their recording help, our editor, Ryan Murdoch, and of course, Gail, Raoul, Eric, Angel, Noel, Mango, and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time. All right, if you have ever dealt with a traditional home security company, you know the drill. Expensive monthly fees, contracts that lock you in for years, and waiting around for a technician to set everything up. It's a lot. Well, now they're Simply Safe. They have completely changed the game.

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