You're listening to Math and Magic, a production at my Heart Radio. When we first got to MTV, 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 gonna do jingles? Went oh, no, we can't do jingles? And I said, well what do we do? He said, how about this? Imagine It's like a picture of a cow, you know, a drawn cow. I said, yeah, he said, and all of a sudden, an X 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. I am Bob Pittman. And this is Math and Magic Stories from the Frontiers and Marketing, where we or the insights side of marketing the creative side, and how they come together to create the truly remarkable ideas and successes. Today, on this episode, we have someone who is a true iconoclast. Somebody would call him a Frankie creative genius, Fred Cyber. Welcome Fred, Fred and I were part of the birth of MTV. Were at the first twenty four hour day movie pace service the movie channel before that, playing around with the concept of making a channel the thing instead of just letting the shows set the image of the network. Bred and I also shared roots and radio as our start. Fred gets most of the credit for the original groundbreaking look unfield of MTV. He also helped Jerry Laborn when she created the first tween a network, which is Nickelodeon. I can still remember when he pitched the brand image for Nickelodeon and it was like orange, that's it Orange, And of course, all these years later it was as impactful as the look of MTV. Bred went on to do so much more in branding, network creative and a major career and a major influence and animation from his time as the head of Hanna Barbera to his own Frederator. He also discovered and developed some great talent one of his superpowers. We're here to get into all that and more, but first, Fred, we're gonna do you in sixty seconds. Just give us quick reactions, just to warm us up. So, Fred, do you prefer cats or dogs? Dogs, hoodies or button downs? Button downs? Power puff Girls or Johnny Bravo. Oh, definitely power puff Girls. Mets are Yankees, Martha Quinn or Nina Blackwood, Martha cup Or Cone Cone Disney or Hannah Barbara Barbara. For sure, it's about to get harder. What's your favorite city? New York City? Favorite cartoon? Bugs Bunny. What would you eat for your last meal? Probably the same thing I eat for my first meal, some yogurt and some chicken. And you've always eaten met since I've known you. Smartest you know? Bob Pittman, Oh, right, childhood? He wrote, that's tough too. I don't know my parents. I guess first job working in my parents pharmacy. Favorite book, Dashell Hammett anything that he wrote. Quote to Live by something by Winston Churchill about success is after a lot of failures? Worth bad or fashion trend you've participated in? Probably my khakis and white button down shirts. You've never changed. God bless you. Who would play you in a movie? Everyone says that I look like the late Harold Remus. What would be the title of your memoir? He tried really hard, proud professional achievement. There's nothing I've ever done that I didn't have a great time doing it. So how about this creating the catalog for a jazz label called Mosaic Records. God bless you. What's your favorite ice cream flavor? A mixture of vanilla and chocolate yogurt flavor? Plain? Best live concert b B King at the Fillmore East done? Excellent? Was that was a good set of questions. But before we go back to your beginnings, let's talk about people, because I do think this is one of your superpowers. Let's talk about people who you hired, mentored, or help develop. Seth McFarlane from Family Guy, famed Judy McGrath who went on to be CEO of MTV Networks, who, by the way, has been here. She said. The interview went is what music do you like? She said somebody? You said wrong And the rest of the time you talked and she got the jobs she said Bruce Springsteen and I said wrong. And Foley who helped build Showtime Programming and they headed that. Well, you developed her? Why we all did? But all did? But you know, you've had a really great track record. How do you spot talent? You know, it's a really mystical process. When you asked me to come and talk to you about working with you. I said, you know, I only watched TV. I don't make and you said, come talk to me anyway, and we had a quick cup of coffee like at the Four Seasons or something like that, and I didn't think another thing about it until you called and said you're hired, and it was like, I wonder why. And I think that almost everybody that I've met with it's that same kind of process. Basically, it's having a conversation with somebody and go, you know, I just want to spend more time with them. And it really comes down to did they say something or did we have a dialogue that made me go, boy, I would really like to help this person. So how do you empower them to develop breakthrough not ordinary ideas. What I feel like I've done is one let people know that my major goal at work is to have fun, because I think you can make money from having fun. The second thing is to provide structure in a way that doesn't seem overly structured. You know, in my TV days, it was making sure that spots were thirty seconds and not a second longer or shorter. When you and some of our other colleges say it doesn't matter how long they are, Like, I don't know, discipline seems like a good idea. Or when we made cartoons to begin with, and I was in love with Looney Tunes, I said, well, it's making the same length as Looney Tunes. They said why, I said, because Looney Tunes are the greatest cartoons ever made. What I found over the years is that by giving people structure and almost nothing else other than sort of a philosophy of where you'd like them to go, if they don't want to be there, they leave, they quit. They don't vibe with you one way or the other. And if they do, they've sort of accepted the structures and the strictures, and as long as I don't over note them. In our business, it's all about the notes that you give and all that type of stuff. In the cartoon business, I just would say to people, well, what cartoon do you really want to make? If you have one you really want to make, will do it. And if you tell me you have fifty you want to make, I don't want to do it. It means you don't care about anything. So I'm just looking for people who care about something. When you were talking about Judy, and I asked her who she liked, and she said Bruce, And I said, wrong, because I don't have a good thing about Bruce. The fact she cared, you know, the Bruce haters are coming after you right now. I 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've got these people. How would you describe your coaching technique getting the best out of people? I asked them to tell me what they want to do. The way that I sort of think about it is there's a big circle of ball, and everything in it in that ball is what I love. And then they have their own circle in their own ball, and it's everything that they love. And I said, why don't we just like find the places where we touch, just where we kiss, and then we're both gonna be really, really happy. And the only thing I want is like for us all to be happy. Well we've been able to do for a living over our lifetime is kind of magical in that I think that what I've done my whole life is make people happy. The people that I work with want people to be in love with the work that they do because people are really passionate about their work. I never hired anybody who actually knew what they were doing, that had on it before. That was one of our hallmark. We had these creative promo departments. Once people came in and started saying, well, I worked on promos over here, like, I didn't want to hire them. If they were a wonderful writer, that was great. If they were wonderful director, that was great. One of the earliest people I hired had just come out of film school and his first job was cutting negatives film negatives at a porno place. I'm like, okay, fine, you know, like whatever, So let's jump back a little bit. I want to get some insights from your youth about you. Your parents were both pharmacists, owned the pharmacy and Long Island, you worked there, and you were going to Columbia to become a pharmacist. Yeah. Anything in that, what is it tell us about you? I have no idea other than that. I was very influenced by my parents. Everyone in my family are pretty much scientists. There's biochemists, there's neurosurgeons, there's other pharmacists, chemists, and I decided at six I was going to be a chemist, and you know, I would blow up the basement with you know, experiments and all that type of stuff. But when I was twelve, a lightning bolt struck that changed my life. It's like this, you know the Beatles movie that's just come out yesterday. It was like that, And in fact it was the Beatles. It was the day they went on Ed Sullivan, and my life changed. I went and bought a guitar, taught myself guitar. I was already a musician, I started bands, I did all the things that everybody did. But I was a chemist and I was a science math kid, and I went to college for that. And I'm in a zoology class one day where you know, we had been dissecting frogs great and the next week we're going to dissect rats. So I get there and all the rats are alive. And the first thing the zoology teacher said is now I'll show you how to kill the rat before you dissect it. And I looked at my lab partner and I said, you know, I like the Beatles more than this. And I walked out and I walked right to the college radio station. My path changed instantly. So your parents, who are the pharmacists. What do they say this, Oh, great, Fred, you're leaving this wonderful career to go be a radio something. We did not have a decent conversation for the next ten years. Actually, really yeah, they were very, very upset. When they became less upset is when I went to work in radio and I was forced to wear a suit to work, and they thought, oh, it'll all be okay. Well, actually, just make you feel better. My parents told me for the first ten years I was where I can get out of radio. That's a crazy business. Go back to college, man, each college should be a normal kid. And then about in my thirties sometimes they said, gosh, I sure, I'm glad you didn't listen to us exactly. Well, I finally said to my folks, I'm doing everything you taught me, all the ways you taught me to do it. I just took my own path in doing it. And they finally sort of calmed down. And even though pretty much for my entire career until I started making cartoons, they had no idea what I did for a living. After you're leaving this possible career as a pharmacist, you eventually wound up as the promotions director at a country music station w h N in New York. One of your great supporters, who I had worked with and who I love 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, at the beginning of the cable network space. Why did you make that jump? Well, you know this is gonna 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. Pretty much anything I did, he told me it wasn't any good. So you called me one day, you said you want to be in televisioned and 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 about your promotion at w NBC. We're w NBC and we're gonna make you rich. 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, what do you think about that? I said, well, here's what Dale talk me. 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's flattering. So any career lessons and that for the folks listening, go work for the person, not the job. I tell people that all the time working for smart people. Has always worked, working for Ted Turner, working for Scott Sasso, working for you. I would go in at ground level at a job and I always came out at the top floor, and then I go off on my own for a while, and then when I screwed that up, I go back, you know, to a job. We started experimenting with network branding with Movie Channel, although the Movie Channel has been lost in history, so it's really some pioneering work done there. How would you describe that. I mean, that was very early and we were about the only people that were doing that approach to let's make the network the star, not the program. The stuff in eighty when we started together May eighth. Wow, what a memory. Yeah, the average home in America had to annals of television. I lived in New York City, so we had seven, but you know, the average home had two. However, in the same town that had seven TV stations, they were about seventy seventy five radio stations. And over the years before radio had learned to compete because they only each had a sliver of the thing. And what that effectively came out to is they each had personalities. You and I had either the benefit or the curse of having come out of that business where we had to compete like crazy. At a television station, they just turn on one light switch and the other switch opens a hole in the ceiling and money drops on their head. Because it was just easy to make money in television. So we started from the premise that you had to have a personality. It turned out that in television that was called an innovation. And by the way, we were probably about thirty years too soon. Yeah, but indeed that was the demise of TV as we know it, when the loyalty was to the program, not the network. When you asked me to come back and work on Nickelodeon. There were only thirty cable networks, which we thought was amazing, and that Nickelodeon was number thirty and people are like, what do you mean only thirty? What you know? And and there I have to tell you what. At MTV time, I was so freaked out that there were thirty that the resulting work came out because I was like, oh my god, Oh my god, what are we gonna do to stand out? What are we gonna do to stand out? And a lot of it just came out of the panic of getting lost in the mush, So let's move on to starting MTV. The board would not approve the idea, but I did get us a budget to develop it in that period. Did you ever think we weren't going to get approval to launch MTV? How did you believe in it? 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 gonna happen. Was it youth totally? 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 what 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. Well, you know, we went to the head of Warner Communications and American Express that on the joint venture Warner m X where we got started, and we got a meeting with Steve Ross, who was the CEO of of Warner, along with his deputies David Horowitz, et cetera. And we got Jim Robinson and his deputy Louke Gershner from American Express. I don't know if you remember, but we were worried that when we showed these videos too, from American Express called so he said, let's find the tamest one. I think we found Olivia Newton John as THEDO to talk about the launch of of MTV we if you remember, but in the meeting, they said, do you have to play that kind of stuff, implying Olivian Newton John was too. But to their credit, Jim Robinson's the first one to say, Okay, I'm in from my half. Howbout Steve? So we locked out. Let's go to the launch of MTV and talk about some of the things that really, I think still stand out today. The logo. We had no money for a logo. I was probably the cheapest man in the world and had expectations you could create a lot out of nothing. Well we had, we really started, but not like venture capital guys. Well again, here's the metric I use. A guy comes to see me for a job in the promo department from CBS Channel two in New York, and I said, how much do you get paid? And he was getting paid twice as much as I was. That was the metric. We all earned intern wages. If somebody had a dollar and we were asked him to spend ten cents, we knew they'd be bad. We found people that had a penny and we gave him the dime. They thought they had all the money to people all the time. Absolutely, Just hold on a second, because we've got so much more to talk about. We'll be back after a quick break. Welcome back to Math and Magic. We're here with Fred Cyberg. So talk about the logo. You set out, you got the mission. You and I had these discussions. I've naively said, we'll do our own Star Wars logo because everybody has a Star Wars loging 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. 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 was one of the most famous graphic designers of the last fifty years. And I was like, oh, well he's gonna be really expensive and we'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 find a tie Chee studio above Bigelow Chemists on Sixth Avenue. And Frank had been the guy, because he's a year older than me who would 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, and I knew that Frank loved music. So I go down to his little tie chee studio place and I go, will you guys design a logo for this rock channel we're starting? And they're 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, and boy do I wish I had that memo. So for a year they designed logos and I just rejected everything, probably five hundred designs. So 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 up pile and I'm like, no, no, I'm going through the whole pile. And at the bottom of the pile is a he's 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. I can see Frank like growling kind of He and I now disagree. But what I had heard is that the woman. 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 him, 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, maybe it was 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 g M was the only thing they showed that when you put it on a TV screen, filled the whole scream. Okay, we dominate the space, and in a world of thirty channels, and in a day when the screen was square exactly right. So then I go, oh, you know, we need official colors. You know, a logo is supposed to be a thing that you make and it never changes. So they come to my office with about ten different boards. Everything was on boards in those days, and then a little board where Frank had illustrated ten or twelve of them on acrylic overlays. 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 finally we had to do something. And I looked at them. I'm just staring at all of them. They were all like, really kind of cool, and I said, why don't we just use them all at once? All the time. I don't know who I was talking to, and I was like what I said, Well, we're 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. The other thing you did when you did those promos, the great stuff, you laid the music bed down first and cut the music, and everybody else in that era people forget this. They don't realize that was an innovation that everybody else did the video first and then rolled to music undress. So I got that all from Dale. I was an audio guy, and I was a really good audio guy. I was a mixer and all that engineer. 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. And 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 three hour video studio will go much faster. By the time we got to MTV, I realized that he was absolutely right. I was hiring basically kids, you know, one just out of school, and we didn't have any money. Now fast forward twenty years. I go to MTV one day. I'm running their online business for a little while, and I go, who's the promo department now? And they tell me and I go down and I introduced myself to a couple of people in the one you what what you're the one? Well, what are you talking about? They said, they make us do the audio first, we're filmed. People like why. So twenty years later they were still doing it. But boy, what it did is it brought rhythm and energy. It brought the backbeat of rock and roll into those spots. Everything was beat. You know, I'm in radio. I love audio. People don't realize how much of your emotion is not driven by what you're looking at. That's what you're hearing. I used to joke all the time that we could make the spots black and they would have the same effect horror films. You go in the next room, listen to turn off the sound. It's not very scary. So let me. I'm not to spend all of our time on MTV, but I want to hit one other thing here. The cable operators wanted us to pay them. As you say, we had intern wages and no money. So our good friend Mao Stunts, who actually had a Harvard MBA, said we should use consumer pull. What the hell is consumer pull? And he goes will get the consumer to demand it. Great, So you and Tom Preston came over to my apartment one night to show me a Cable Brats spot. Embedded in the Cable Brats was this memorable line, 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 fifties called I want my Mapo for a really horrendous tasting. He had sports stars like Mickey Mantel and Joe Namath crying like I want my babo, and he redid it with Mick Jagger and you know whoever, David Bowie and Pete Towns and all that type of stuff, and they showed us this spot. So we went and we pitched it to you. I think you saw the feeling of it right away. I remember going into our boss's office and saying, but HBO spending ten million dollars a year in advertising goes you're lucky. You have to somehow or other. The people in the media business didn't actually believe in advertising as the weirdest thing. And so I went to Dale. I said, look, we only have two million dollars. 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 on this app. And he did an incredible data dump of where could MTV be put on against how much media cost in 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 that's exactly what happened. He literally took what Mayo said and put on the beginning of the spot. He had Pete Towns in doing it. America demand your MTV. Then people go, I want my MTV, I want my MTV, and then Pete Towns and again with a telephone going call your cable operator and say I want and God knows, I think we made customer representatives from all over America crazy. Within four weeks, I had a guy stopped me at a cable show cable operator and said, I hate you, and I go, why why do you hate me? And he goes, because my phone rings all day with those people saying I want my m t BA can't get any work done. Demand is bad. We reverse that demand end curve. And by the way, I just sort of flip it. A couple of years, one of the major cable operators decided they were going to take MTV off the air. And you called up and you said, we need new spots, and I went, what's that. You said, we have to get people to keep them from turning off MTV, And we went and filmed a lot of rock stars, half in shadow and all in black and white going there trying to take away your MTV. And we put those on the air, and lo and behold, they did not cancel our channels. God bless him. So let's jump to Jerry Labor. Let's jump to Nickelodeon. You mentioned Nickelodeon was number thirty. It was a toddler's channel, invented to help Time Warner Cable get some cable franchises. It's exactly the way that Netflix uses kids on their service now. It is a come on that no family can resist and for us had basically no value. We have this idea, we're gonna turn into a tween channels. Actually, Jerry said, this is great. An old school teacher, I got a great idea. We relaunched it to that point. Only MTV had an image as a network and your mission. You need to do with Nickelodeon what we did with MTV. How on earth did you end up with Orange? After the MTV logo thing, which was really the most visible manifestation of the creative work, designers came out of the woodwork wanting to work with us. We found somebody up in Boston, a guy called Tom Corey and his partner Scott Nash. We asked him to come up with some ideas for logo. So they came up with a bunch of things, and all of them were pretty standard logos, truth be told, I picked a really standard one. We were about to go in and pitch it when Alan said, you know, our thing is this moving logo, and they have one here. Why didn't we pick that? I said, well, it's orange. It's only one color. And so we called Tom and we go, how come like orange? Like you said? He goes, well, you know this is the color. It's uh pantone O to one and it is not found in nature. Anything we put it on it will stand out from that. So we go in to pitch it to Jerry and her team and she's like, but you're the MTV guys, how come we don't get lots of colors? And I think you said probably something similar and we just o and I think we just tap danced really hard and at that point you were willing to give us our heads. And the thing that was really brilliant about their solution is that it wasn't an orange logo. It was white type that was always exactly the same. One of the key elements of the logos. You have to have something that is fixed. But the orange thing ended up being thousands of different shapes around it, and sometimes they were real shapes, like a boy riding a bicycle or a girl's head, and sometimes it was just an abstract design, a blob, a splat color burst, you know, or something like that, and we realized that we could have fun using it. The thing about designers is they hate the work that anyone else has done. So you give them a logo that somebody else designed, the first thing they're gonna want to do is change it. And what we did with MTV is basically the m became a canvas for artists, so that any artists could put their own imprint on it and not feel like it wasn't theirs. And the shape thing at Nickelodeon gave every artist a chance to be themselves and it worked. We wanted these networks to feel like a human. We wanted to have a personality. So let's jump we've talked about Fred Cybert maybe two point oh, let's go to Red Cyber three point oh animation. You went on to be president of Hanna Barbera. You had your own animation studio, you began this living expert on animation. How the hell did you get interested in animation? Where did that come from? Well? I always love cartoons as a kid, the exact same way that several years later I fell in love with Rock and Roll. I remember buying a Bugs Bun t shirt when I was in college and thinking it was the coolest thing, you know, in the world. When we first got to MTV, 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? I said, are we gonna do jingles? He went, oh, 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, you know, a drawn cow. I said yeah, he said, And all of a sudden, an X 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. This is the most exciting moment of my life, and we started hiring animators to do all that stuff. So in that process I started talking to lots of people who did animation. I'm sort of a curious guy, and I just asked them a million questions and a few of them started telling me how the cartoon business works. So I started reading books about the history of the cartoon business. So one day, Nickelodeon comes to me, takes me to breakfast and said, you know, we've been licensing all of our programming. I said yeah. They said, you know, it's getting really expensive because the more viewers we get, the more they want to charge us. And you know, our most popular cartoon is this thing from England called Danger Mouse. We think we are going to pay enough that we ought to start thinking about making our own. I said, oh great, and they said what should we do? Silence? I go what They said, Well, what do you think we should do for cartoons? I said, why are you asking me? Will you do our animation? I said, well, one I don't animate to anything, and two I essentially take your logo and wiggle it for ten seconds. Please. So well, you're the only person I know, I said, okay, Well I think you should make cartoons the way Looney Tunes did, and I just start improvising and they didn't want to do it the way that I wanted to do it. And you know, me like, if they don't take my idea, I get really upset. And as a consultant, they never quite take your idea. So long story short, I helped them make a deal on a library of cartoons, and I wanted a bonus, and they wouldn't give me the bonus, and I got so mad that I just started complaining to everybody. And one of those people I complained to with Scott's ass of the president of Turner Entertainment. He said, how did you do that deal? You make logos? I said, yeah, but it was logical. I did X, Y and Z. You know. All that time was fine, and they were Hanna Barbara cartoons. Eighteen months later, he calls me up and he said, hey, you know, we just bought Hanna Barbera. I said, yeah, I heard I read in the paper. He goes, why don't you come round Hanna Barbera. I'm like, huh what I said, Look, I don't know anything about cartoons, be just don't worry about it. It's a disaster there. You can't go wrong. If you don't make a hit, they haven't had a hit since the Smurfs, nobody will blame you. And if you do have a hit, everyone don't think you're a genius. So here was the kicker. I literally look at my watch, and on my watch are four Hanna Barbera characters, completely by coincidence. It's ten thirty five in the morning. I said, I have ninety days. I have to wind down the agency's will wait the first time I walk in the Hanna Barbara building, I'm president of the company. I made two cartoons, full series, ten million dollars disasters. They fail like immediately, two Stupid Dogs and Swat Cats the Radical Squadron. Okay, yeah, So I go back to Ted Turner. I go, Ted, I know I'm out of budget, but I need another ten million dollars. He goes what I said, Well, you know, I I gotta get you some hits. I need another ten million dollars. What are you gonna do with the ten million dollars? I said, I'm gonna make forty eight short cartoons, because well, you just had two failures, Like, what makes you think you're gonna where. I said, Ted, if I do something forty eight times, don't you think I'll do something right? And you know the natural entrepreneur. And Ted was like, you're right, go for it. And that was that. And the hits were Power Puff Girls, Dexter's Laboratory, Johnny Bravo, Courage, The Cowardly Dog, Cow and Chicken, and I Am Weasel. So you're at Hanna Barbera. You now have a hit. Now you begin to think you're a animator. Actually, to be honest with you, I figured that animation was sort of a sideline that I was going to do for those years, and that was gonna be it. Ted announces one day that he's selling the company, and he's selling at the time, Warner I'm one of those guys that runs around the edge of the field to get to the goal, like I can't run through the scrum, and Warner Brothers was a scrum and it just wasn't the right fit for me. And I figured I'd come back to New York and go back to doing the things that I had done in TV. Somehow, I didn't know how. Somewhere between Judy McGrath herb Scandal was running Nickelodeon and Tom Freston, who was running MTV Networks. They said, hey, well, why don't you come back and be a consultant. I said, I'm never going to be a consultant again, but I gotta make things like I'm a maker. They said, okay, well you can make cartoons for Nickelodeon as long as you come and consult with us once a month. I'm like, okay, I could do that, and I don't care if you listen to my ideas. And I started Frederator. You know in rest his history, So this is a podcast about math and magic. How do you use both? I didn't know what to do for m TV because I was the head of promo, but we had no shows. And in television promos are watch Bill Cosby in a very special episode Thursday at eight. We didn't have that. I remember actually going out with Dale and we go out to the beach and I'm against it, and I just said walk with me, and we walked back and forth on the beach for five or six hours while I tried to figure out what the promo should be. And I realized that the problem that MTV had was twofold. One is nobody knew what the hell it was, and so telling them to watch this or watch that wasn't gonna be very useful. So I realized I had to tell them a story. But I also realized something else that we had learned in radio, which is at the end of every song, people have a reason to tune away. So that meant in MTV every three minutes people could leave. The ratings. Lesson I had learned was time spent listening was more important than how many people listen, because if you can get somebody to listen for fifteen minutes for a few songs and through the commercial, you made more money. And if they listen that long, more people were going to listen. So I realized that at MTV our job was actually not be cool. We knew how to be cool, not be crazy and creative, though we were going to do that anyway, not tell people what time the shows. Wrong, it was to get them to listen longer, time spent viewing. So fast forward Nickelodeon. One of the great things about Jerry is she was very research crazy, and she said, we don't understand why no one watches. As you remember, one show had a rating and everything else had hash marks basically zero, and I said, well, what do you know should Well, here's what we know. We can't figure it out of everyone who has cable tunes into Nickelodeon once a week and stays for less than six minutes. I said, oh, okay, so that's the problem to solved. You what do you mean, I said, we just have to get them watching longer. We go back and we work out a promotional clock, because the way Nickelodeon did it was like nuts. It was well, if you have a minute here, we'll put a promo, and if there's not another minute for two hours, then we'll do it. There was no organization, and as you well know, with media, a dependable, organized wheel makes all the difference. So I go back to Jerry to the next meeting. I said, Jerry, I found twenty five million dollars for you to market. What are you talking about? I said, Well, the whole deal is this time spend viewing thing. We worked out a clock and there's gonna be two minutes of promos an hour, and they're gonna be distributed this way. We'll have to recut some of the shows, but we we have no new shows. We have to do that too. Well, where's the twenty million dollars? And I said, well, you're right, for your spots are five a piece, and if you add up how many there are over the course of year, it's twenty five million dollars. And we're going to use them like an ad campaign, not like a television channel. We have a story to tell. I don't care about your shows. The only thing I care about is your kids that watch them and the story that we are telling them. I remember having a fight with my accountant at MTV at the time and him screaming about how much money you were giving us, and I said, would it surprise you to know that I not only know how much every second of video costs, but I can tell you how many times that second will run in a year. Fast forward. He's my CFO. Now. We've been friends ever since because counting Dale Palm taught me another lesson when in doubt, count and counting together with a creative approach, makes for as you say here, math and magic. I almost want to end the show on them. It's a great way to do I don't want to ask you just a couple of more things, though we're talking about creativity, talk to me about the role of the old dogs like us and creativity. We sort of know the power of young fresh thinking. We were that once upon a time. Do you think there is a role there is this a young person's game. I think there's always a role for anybody who gives a crap one way or the other. I decided a long time ago that I have three rules for myself that you know, have not always made me wealthy, but they worked out really nicely. Which is my first rule is I want to have a good time. My second rule is I want to make some money. And my third rule is I want to stand the people that I work with. And I figure, at any point, if I get two of those things, like, I'm onto something. There was a period of time where I was still fresh enough to that work that we had done in the early eighties that when I would meet with a new team of people, I go, well, you know, what we did at MTV was this, and what we did at Nickelodeon was that. And I realized I was starting to be the get off your long guy, you know. And I decided instead that what I needed to be was what people had been with me, which is the favorite uncle. I would go through the point of view that I had and why I had that point of view, because it's still as fresh in my mind today as it was, you know, thirty years ago, forty years ago. I realized that people need room to be themselves. The way I call what I do now is I'm the bumpers in the bowling alley. You might not get a strike, but you'll never get a gutter ball, And by never getting a gutter ball, you have the confidence to be able to do something wonderful. The first person that I brought into Nickelodeon was a guy that you know called Scott Webb, who had been a movie channel producer for us, and he made a bunch of promos and he comes and shows them to me and I go, what the hell are you doing? He goes, well, this is what they wanted. I said, I didn't hire you to do what they wanted. If they knew what they wanted, they wouldn't have hired me, and I wouldn't have hired you. Now, you better start doing the things that you believe in, not the things that they believe in. And from that day on, he not only was brilliant, but the thing that very few people know about Scott Is. He was legally blind but became the worldwide creative director of Nickelodeon while being legally blind. Why because what we gave him the opportunity to do is what he had always imagined rather than what he was told to do. To me, that's our role. Our role is to give people the room to screw up. Because if you let them screw up and they're good, the next time, it won't be a screw up, it'll be a home run. Let's move to the way we always end this podcast. This is about math and magic, the two keys that come together to make great marketing and products. And there are experts and icons in both. Your favorite math person, del Pon, your favorite magician, the Beatles, Red cyber Genius and friends. Thanks Bell, Thank you, Bob, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Here's a couple of things I take away from Fred Cyber. One, when it comes to logos, Fred's philosophies dominate the space. Two, Fred's secret to great hiring is to determine in the interview whether he wants to spend more time with the candidate. It's such a simple metric, but if he hears them say something intriguing or wants to help them grow. It's an easy decision. Three On the flip side, one of Fred's keys to success has been figuring out who to work for. In his words, doesn't matter what the job is, work for the smartest person you can find. It's what made him take the leap from radio to television and then to working cartoons for Ted Turner. 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 I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat Nikkiatore for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Asar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gayle Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,