YouSaid · the spoken record

Bob Pittman

lines on the record: 63
first: 2020-12-17
most recent: 2020-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I think they go hand in hand. It's a mistake to say I have my audience. What you really have is you have a coalition of a lot of small segments that have come together to give you a big audience. And if you fail to understand the segments and the tension between the segments and among the segments, you're talking to no one. If I've got someone 20 years old,”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With iHeart, they each scratch a different itch with each of them, and I've been lucky enough to be able to do them all. And even now I'm in a major investor and still on the board of Casa Dragonis, which I was a co-founder of. And that was an idea that I had just sitting in my house in Mexico where I used to spend a couple of months a year when I really wasn't working much and hit upon this idea of the sipping tequila and found Berta Gonzalez, who actually knew what she was doing and had run Jose Cuevo in North America. And so we rolled this thing out. And I still play with that too. I love having these other things to touch and feel because what gives my life purpose and joy is this sort of creation process.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For me, when I was doing investing and I had a pilot group, I did things with a company I called whiteboard with them. And I would say, look, let me invest with you and I'm going to be your coach. And we'll do a whiteboard session once a week, once a month, once a quarter, in which we just start talking through. And I've had this privilege of working with some brilliant people like Ben Lair, who was coming out of college and we financed through a list and use some of the expertise that we picked up from Daily Candy, from Danny Levy and her gang that, you know, it's just this very interesting groups of people. So I find in some of the smaller, more entrepreneurial companies, I got an opportunity to really deal with people who are new and fresh to it, which has a certain reward in itself. I think on the bigger companies, I've had a chance to have perhaps more impact, whether it's a Time Warner or AOL or what MTV became. And MTV sort of went through all those stages for me.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Much easier to run a big company because when you need something done, you have the money to do it and the people to do it. When you run a tiny little company, you got to say, who can I convince to do that for me for free? Or how am I going to get that done? So it's more of a struggle. Also having an impact. I'd love something like iHeart because we reach more people in America than even Google and Facebook more than anyone else. So we can have an impact. So from a creative standpoint, it's great because we can actually create stuff. We don't have to wait until the market leader creates something and then we have a little side opportunity or side hustle somewhere. And in terms of monetization, we're big enough that it matters to companies so we can actually go have a conversation with decision makers as opposed to people who really don't have the authority to make any decision other than what they've been instructed to do. On the other hand, I find that some of the small businesses have been some of the most interesting.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a story in the New York Times, Science Times, years ago, and it was about, they did a study of people and they looked at a picture and looked at what they saw in the picture. Then they took part of those people and they showed them something they had never seen before. Of course, it's always in my mind imagining, oh, I went to Burning Man, showed them something they'd never seen. Then both groups looked at the picture again. The people who had been shown this stuff they'd never seen before saw all sorts of other things in that picture and the control group did not. So I think what it does is opens up when I see stuff I've never seen before. It opens me to thinking about and being open to a lot of other ideas.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“America's becoming a land of cable brats, and cable brats, blah blah blah. And in there saying, I want my MTV. So I hear this, and it's Fred Sibert and Tom Fostner with me and go, you know what? I want my MTV sale. And we reformed that spot as I want my MTV. So somebody just has that flash of an idea. And it's not that the idea is fully formed, but when they've got the right idea. And so what you have to have is you have to have a good editor. I think I'm a pretty good editor. I answer, okay. I may not have the idea, but wow, I know the idea when it hits me. That's the idea. Let's move it around. And I think that's the process through this. And I think the best people open their minds to anything's possible and they listen really hard. And by the way, the great idea is just as likely to come from a production assistant as is your president of production. By the way, your kid or a friend of theirs or a cab driver or anyone else, listen hard and value.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't want you guys to go through them before you show them to me. And I just want you to come in raw and tell me those groups from three because by having three different groups on it, I'm going to maximize my odds that one person has the idea. So easy to use, no wonder it's number one, which was the AOL line, came from a briefing memo that Stone Roberts brought to me. And they were reading, he says, so easy to use no one. So I said, that's the line. They go, no, no, no, that's not the line. That's just with a briefing we're using so we can develop the line. I go, no, no, that's it. I want my MTV was part of a spot which Dale Pond and George Lois did. We had a problem as cable companies didn't want to put MTV on. And they wanted us to pay them to put it on per month per subscriber. And there's no way we'd ever had that money. So he said, I'm going to take a small fraction of that amount of money and we're going to buy TV advertising and we're going to do the first consumer pulling cable. We're going to get the consumer to demand the product. And so they have one.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just the way it works for most people is I think of all the stuff I need to know, I think of all the information I have about it, and then forget about it. It is not an MBA kind of process. I forget about it. And the moment at which I'm in my most Zen state, which for me is about a 15 or 20 minute shower I take every day where I sort of just go into the zone, suddenly the idea pops in my head. It might be a speech. I just have writers block on and suddenly I got it. It might be a slogan we need. It might be a structural thing. It might be a new product. It just pops in my head. I don't have any idea where it comes from. And so when I used to work with ad agencies, I would tell them, I'm not interested in your process. Please don't bring your account, people and research people and lay this out as if it's some process that we're going through. I know how it really works. What I want you to give me is three creative teams that don't talk to each other. I want them to go away and come up with the best ideas they can. I don't want anyone to evaluate.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think that process works a lot better, but it also works better if you get some wow cards in the thinking process because I find as an old man now what I'm really good at is I don't have quite that just out of left field idea. My ideas tend to be something that I've seen somewhere before some pattern or something I've seen, but I'm really good at helping somebody who's got a really raw idea shape the idea. Because like, okay, I never thought of that. It's a great idea. Now let me tell you how we put it together to make it work. And so I think the hardest part often is that magic. But you also want to inform the magic against something. What is it we're trying to do? And so random idea is probably not good, but say, look, here's what we need to accomplish. You've got to figure out a way to do this. And now you start unleashing people. And I find the creative process works for me. And as I talked to other creative people, I think.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I stopped working. I always had to say no because I didn't have any time. I said, I'm going to say yes to everything that I can now. My first answer is going to be yes. And I went to Burning Man for the first time and went to Burning Man and I walked out on that desert, on the Playa one night and saw the fire and all this stuff. I go, what? What is this? Who thought of this? How did they? And you look at these ideas out there and you go, where did that come from? And I have tried to say yes to things just to see stuff I've never seen before. And I think that helps your creativity a lot. It's just open your mind. Assume it will work until you know it won't, as opposed to start what it won't. You know, there's that creative process, which people use, which is you put all the ideas on the board before you start evaluating them. Don't evaluate them as you go. Well, I'll never work. Don't allow yourself to say anything won't work. Put everything up on the board.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think the biggest problem we all have are the blinders that we put on. When I was an MTV, we had a self-serving and half serious joke that no one over the age of 30 has any good ideas. And I think there's a certain truth to that. I think in our 20s, we have our best raw creativity because we don't know enough. If I had known what I know now, I'd never been able to create MTV. I would never been able to build Nickelodeon into this Tweens network. I saw it because I didn't know what I wasn't. I wasn't encumbered by knowing too much and knowing all this other stuff. So I think when you think about creativity, the question is, how do we keep the blinders from killing us? And I'm always looking for the new experience. I retired at 49 once and I retired thinking I wanted to go see the world and do all this stuff because I didn't go travel Europe as everybody else did when they were in college because I was working full-time since I was 15. And I said when I”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big brand we just talk about on the radio all the time. So the magic's great. So for me, and you know an example here is that I think we have to say, okay, there's a math that's being applied to all this that we weren't doing, we have to do it. So we spent the five or six years and the hundreds of millions of dollars to be able to do that now. And so I think every plan people have, you've got to be willing to throw that plan out. I got to be willing to throw the plan out that we sell spots. The plans don't matter. It matters what's right today that's maybe different than yesterday. And by the way, none of us are no stradamas.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's silly to think about if you have an opportunity, say, okay, I can either do search for cookies. And when it comes to cookies, I can say tri-Tate's cookies. They're great with a little line in the box. And I'll go to the website maybe and I'll get a couple of people click on it. Or I have Elvis Rand say, wow, have you tasted these Tates cookies? You know, it came from this shop out in the Hamptons. And Danielle's going, I've been eating them too. My kids love them. Yeah, I promise you that I always think about as marketing is the name of my podcast is math and magic. I need to know the analytics about it. And by the way, all the digital people are spectacular at that and do it better than anyone, Facebook and Google and Amazon deserve enormous credit. But when you get to the magic level, there are very few people that do magic better than radio, getting people excited about something. They outhare radio music festival. The new iHio app. How do we get to be the number one podcaster? How did iHeHeart?”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is always changing. There are way too many variables for us to ever be predictive. And so when I look at the media business, here's what I know can get them in trouble. You got to look to the future. When I came to this company, it was a radio company, an outdoor company. It's not that today. But people were selling spots and they looked at how Facebook and Google were selling and go, huh, that's interesting. And my point was, you know what? That's where it's going. We've got this big enabled audience. What holds us back? Not that we got a big enabled audience. Who wouldn't want that, but that we're selling people spots instead of selling them these enabled relationships defined by the data we have and letting them see what kind of results we're getting through attribution. So we need the data and analytics that everybody else said. We're going to have to catch up. So I think you've got to keep your mind open that things change and not only in terms of what you are, but how you're going to sell it.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I good luck with that, pal. Like, I was there when Steve Jobs went back to Apple and had conversations with him when he was describing to me what his vision of Apple was. And the big revelation would sound silly today is he said, instead of the modem being an application on the computer, I think the computer is a part of the internet. And it's a way to use the internet. And I'm going to do the iMac and build the modem into it. That was the innovation. Or Jeff Bezos, building a book retailer. That was just the beginning. Either one of those geniuses had stopped at their original idea, so I did it. We'd never have this success as we had today. So I think plans are silly in a sense. I think you have to build them, but I think it's better of just saying, look, this is the best guess I've got it right now. But if you wait until tomorrow, I'll have a better guess. And if you wait till next week, I'll have a better one. But I think the best managers, the best creative people really look at.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Great. And by the way, we have algorithms which help find them and other things as well. But I think the process is probably the same. When you get to certainty, I think everything's uncertain. I actually think plans are sort of funny because I think we invent plans to reduce our anxiety about the future. But I've run for, I can't remember the first company I used it. I do a weekly operating committee and we usually meet every Monday. And the purpose to adjust the plan because I find even a week sometime is too long before we adjust the plan. If we wind up hitting our numbers for the quarter, we probably did it in a way we didn't intend to at the beginning of the quarter. If you're really going to run a business, you've got to run the business, which means understand that because you planned it doesn't mean it's going to come true. I love these strategy groups that say, and here's your plan of how we're going to do it.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think of the example you just used matters because you can still be user generated content YouTube and still be a part of the major monetization machines. When you think about uncertainty, I don't think there's any greater level of uncertainty than there ever has been. I think there's always been the ability of a talent on TV who is working in Des Moines, Iowa to suddenly be the nighttime anchor Tom Broca's a good friend. You should listen to his story. Actually, I think I covered on one of my podcasts, the math and magic. He's an Omaha. He gets a call from Atlanta the big time to come. And then when he's Atlanta, he gets called from NBC, the network to come. You could be discovered anywhere. And I think the people doing user-generated content, what they're really looking for is they don't want to have 10 listeners or 10 viewers. They want to be the next big star. And so they have a shot to do that. And I think that's good.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Consumers and products. And I think sometimes when we just let the engineer decide what you're going to do, it's not what can we do. You also need that hyphen and what should we do. I'm a great believer. Look, I may be old-fashioned, but I do believe having been in this business for 50 years, that I've got long enough road to see that actually you can abuse people forever, that they eventually you're found out or what you've done is you've created an opening for a competitor to slip in and say, you know what, they didn't treat you well. I will. In that point, they're not even more convenient. More trustworthy”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No to somebody who's got money in their pocket. I say that just to illustrate the point that I think it's very important when you monetize that you are really respectful of that relationship with the consumer. They've given you their trust. If you blow it by selling it off in some irresponsible way, it may not affect you today. It may not affect you next year. It will affect you eventually. I'm old enough to be one of those people that I've seen jerks and business and I say, you know, good people are the ones who win. And they say, what about so-and-so? Look how well they're doing. And back then, I didn't have an answer for it. Today, I do, which is their career's not over. And I've seen almost no examples of a lifelong jerk who really has a lifelong career that at a certain point it all comes back to them and it all is relevant and they have to pay for not treating people with respect. I think that's so true with”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Called me and said, Bob, I know we don't have an extra penny, but boy does the country need this right now. And so we launched it. But when we launched it, we decided instead of launching it with ad sales impressions, et cetera, that if we wanted a really trusted news source, we couldn't have it be about advertising because then it would be about ratings. And if it was about ratings, it would be about what gets a better rating, getting someone's blood pressure up, telling them a half-truth, gets them all excited. So we went with the idea we're going to go and do no more than 10 bounding partners, companies that believe in this mission that are willing to support it. And we got companies like McDonald's, Bank of America, Lowe's, CVS, GEICO, et cetera. But there were some other companies that actually wanted to invest. And we go, you know, they're not right for it. They don't want to come with the purity of the mission of really supporting this. And so we said no to them. And that was when you're starting a business, can you imagine saying?”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A lot of scale engaged relationships with the consumer. And then we monetize it. We rent that relationship to unaffiliated third parties. And that's what we call advertising. We're renting a relationship is the business we're in. So I'm not selling impressions. I'm not selling spots. I'm not selling renting my relationship. And I have to treat it like I'm renting a relationship. So if I'm renting my relationship to you, I can't let you abuse it. So I have to be careful about what I do in that sales process, what I allow an advertiser to do. Is it the right advertiser? We just launched the black information network, which is the only 24-hour day news source for the black community. We did it back in the height of COVID right after George Floyd. We'd had it in development and we'd had it stuck on a shelf because we need to save money. And the executive Tony Coles, who was charged with developing it.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing that protects you. So I think you start with you build a strong bond with the consumer. And I describe our business model, and I've described this business model for every media business I've ever been in, is our job is we build”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money to put another business in there. But we picked Google because I thought it was the best service. And I think you never go wrong by picking the highest quality, the best of whatever you've got there. Treat the consumer with respect. And if you do that, modernization is a lot easier because you have a really committed consumer and you have a tight bond. And I think people will always pay more money for an engaged consumer rather than just there. If you trick somebody into going to a site because your horoscope says you're going to die today, click here and you click there and you find it's something for buying a car. That's not a very engaged consumer. And yet today we see an awful lot of that cynical view of monetization. I was tricking them into coming over here and I'll get some money out of them. I think those aren't long-term models. I think those are short-term models. You don't have a moat around your castle.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, you got to know what you're doing. What are you trying to do? If you're just trying to sell advertising, good luck, that's not a business. What's your mission? In the case of iHeart, our mission is to give everybody in America a friend, anytime, anywhere. It's all about companionship. And if we do that well, we'll figure out how to make money. And I've always thought in every business I've been in is if we can figure out how to be important to the consumer, we'll figure out how to make money. But if you start from, I got this great scheme to make money, that's what you got. You got a scheme. You don't have a business. You're providing nothing of value. When I was at AOL, the last deal I did was to give Google the search traffic on AOL, which probably in a couple of places we're given credit for sort of being that catalyst that makes Google Google. But they didn't offer us the most money. Although, by the way, we had 10% of Google, too bad. I think it was 10% too bad somebody at Time Warner sold it too early. And we got a lot of money, but it wasn't the biggest check. Somebody else is offering us more.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we got to this point, it was almost like the dark side of the force. Everybody thought we were genius just because we said something. And ultimately, it was probably, I always think back on probably the reason I decided I wanted to leave is I just felt like that's corrupting me, that I no longer have to be smart, good, and do stuff. I just say it and people believe it doesn't sound right.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't stop on either one of them. You keep going. But that was sort of the key moment of we had arrived. So there were all those moments at that time that were just dropping one after the other. And of course, at that moment, I didn't realize because I was young. It didn't resonate in them and everybody. We were sort of the it company. We were cool and hip at a certain point. We were the Facebook and Google and name any other cool company sort of rolled into one. And so, you know, if we wanted to talk to the president of the United States, we could. We met the president. We met people. They all wanted to know us. People wanted me to be on their board. It was like amazing. I was so charming. So we were off and running. The downside was. When we were a scrappy young company, we had to be really smart.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting is we discovered people found new creative ways to look great if they couldn't throw money at it. So side issue, another point. So we were going through all this and by the end of the year, we actually made money. So the day I knew we were going to make money, I didn't call Drew Lewis. I called Steve Ross and says, Steve, I want to come see you. And I went over to Steve and I said, Steve, I have great news for you. Said, we've crossed it. We're going to make money. We're now money-making venture. By the way, no one had ever made money on a basic cable network. It was thought that that model of advertising supported wouldn't work. And Steve, and this was a great lesson too, but also a moment of knock me down a notch on arrival. I'm thinking he's going to say, Bob, you're a damn genius. You're great. You're so wonderful. Instead, he says, great. Now here's what we can do. And I realized at that moment, one of the great lessons is that there is no such thing as success or failure. They're just stepping steps.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Rolling Stones, and someone is with him says, Drew, do you know the Rolling Stones? He goes, No. Said, do you know Mick Jagger? That's not ever heard. I go, wham, in trouble. He takes me to lunch and he says, look, I don't know what you're doing. So Steve Rosser loves you and all that. But either you can make money by the end of the year or I got to shut this thing down. Can't afford to feed it anymore. So meanwhile, remember I just taken over as the COO and I'm running stuff and now I'm getting this word that he's going to shut it down. Well, I think to myself, I can't tell the people that we're close to being shut down because they'll all get bummed out and they're on a high and they're really excited about building this thing. So I got to keep this to myself and the CFO. We started out just cutting costs. Suddenly instead of spending $30,000 for a concert, I say you shoot it for $10,000. They go, you can't shoot a concert for $10,000. I go, well, give me the budget. I'll show you. We'll cut that, cut that, cut that. I won't look good. And of course,”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As chief operating officer of the company, and they came and said, Look, can you run the business? I only run programming. I was a creative guy. By the way, I hated salespeople, those nasty salespeople. I was just like, I'm a purist. I just want the product. And I don't know what I was, 28 or 29-year-old person would say, of course I can. Not in VM, not a college graduate. And so I took over the business. So I sort of knew something had happened when somebody wanted to push me out because they were envious of the attention I had. I realized it was something significant that the company was willing to let me run the whole business. And then the quest was, when do we make money? I don't know if you remember a guy named Drew Lewis. He was the transportation secretary who fired all the air traffic controllers under Ronald Reagan, a really tough guy. They hire him to be the head of the Warner Amics Joint Venture, which is both the cable company and WarnerMX satellite entertainment corporation. The first meeting with him, I said some...”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think with budget, we're going to do 10 million in sales first year, we did half a million dollars. It was a disaster. And by the way, had Steve Ross not been our great protector, and Steve wound up in my life sort of being my great mentor, almost a father figure to me. So Steve was protecting us, but I had this weird experience. I still was running the movie channel as well as MTV. And my boss came to me and said, you should just run the movie channel. I'm going to get somebody else to run MTV. I built it. That's my baby. I started the whole thing. And it was, you don't know people clearly, I think, is killing him that I got all this press attention and all this and none. And I just said you can do what you want to do, but if you do that, I'm quitting and sort of left it at that. And one day his boss CEO of the company came in and said, Bob, did you just say you'd be okay with that? I said, no, no. I said, I would quit. He said, I sort of thought that's what you'd say. And about a month later, he left, and about a month later, I took over.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some that are good and bad. You want me to cover them The first one was we had to prove that we could sell records. So I sent Tom Freston and John Sykes out on the road because MTV was not in the big cities. We weren't on in Manhattan. We were on in some suburb of New Jersey. We were on Tulse, Oklahoma, Oklahoma City, and Tucson. And Tom and John hit the road. No internet back then. Phones didn't work real well. Looking for some evidence. And they called me one night in the middle of the night. I still remember as in my apartment in New York, and they said, we got it. We're at a record store today and we walk down and the guy said, I'm selling tubes. And nobody's playing it on the radio. Suddenly sold like a box of them. What happened? Everybody's coming in for all these weird songs. So we were able to take that market to the music business and say, look, we're selling records. You should love us. So that was step one. Step two is sort of a weird one. MTV suddenly got all this press attention, but it wasn't making any money. As a matter of fact, the sales group had missed their goals.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hitting it just right. I think the secret is you got to be able to tell a good story and what's a good story. A good story is really about I got to have a headline who grabs you. I got to keep it simple. I got to make it understand, catch people sometimes say, look, don't tell people at the sausage making. No one cares. No one care what it is. They want the excitement of it. What made that story exciting? Why are you talking to me about it? What's important to me? And I think, again, we go back to, we were talking earlier about just management, that people oftentimes get stuck in making the job easier for themselves, not for their customer. I think sometimes when you're telling a story, you spend too much time talking about yourself rather than what's relevant to it for them. And if you can do that, that makes your story a whole lot better. But I think it is almost 100% storytelling. And you want to be a good host, know how to tell a good story.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way I was not a great talent, hence I became programming and management and then running businesses. But I understand it and understand what it takes. And we do put those people first and really treat them with, I think, the respect they certainly do.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People grow and we coach them and we help people, we put those shows together, we help promote them, and we get the flywheel effect of our size and scale, help still build up talent, and the talent helps build the size and scale. And I think we treat them with great respect. And my view is it's a talent first company. You know, we started conversation talking about the consumers, and you got to listen to the consumer. I think when you start going after the consumer, if this is a host-driven medium, then who do I worship in this company? Host, and I can't be so cynical to say we're going to buy them off. I'll just give them money, they'll be happy. I started life on air. And for me, it's always helped me in create adventures because”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morning personnel, so we didn't have the Elvis Durans or the Ryan Seacrest in the country, and we needed one. And so some of our guys, I didn't know Bobby, I wasn't involved in this, looked at Bobby and said, you know, Bobby could be that. And we moved Bobby to Nashville, put Bobby on a bunch of our country stations. And now, of course, Bobby's all over TV and Big Star, one dancing with the stars and is untouchable in terms of that morning personality on the radio on Country Radio now. But somebody spotted Bobby has that. And I think that that's what we look for. And given our scale, we can afford to get anyone we need. We re-signed Charlemagne to God, made the news. It was all over the news. And Charlemagne had everyone was after Charlemagne the God because he is in the hip-hop world, the Howard Stern, the Ryan Seacrest, or whatever, and more, and he wanted to stay with us. And I think one of the reasons is that we help.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we look around, there's usually, if you look at a crowd of people, there are a couple of people that are really the friends everyone wants. And they sort of gravitate toward those people. And I don't care. Give me a group of 20 people and you can still spot those numbers. And they're just some people who are just interesting. And there are some people who are really boring. People say, what'd you do today? Well, I woke up this morning and I was getting out of bed and I looked and I thought, wow, did I leave a piece of paper on the floor there? And I saw you go, oh my God, you're killing me, please. That's enough. Sorry I ask. And then there are other people you ask that question too. And that's like they rattle off some great story and you're mesmerized by it. So I can't tell you how to get that part of it, but I can tell you from my standpoint is we look for those people all the time. And when we get them, we promote them. We had a guy who was in pop radio, top 40 radio, CHR in Austin named Bobby Bones. We realized in country we had no great.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about things that don't make you look good but are just honest. And one of the constructs we use in coaching talent is we say, imagine you're riding in the car to work with someone every day and you're sitting in that empty seat. What would you be talking about and what would you be sharing? Imagine you're sitting on the counter talking to someone while they're shaving. Imagine you're sitting in the chair in their bedroom talking to them while they're getting ready or sitting on the counter in the kitchen talking to them as they're cooking or in the office when they're doing some mundane work. You're sitting beside them chatting with them. What would you talk about? Would you talk about problems you have in your marriage? Would you talk about problems you have with your kids? Would you talk about something stupid you did today that was sort of embarrassing? But only the two of you know you're not telling everybody. That's what you have to be willing to do. And so few people can do that. Or by the way, so few people have interesting stories. The truth is that”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a really good question and really good perspective, of course. If I told you everything, then you'd know everything I know, so I can't tell you everything. Actually, I'm kidding. You have to be willing to be honest. Ryan Seacrist, who does this extraordinarily well, says, you know, sometimes he's out with some movie stars or what he calls TV stars. And fans will see them and they rush up to them and they'y ryan their phone and say, would you take a picture of me with them? that they think of Ryan as their friend and they think of those other people as stars. And Ryan says, you know, if that ever changes, I'm dead. Ryan's, in addition to everything he does on TV, probably his base and his foundation is his radio show. Morning shows on Kiss FM in Los Angeles and then middays all around the country and American top 40 and a lot of other things he does on the radio. And I think what's really important to be a person is you have to be willing to talk.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are bonding to that host. It is a tight adjacent business to radio in the sense of that host driven that they bond with that host, they feel the affinity for the host, and you've either got a host that works or a host that doesn't work. And MTV was the same way. And everybody there got the benefit of everything we did on MTV was attributed to that person.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think about the difference at that point analogy I used. I don't even know if people know what a jukebox is today, but it's the difference between jukebox and radio. They had favorite radio stations. They felt personally involved with human-like emotions. Jukebox was a thing. And if you don't put people on, it's a thing. And indeed, in the early days of MTV, we would do research, because I had to prove the point because I had stuck my neck out, said we have to have these people because you have something to bond to, is people say, I love MTV. Why do you love MTV? I love that Martha Quinn. Why do you love Martha Quinn? I love the music. I'd love the videos she's playing. She didn't pick those videos. Love that contest she did. She didn't have nothing to do with the contest. Love that music news that was collected somewhere else. But they attributed everything to the human being they were bonded with. And, you know, today I'd liken it to podcasting, which is like radio host driven. And a lot of people come to it have come out of TV and they think it's story and production value driven and it's not.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Funny, people think because all they seem to know is TV and God spend as much time in TV as I spend radio, so I appreciate it and love it. But this ain't TV without pictures. Radio is not that. It never has been. It is really about companionship. We're keeping people company. And actually MTV was very radio-like in the beginning in the sense that we were keeping people company. You got nothing to do. Turn on MTV. We'll keep you company. We brought that radio experience to TV, which is why people said, I want to tune in MTV, not I want to tune in and see a particular show. They didn't even know what show was on. They didn't even know who was on. They knew I can tune in and there they are. And it went in the beginning. Some of the people looking at my budgets, we didn't have much money to spend. And they'd say, Bob, why are you proposing to spend the money on these people when it's just the music videos they want? Indeed, my boss was one of those that saw everything as TV and they go, you know, because no one bonds with a thing.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As a performer, Michael Jackson may never have been as big as Michael Jackson was. Very talented, but in an album before bad that wasn't quite as big as Thriller. So those pieces fell in place like that.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Initially, we actually gave awards to the directors, and we would go out and meet the directors and producers of videos and be good friends with them. And then, of course, I think the thing that really put it on its path is we began to have some video artists. And the two that come to mind are Madonna and Michael Jackson. They looked at this new form and go, aha. I need to be something no one's ever seen before. I need to be a performer, a visual performer, visual art in addition to my music. And I think they set a new standard, and now everybody could see what they were doing. God, now I know what you're talking about. And then you begin the following, but it took it to the next level when artists like that popped on the scene, which probably may not have happened like that had it not been for an MTV. Had you not seen Michael Jackson's dancing and those moves and seen him.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moment. And obviously it worked. The record company has been saying, hey, this is a great promotional thing. We were sort of the YouTube or Spotify of that today to get music going. Of course, radio still had the reach and still had to bring it home in terms of big sales, but radio played so few songs that MTV could tee up, okay, this is the next one you should play if it was big on MTV. Just like today we'll look and say, okay, if that's big on Spotify playlist or if that's big on YouTube, yeah, that's probably one we'll come close to adding, although we've got a lot of sophisticated AI today to help us we didn't have back then. And then the second phase of it was we needed to get artists to do, as you point out, better videos. And so the ones that were good, we tried to give a lot of attention to. And that was one of the reasons behind the video musical award show. Let's start encouraging people. Let's start rewarding it. Let's start highlighting it. And that was a way we pushed it forward.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Began coming along, but simple answer was nobody was producing videos. Springsteen hadn't done a video. Most black artists hadn't done a video. And so as this began to develop, we actually were working a lot of artists trying to get them first, do a video, forget, do a better video, just do a video. When we launched, we only had 250 videos. And that's not enough for a channel. But the calculated risk we took was that if we succeeded, they would make more videos. And if we didn't succeed, who the hell cared? So that was the risk we made. We launched an August one of 81 really about six months too early. We just cobbled together to get it on the air because the record companies were going through bad financial times and we thought they were going to axe the music video budgets to save money. So we had to launch in August so we could get enough evidence before the budgets at the end of the year so they keep it in for the next year. I mean that's how tenuous it was at that moment.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“MTV, you didn't know what artists looked like. They weren't really celebrities. You might know what Mick Jagger looked like and the Beatles, but beyond that, you never really got a good look at them because there was no internet. They didn't cover it on TV. They didn't do those celebrity news shows, CBS, Walter Cronkite wasn't going to cover music stars. If you looked at the album, they generally had some faded pictures, some art. If you went to a concert, they didn't have big screens anymore unless you were on the front row seat. You didn't know who was playing down there. So one of the first things we did is we made the artist a celebrity. And from the beginning, artists would say, my God, people are stopping me on the street and saying, I saw you on MTV. So nobody's ever stopped me and said, I don't know who you are. So the first thing was we made them celebrities. And that changed music and changed the music scene and therefore changed videos to a certain extent. And then American artists looked at MTV and go, wait a minute, I need to be on there.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They all arrived at one place for different reasons. When MTV launched, they talk about the second British invasion as if the Beatles were coming back in the Rolling Stones out. Well, the reason it's the second British invasion, because nobody in America made videos, and all the English groups did because in Europe you broke music through being on these TV shows. In America, you broke yourself by being your song played on the radio. So these people didn't want to travel. So they would produce a video of them and send it to the shows. So the videos were pretty much look like what you would do if you were getting a TV show and doing a performance for the most part. In other words, some, the buggles I loved, and I saw them actually producing the video before we launched MTV called Video Killed the Radio Star very clever. And there were some of the creativity beginning to happen with people pushing the form. So initially, that's what it was. And by the way, if you think about it, remember, before...”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem is probably we don't have enough money for that. And if we do that, we can look cheap. So he said, why don't we do something that no one's ever seen before? And then it'll just look like it'll look different, but not cheap. So that's what we did. And that was sort of the motivation for it. And again, it worked on many levels.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's the guy who did our music programming. He was the wonk in the group, and he was very dry, and he said, we're meeting. He said, don't you think MTV sounds better than TVM? And you know, right on the spot, we go, you know what? You're right, it does. Yes, it's going to be MTV. So that's the way it became MTV. And a guy named Fred Cyber and I, and I did a podcast with Fred on my podcast, Math and Magic, about all of this. Fred was just the on-air genius of sort of how we're going to do the creatively, the look and the feel. And Fred had never been in TV. I recruited Fred from a radio station, WHN Radio A Country Radio Station in New York, and he had produced some jazz records, but he had just this great thought process. And he and I went through this whole thing. Now, Fred's a lot smarter about this than I am. So we'd have these discussions. And I'm thinking like Star Wars is very hot at time. We'll have our Star Wars logo with a big Chrome logo coming from outer space. And Fred said, you know,”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mood and emotion, not about a linear plot line and not about shows. So that was the general thesis of it, and we were going to make MTV the hero, not any show or not any video clip, that the video clips were only going to be program fragments, but the program was a never-ending program called MTV. And as opposed to saying people, I'm going to watch Saturday Night Live, I'm going to tune in MTV to see what's going on. And that was our mission and we put together a group of people who shared that mission. And we all found ways to do it. And even when you looked at the on-air look of MTV, we wanted the minute you looked at it, so that's not like any TV I've seen. The original name I wanted was TV1. And I was going to put us versus everything else on TV in sharp contrast. And we couldn't clear it. So then we could clear TVM. So we're going to be TVM. And we had the guy who was the driest, most.”
2020-12-17 · Invest Like the Best · Bob Pittman - Lessons from Building Media Empires – [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.12] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source