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

“On the early MTV and had gotten some experience with it. And there were other people playing around with video clips because they were out there trying to figure out what to do. But I think everybody was trying mechanistically to figure out what to do with a video clip. So we came up with this idea, said, look, we're going to do a video radio station. And we did that to sort of understand the form of it because radio stations were all about the image of the radio station, like Kiss FM Z100. They all had an attitude. TV networks didn't. I like the Cosby show back then, but I didn't know what network it was on. I didn't care. Networks were just sort of this delivery system for programs I had Affinity for. And the reason we surmised, we also said, look, music, we got a generation that grew up with rock and roll music and they grew up with television, but the two have never come together successfully. And the thesis I have was that they hadn't come together because everybody kept trying to make music fit the TV form. And we were going to make TV fit the music form. It was going to be about”
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
“Movie service, which was a big hit initially until HBO realized that it was a big hit. We were eating into them and they started a fighting brand. By the way, never having gone to business school, I didn't know what the hell a fighting brand was called Cinemax. And they dropped Cinemax on us and slowed our growth. And by the way, we eventually merged that service with Showtime so that they had two services like HBO and Max. There was a Showtime in the movie channel. But after the success of the movie channel, they said, okay, we're ready to do our next network because our job was to build networks. And I had done a TV show on NBC in the 70s called Album Tracks, which ran after Saturday Night Live because I had a great mentor there, the president of MBC Herb Schlosser, spotted me young, said, kid, you're going to TV here. I need you to do a TV show, get some TV experience. And so he let me do what I wanted to do. And I put together a show that played just enough of video clips so I didn't have to pay rights on it. I could use it as editorial, the music news and like the music news segment.”
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
“Basically, by delivering distance signals. So it's just a big antenna for rural communities. But they started building the big markets like New York and they realized nobody really is interested in seeing the TV station from Syracuse. Thank you very much. They're going to have to have some programming. Well, HBO was there. Ted Turner had the super station out of Atlanta. Showtime, a couple of others. And so there was this vision Warner sold half of their cable company to American Express. They formed a company called Warner Amex. And they decided to do a programming company called Warner Amax Satellite Entertainment Corporation. And they brought me in to be the programming person because they thought that coming out of radio, I knew specialized formats. I understood narrow casting because radio was all about that. I mean, if I'm one audience that's very cohesive today, is it hip-hop? Is it CHR, which is sort of pop, is it country, that we understood how to do that? So they brought me in to do it. And the first network I actually did was called the movie channel, which was the first 24-hour day.”
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, I have been in radio and I've been this sort of weirdly. I had this really great career in radio at a young age. I started as a disc jockey at age 15 and I left Mississippi at 18 to go to more radio stations. And when I was 19, I talked to somebody into letting me program a station in Pittsburgh. They hired me as the midday personality and then they let me program it and I had a big success. And so NBC hired me when I was 20 to go program their station in Chicago. Now why you'd hire 20-year-old kid to go program the station back in those days, companies could only own seven markets and 1 AM, one FM in every market. So it was a big deal to go to NBC there. And then by age 23, and I did the AM, FM there, had a big success. And they sent me to New York at age 23 to program WNBC. So I was Mr. SmartyPants. I mean, I thought I knew everything and I was recruited to come to this new company called WarnerMX Satellite Entertainment Corporation, cable industry have built itself”
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
“Almost always wins. I mean, if you think about restaurants you go to, if someone gives you fantastic service, you keep going back to that restaurant even if the food's not the best. If you go to a clothing store and that person's just all over you and just takes care of everything, hey, I'll bring it down to your house. Come on, your loyalty goes to that, not the best quality. I've never seen it any other way, except again, as I say, say there's an aficionado product that you can do, but it's going to be small. Those are niche products.”
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 know, I don't know if there are any second level. It's just, I think it's that prism that I try and put on almost everything, that the consumer is brand loyal, but only to a point. And if you want to break your brand loyalty, be careful if your competitor has found out how to make theirs a whole lot easier. Because before you know it, that thing you take for granted is gone because you didn't respect the consumer and didn't put them first. It sounds so trite because everyone says, we put the consumers first, but I actually think if you analyze most people's actions, they don't. And I do see it in a lot of the, before I came to iHeart, I did about eight or nine years of mainly investing. I thought I was retired. And the fly I saw in most people's work is that they really were not serving the consumer. They just had an argument that they were serving the consumer or rationalization they were serving the consumer. And I just think that's...”
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
“Yeah, yeah, I guess we got to work all weekend that if you sign up to really super serve the consumer and make life easy for them, you have to be prepared to not have platitude, but put it there. And that means sometimes you're making operationally much more difficult. Even in our place, we'll say, gee, you know, we can get around, we can write a piece of software that'll do that, but it's going to take us six months. And right now it'd be a whole lot of people. And I go, well, I guess it's going to have to be a whole lot of people because if you're again signing up for it, you truly do have to sign up for 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
“Look, I think you have to treat the consumer with great respect so you can intentionally give them an inferior product or try and sell it as something more than it is. But I think that in the hierarchy of things, you have to realize that convenience is king. And you've got to make it easy. And I can't tell you how many people I've seen build products that either they put some hurdles in there because it makes their job easier to build the product or they service it poorly. So if I've got a problem, now here come the hurdles. And every business I've been in that's business that's been in existence, I can close my eyes when I walk in there and say, your number one problem is you built your company around operational ease, that every company, and by the way, a group of humans put together, if you leave them for 10 minutes, they're going to start making their job easy, not the ease for their consumer. And often we say, boy, that's a lot of work. We got to work all weekend. I go.”
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
“At time after time, it's that, and I think even with iHeart, when I got here, we had, we still reached even back then, 91% of Americans with our broadcast radio stations. But you had to listen to AM or FM. So we went on a quest, okay, our strategy is to be where our listeners are with the products and services they expect for us. Convenience. And we're now in 250 devices. Now, it's 85% AMFM, but it's now 15% other devices. And again, people want to get what they want where they want it. They don't want to have to move to where you want to give it to them. But you see it in all these startups too. Any product that's going after”
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
“CNN, ESPN, those cable networks, they were specialized networks. We called them narrow casting. They were really a precursor to on-demand because what we knew was the consumer didn't want to watch the news when the networks, ABC, NBC, CBS decided to schedule it. They didn't want to watch cartoons only on Saturday morning. They didn't want to see music on Friday night. They wanted to pick and choose when they wanted to watch it. So the thesis there was we'll have these 24 hour a day networks and you can pick and choose when you want to get your news, when you want to get your music, when you want to get your kids programming, when you want to get whatever. And you put together your own array of programming. Now, they were still linear. The show was in progress when you got on, but it was a step forward in convenience probably by the late 80s. The majority of people, majority of viewing was on a cable network, not on the broadcast networks anymore.”
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
“Every time they make a transaction. It's a little small group of people, maybe about 10% of the people are sort of fishingados in any segment that don't behave that way. But the vast majority of people behave that way. When I was at Six Flags, our thesis was we were not a destination theme park. We were regional theme parks within a day's drive of about 80% of America. So our pitch was instead of spending all that time going to Disney. Why don't you come on out for the day to six flights? Save you time at AOL it was easy, so easy to use no wonder it's number one. When I got to AOL, people said, oh, AOL, don't take it seriously. It's like the internet with training wheels. And I began to do a little research and said, I will bet it's all about convenience. And it turns out it was. And we described, people said, what is AOL? I said it's convenience in a box. We're taking stuff you already do. You already like to do, and we're making it easier by using the internet. And that was the thesis. If you go back to the cable networks, MTVs,”
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
“My philosophy for the consumer is that the consumer humans are in an eternal quest for convenience. Save me time, make my life easier. And if you can build a product that demonstrably saves them time, gives them more convenience, they'll take your product and they'll take it over quality. I mean, look at the microwave oven. It doesn't cook nearly as well as the conventional oven. It's a big hit. Look how few people now have a wired phone line. My mobile phone isn't nearly as good. I traded quality for convenience and people 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
“I think when I was a young guy, I described myself as a sociologist. And I think back, I think it's probably a pretty good description, that I'm only in businesses that are dependent upon the consumer. I really don't understand B2B, but I do understand the consumer and whether I'm trying to sell that consumer a house or trying to get them to buy an online service called AOL or getting them to tune into a new thing called MTV. The consumer behavior is exactly the same. It just expresses itself in different venues. So I've found that moving from industry to industry, but taking that knowledge of the consumer, not a bunch of formulas for an industry have served me well, especially in emerging industries where there are no rules and therefore it forces you or maybe allows you to go back to what you should do, which is look at the consumer and build your business from the consumer up as opposed to trying to cram something on the consumer.”
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