You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. We actually created something a couple of years ago called agency Therapy. We had a client come to us and say, I need to do a review and I said, well, why do you think you need to do a review? And I got the whole litany of reasons, chapter and verse, and I said, so do you think those could be solved by maybe talking to the agency and avoiding the disruption? What do you mean? I said, Well, let me asked you a question. If you have a disagreement with your partner, your spouse, your significant other, do you instantly go to the bar to meet a new one or do you try and work out the problem? I said, And if you don't work it out together, do you ever go talk to a therapist and try and get your relationship back on track? And they go, well yeah, I said, well, why wouldn't you do that? In this context? I'm Bob Pittman. Welcome the Math and Magic. Stories from the frontiers and marketing. Sometimes we probe the deep frontiers in marketing, sometimes even the fringe. Today we have someone right in the middle of all things marketing. Michael Cassen Brooklyn born raised in California, tax lawyer, entrepreneur in the video business, but made his real mark in the advertising business, first at Western International Media and now with media Link, the company he founded, a strategic advisory firm that sits at the intersection of marketing, media, advertising, entertainment, and tech. Truly a one of a kind guy, one of a kind company. If you read Kenneletta's twenty eighteen book Frenemies, The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business and Everything Else, you'll be familiar with Michael's role as the connector of the advertising industry. He has a radio show on our own WOR in New York and on iHeartRadio, and a podcast on iHeartRadio Media Linked, and he is in the Advertising Hall of Fame, recently inducted. Michael. Welcome, Thank you, Bob. Before we get into your story and the backstory on everything, I want to start off with you in sixty seconds. Ready go? Do you prefer New York or LA? New York is my favorite city in the world. Los Angeles is my favorite city to live in. Manhattan or Brooklyn, Manhattan, Mets or Yankees. Oh, I'm a Dodger fan all the way. The rat Pack or the Beatles, Total rat pack, Instagram or Twitter. I'm an Instagram guy, sunriser, sunsets, love Fiddler on the Roof. But I can take either side of that trade. A wine or beer. Oh, I'm definitely a wine man. Surfing or skiing. I gave up my surfboard for my first set of skis when I was fifteen years old. Ken Aletta or Walter Isaacson, Oh gosh, The Jobs Book was probably my favorite business biography. But Ken got very much under my skin in the three years plus that I spent with him. Okay, it was about to get harder. You ready? Secret talent dancing, favorite song, Mack the Knife, favorite artist, Frank Sinatra. First concert it would have been Sammy Davis Junior and the Will Maston Trio. Childhood hero, Mickey Mannle, favorite TV show of all time? Breaking Bad? What's one food You'd never eat? Olives? Okay, let's dive in. Ken Aletta put you front and center of the app business with his book Frenemies? Did that make life weird for you? When I read the galleys of that book a bit before they came out, I freaked out. You might remember that because you and I spent some time together, and you had also read the galleys, and you told me I was out of my mind to freak out. You talked me off the ledge. So I want to say this publicly, thank you, Bob Pittman, because it's kind of daunting when you pick up a manuscript and it turns out to be a lot about you and you don't expect it. The two people who brought me back to reality Bob Pittman and Ken Lrer. So the answer is in retrospect. I felt really good about it, but at the moment I read it for the first time, I freaked out. You are Michael Cassen. Everybody who knows who knows you have this great interest in many things. One of the things you do is work with clients when they do agency reviews. I think everybody in the agency business lives in mortal fear of the agency reviews. They spend an enordant amount of time pitching business, churning a lot. That's got to be a tough job. Tough to make sure you cover everything on behalf of the client, and tough because there can only be one winner among the agencies pitching. From this insider's point of view, and you probably have the most spectacular viewpoint on all this. Can you explain the process what's really going on in an agency review? Traditionally you'd be looking at an agency to determine who's the best strategic partner for you, who's got the best team that they can put on the field, who's going to offer the best pricing. Obviously that becomes an important consideration, but traditionally it was strategy led. Pricing was always important because as somebody we both know, Alan Grubman famously said, it's not about the money. It's about the money. So at the end of the day, that's always been an important piece of it. But I think we've moved from the traditional and today, unfortunately it's just the nature of the business. In these reviews, and we're fortunate to manage most of the large ones in the world, there seems to be a race to the bottom, and the race to the bottom seems to be driven by pricing and race by the agencies are pushed by the client, pushed by the clients, and then the agencies need to rise to that occasion, and so things that shouldn't be the reason you choose an agency, which is who's the cheapest. When we first started to do business together, Bob Western was famous for saying, we buy the same things for less. You know, that was a good stick. It worked, you know, and they sort of did and we sort of did. But today it's more difficult to prove that. And yet it's it seems that that race to the bottom is who can deliver the lowest price without as much consideration to strategy. I think strategy is still, at the end of the day, the more important of the two elements. Have the clients or let's put the evil people in here at procurement procurement people have they realized that, of course you get what you pay for, and yes, I can get you cheaper spots and their worst spots and they're worse performing. It seems to me that there's not nearly as much of attention to return and value as there is a unit pricing. What's so interesting is as marketers, there is a much more focused view on return on investment. The marketers are asking now for a better return on their investment does not not come up in the agency review. It does, But the procurement folks are looking at a grid and on that grid that's just going to look at cheaper and cheaper doesn't always mean better, as you well know. And do the CFOs now control the process more than the cmos, Yes, they do. You know, let me step back for a second because you mentioned the P word, the procurement word. I look at that group, not just procurement, but in the marketing services area, it's an orchestra. What some marketers have done have put procurement in the first chair violin and that's not a good place for them to be. I think they need to be in the string section somewhere. But first chair violin is the person who should be leading it, and that's the marketer. Procurement needs to be a support, not a lead. PEPSI several years ago took procurement out of the center and put it back into the brands, and that was a good move because what you realized then it's not just procurement as to who can buy pencils cheaper because we're buying more pencils, it's who can buy it smarter. One of my friends in the agency business said, you know, in the old days, we spent all the time talking about creative and strategy and a plan, and media was like, yeah, yeh, and buy some media. Now, we spent all the time talking about media and cost and going yeah, yeah, that's a good idea. It's completely flip flopped. He was bemoaning that fact. Is that accurate? Yeah, it's accurate. So, Bob, when I started in the business, in a pitch, if a pitch was ninety minutes, eighty five minutes, was the creative To put it in mad Men terms, it was Don draper right and Harry the media nerd with the bow tie and the abbocus, figuring out costs per points. He would get three minutes at the end of the presentation go yeah, no the media and nobody cared. Something happened, And I think I was a little bit a part of that revolution in the nineties. We got the industry to focus on the fact that when you announced one hundred million dollar budget or a billion dollar budget, eighty five percent of that budget is the media spin, not the creative. So maybe you should spend a little more time looking at the media mix and the strategy being applied as opposed to the storytelling. That being said, storytelling is still the most important thing in marketing. You can have a great media plan if it's a terrible bit of creative. It's going to die. You know the old joke. Can good media save bad crew creative? Not so sure, but bad media can kill good creative right, Well, you're advertising the wrong message exactly, spending money to hurt yourself. We're going to come to some of these issues a little more, but before we leave it, what advice would you give to agencies, both in review and those that are pitching the new business. Be careful what you wish for, and be careful of making wild ass promises that you can't deliver, because, as procurement does, get a stronger hold on some of this, if you make a promise to somebody that we're going to save you X, they no longer will accept. I'm sorry, the dog ate my homework and I can't deliver because in this day and age, procurement goes up to the CFO. The CFO takes those numbers in the public company context to Wall Street. Well, if you're not delivering, think of it in the M and A context with all the merger and acquisition activity in the media business. For example, if you don't think that when AT and T buys Warner Media, or when CBS and Biacom come together, or Disney and Fox came together. They're not looking to ring savings out of that in media, but those savings actually are playing a part in the financial commitments that the CEO or the CFO then make to Wall Street. See, you actually have to be able to deliver it. You can't get away with yeah, Well I had meant sorta kind of it's not going to work anymore. Did that happen in that? Was it two years ago? We had Lalla yeah or whatever it was. See you're a music man, right, Media pollos and media pol media Polluz was twenty fifteen, and there was a lot of wild ass promises that people couldn't deliver on. But that was the moment where everything changed. Twenty fifteen was where we saw a change. And what I mean by that is historically, if you were the roster agency for Unilever or Procter and Gamble, you could generally hand that down to your descendants. Not anymore. It changes a lot more frequently now, and many of those reviews are driven by procurement, meaning it's three years, you got to go, meet new partners, you got to go, even if you are going to keep the business you have to be reviewed. We actually created something a couple of years ago called agency therapy. We had a client come to us and say, I need to do a review and I said, well, why do you think you need to do a review? And I got the whole litany of reasons, chapter and verse, and I said, so do you think those could be solved by maybe talking to the agency and avoiding the disruption? What do you mean? I said, Well, let me ask you a question. If you have a disagreement with your partner, your spouse, your significant other, do you instantly go to the bar to meet a new one or do you try and work out the problem? I said, And if you don't work it out together, do you ever go talk to a therapist and try and get your relationship back on track? And they go, well yeah, I said, well why wouldn't you do that in this context? Well what do you mean? I said? Well, Look, the work we have to do in anticipation of a review is not different than we could do here. We talked to the stakeholders, we find out what's ailing you, because truly, when you find a sick client, you generally find a sick agency, and vice versa. So maybe if we sat down and talked through what the issues are, you might solve those without the disruption of a review. And people went really, And we have some case studies where we've actually done that and avoided and some of them are three four years later, they're happier than ever with their agencies because we solved the problem. We got to the core of what their perception was that they weren't getting. You are obsessed with Hamilton. Tell me a little bit about that obsession. I think Alexander Hamilton is one of the most interesting characters in history, not just American history. I read the book when it first came out, and then when I saw the show the first time, I said, you know, I want to go back and reread it. It was a multimedia experience. Every page I read, I was listening to the music while I was reading it. A particular lyric stood out for me, and it was the song about no one else was in the room where it happened. It really resonated for me because I felt, in a very prideful way that media Link, in its position in the industry, got to be in the room where it happened. A lot same song, there was a lyric where Thomas Jefferson says to James Madison, I arranged the menu, the venue, and the seating. I also learned a great lesson from that, because even if you're having a meeting with people who know one another, if you have the right menu, the right venue, in the right seating, it can be an entirely different meeting. So let's go back in time. You were born in Brooklyn, grew up in la You know, the migration happens a lot now, but it didn't happen so much in the fifties. Why did your family move west in the nineteen fifties, I mean that was really early for that. Does the word stetel mean anything to you? Doesn't from a boy from Mississippi, But shtettel is what the little villages were in eastern Europe. Okay, we lived in Brooklyn. My grandfather owned three two family houses, you know, up and down. We lived in one, my aunt and uncle lived in another, and my other aunt and uncle lived in another, and my grandparents lived in the fourth. That's what you call a stettel. And my father woke up one day in the early fifties and said, I think it's time to go west. Young man, and he loaded up the Conestoga and we crossed the plank Beverly Hill Building. Yeah, exactly, Brooklyn Hill, Billy. Yeah. My dad drove across the country, but my mom and my sisters and I flew on what was probably, you know, I was only three, but probably a twelve hour flight, and we flew to California. And the good news is my grandfather was one of fourteen children. Most of his brothers moved to California in the twenties and thirties, so they were already well established here. What was unique for me was growing up in the fifties in southern California when it really was Orange Groves. Well, I want you to paint that picture for us. The fifties in southern California was really the wild West. My dad loved horses, and so I mentioned to you earlier that I traded my first pair skis for a surfboard. What I traded for a surfboard was my horse. I had a horse in the late fifties and early sixties in La. In La and Bob, you probably drove on the four h five today. When I had my horse, there was no four oh five. I'm really that old Every weekend I would be riding in what is obviously today the San Fernando Valley. There was no four h five Freeway, and anyone who's been in Los Angeles knows one of the great parking lots in the city is the four or five Freeway. And there was a lot of farmland. There was a lot of farmland, a lot of orange groves, and a lot of hicks. And I had an advantage because my folks were New Yorkers, so I had that cosmopolitan, extra special sauce that I got to sprinkle on things because I grew up with that sentiment and that mentality. Because my grandparents and the close family still lived in New York, I had a bi coastal life in the fifties when that was unheard of. We'd spend our summers back in New York, which was crazy because you'd say, well, why would you go back to New York. Well, because that's where the summer camps were and the things that my parents thought I should be doing and my sister should be doing. So it was kind of unusual in those days to have that experience. I grew up in the same era in Mississippi and my dad almost moved our family to Glendale, and the early nineteen sixty sixty one or sixty two, everybody from everywhere in the country was looked at California. There is such a mixing of people, such a mixing of ideas and culture. How to growing up in that? With that mixing of ideas shape you. You grew up here, you were going to go into the entertainment business. I was more attracted to the business side of show business, not the show side of show business. But you know, I was a ham anyway, so I didn't mind that side. Where did that come from? You know, everyone who knows you, Michael Casson can get along with anyone that is sort of the essence of you. Where did that come from? I think that came from my family. I've always believed when I come up to your offices on fifty fifth Street, whether it's the receptionist or you, I treat people the same. I've always tried to do that. It's a very special quality. 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 Mathem Magic. We're here with Michael Casson. So let's age Michael Casson. You went to the University of Miami for one year, yes, then you went to UCLA English major, went unto law school in la then New York, became a successful tax attorney. When you talk about show business, you were definitely on the business side for a year. You even left to go run a home video business that was the mid eighties, and then you went back to law. But probably the most important thing is to Michael Casson, that came into the ad business, and I guess your first stop was Western International. Grew were the COO and then president with Dennis Holt. You guys sold the business to IPG. This was really the early days of a straight media agency. How did Dennis start that and what did you help him do? And then why did others began to copy that model? So Dennis had an idea well before he launched Western. He was very prescient in that he saw what I just alluded to, that media was where the money was, not that it wasn't great to be Don Draper. What Dennis identified early on was that you could really change the world through the media lens. And what he did was realized that media buying could be like a cooperative in the old classic business context, a co op. He went around to all the creative agencies that weren't the big behemoths and said, gee, if I could buy media on behalf of Bob Pittman and Associates, a great hot creative shop, you know in Cleveland or New York or anywhere, then I've leveled the playing field. Because if you're competing against j. Walter Thompson or Ogilvan Maither or McCann Erickson, you know, the big, boldface names and advertising. But if I could level the playing field on media, then at the end of the day, the client could make their decision based on who actually served up the best creative. Because media was neutralized all of a sudden, we could go out and combine and consolidate. So well he provided scale to small players. Western was the first billion dollar media agency in the world, and at that time we were the largest. Dennis was one of the best salesmen I ever met. Because to Dennis, no was a definite maybe, and he was relentless. He would just dog you till you were dead. But you couldn't say no to Dennis Holt and Western had reached a certain size and scale, and Dennis realized he needed to build a company around it in a different way. And that was my opportunity. Because I didn't grow up buying media. I was a tax lawyer. I didn't know the difference between a GRP or a TRP when I came into the business, and my first day on the job was that of chief operating officer, which was quite a big step to have me come in in that role with people who'd been there for twenty five years and had built not in a negative way, but had built fiefdoms and local broadcast and out of home and radio and national broadcast. And these were all people who'd been doing it a hell of a lot longer than I was. I was doing it for about five minutes. But what I did was I brought basic business principles to it. And I looked at it and I said, I understand this business. This is like a mutual fund. And Dennis looked at me and said, what do you mean. I said, Well, if you go to a mutual fund, you give them money and you ask them to diversify your investment portfolio. Put some in stock, some and bond, some in real estate, some here, some there, and you look for a return on investment. That's what you're doing. I said, that's what we're doing. Clients come to us, they give us ten dollars and they expect us to determine where to invest it to give them the proper return on the investment. So if we look at it that way, it's not anything other than investment advisory. Western International Media in those days was known as a media buying service. I changed every bit of collateral and I said, we are not a media buying service. We're a media investment service. We're investing clients' money, and if you look at it that way, it changes the perspective. I give Irwin Gottlieb credit for taking it one step further. Later on, Irwin took it and said Group M, the age group that he ran, was a media investment management company. One extra word, but it was the same principle. So I looked at it as I was investing clients money to generate a return on that investment. Full stop. Walk us through the steps in the advertising industry of how the agencies got split. We had the media agency and then we had the creative agency. And did Western play a role in that? Yeah? Western was the first media buying service media management company, but to be created and to be created at scale. That led the unbundling of the industry. Where creative was over here to the left, Media all of a sudden was split off as a separate discipline. The big issue was where would the media planning go. So you have your creative, you have your media implementation or execution, the buying of the media, but the planning is the strategy. The progression was research would tell you what you should be doing. Once you know who the target is, then you have to do media planning to figure out how do you reach that target, and then you have to do media execution to actually buy the media. So those were always the three steps Research, planning, buying. We felt strongly at Western and we changed the industry that that discipline should be a separate entity, and so we unbundled the industry. As you know, Bob, the industry is rebundling. Why because digital. It's where it got clearer that you needed to have planning central, not on the media side or the creative side. It was right in the middle. And the client says, wait a minute, I need the creative messaging to be informed by the same sort of data that the media planning and execution is. Well, if it's the same strategy, why are we not bringing them back together in a different way. Perhaps so, I don't think we've gone back to the bundle that existed before. I think we have a new bundle. You began media link as an offshoot of a learning journey. You're working out your noncompete. You had to sit on the beach for eighteen months, two years, whatever it was, and you went out to the desert or it was your version of seeking the Guru in India, and you went out to teach yourself. Tell us about that journey. So what I did in that covenant not to compete moment, I said in an effort to maintain relevance to my kids. And my kids today are thirty eight, forty and forty two, but back then they were fifteen, sixteen years younger. I want to make sure I understand what's happening in this new world. It was just post dot com. Everybody was running around with dot com this and dot com that, and it blew up, and I said, but there's more here. And what I don't want to be is a guy who used to be in the media business and knew what was I wanted to kind of understand what was gonna be. What did you do? How did you teach you? Surrounded myself with the smartest frickin' people I could find that understood this trajectory we were on in terms of bringing things again into this digital world. I was very fortunate that the timing of that linked up with the moment in our industry where there was more chaos than ever. Years ago. In another book, I was asked by a friend to write a chapter in a book called The Strategy of Meetings. And the chapter that I wrote, and this is thirty plus years ago, was chaos and Opportunity. So I've always been a big believer in that chaos theory. If you can find chaos, there's generally going to be opportunity. And that's what happened. And so how did you get people to teach you? You're Michael Casson, you came from Western Nashow, you're the old guys. Why would anyone spend the time with you? How convincing were you? And how did you find these people? I had some good jokes and I could entertain no listen, I just asked Bob, It's funny how that works. I just actually sought out smart people, and I said, who are those people that I need to know? Brian Grazer had a guy that he hired, Brad Grossman, and he had the best title in the world. Brad Grossman's title was the cultural attache for Brian Graziory he said, find me interesting people, find me interesting things, and that was his job. I wasn't cool enough to have a cultural attache, but I think I understood where the puck was going, and I had to figure out who were the best skaters in that hockey game, to follow them and understand how they made the puck go there or what they were going to do when they were there. And I just was seeking alpha and I found some good smart people. So how did you jump from student to master and start Media Link certainly the preeminent advisory business and advertising and marketing. The truth is the phone started to ring. People would call me and ask me questions. You know, if I was known for anything back in those days, I was known for kind of knowing everybody and having deep relationships set across industries. I had a good understanding of the left coast and the right coast of the entertainment industry and the media and advertising industry. I got called as much to say, Hey, Michael, can you introduce me to Bob Pittman, And I'd say, yeah, but what is it you want to talk to Bob about? Well, I want to talk to Bob about X, Y and Z. I said, okay, but Bob may not actually be the right person for that. Sally's the person you should speak to about that, because she really knows that you'll have great time with Bob on another topic. But I understood how to join the dots, how to find the answers. I used to kid around and say I'd be introduced at some event and they'd say, Michael Cassen with the biggest rolodex, and no one knows what a rolodex is, by the way, And I'd say, that's only interesting if you know what to do with it, if you know how to join those dots. The basic story was the phone rang and people were asking me interesting questions. But what really pushed me over the top into the more strategy business other than the connectivity business, to be honest, was when Kevin Mayer went back to the Walt Disney Company in strategy. He called me on a project and he said, there's a project that we need help on called the future of Interactive Advertising on television. And I know that you can help me get the answer because I know you know how to get the answer, but I also know you have no clue how to present it. I said, what do you mean, He said, have you ever done a PowerPoint? I said no. He said, well, we actually need the answer, and I know you can help me get it, but I'm going to help you. And what Kevin did, which really changed my life and really was the trajectory that media Link set out on, was he said, I'm going to give you three people from Disney strat planning who can help do the work. They'll work for you for these ninety days while you're building this project, while you're doing this, and it got me into the strategy business, not into the connections business. And that was really a turning point for me. So the business went well. You sold media Link in twenty seventeen. That had to be a really hard decision. I know it was, I talked to you at the time. Had to be hard to give up total control. So why did you sell it. What was it about it? I've always been a believer that when one drives on a highway, it's good to know where the exit signs are. You may not choose to take them, but it's certainly good to know that there are exit signs. And in a service based business, it's not always easy to see. I thought about that and said, where is that opportunity? I found an extraordinary partner, Essential in Duncan Painter, who understood the nature of a service business, the nature of a strategic consulting business. If Media Link had deeper resources, an international opportunity, we could expand our remit and expand our business. And Essential was a brilliant partner for as it lift up your expectations, it succeeded them. That's great. We have on the media company side introduced data into our mix and understood so much more about our listeners. Yes, we use it with advertisers, we use it for ourselves. I think forever Facebook and Google have changed how you do business with advertisers. No al wants to buy some spots and it themselves. They want who's the audience? Where can I find them? How can I target them? Where can I do my data match, how do I prove it? What's my attribution? And it goes straight through to creative and Bob, I'd ask you this question because you're one of the most creative people I know in this industry. I shouldn't limit you by the way. You're one of the most creative people I know period. Oh gosh, thanks, But you've got a good gut. You can sense things. I've seen you do it if you were running a network or green lighting movies at a studio, if you were making programming decisions today, Historically people would use their gut to do that. I think this movie is great. I think this writer is perfect, this talent should you know, Vivian Lee should be Scarlett O'Hara and Clark Gable should be Ritt Butler and we know it. Today you can make those same decisions, but you could be steeped in so much more data. Where is the balance between what your gut instinct is as a creative person and the data that you can infuse into that process. And I think that's where we are today. The day data found its way into the creative world as it previously had just into the media world. Well, you know, it's interesting there's some studies done on decision making and said, actually, every decision is a gut decision. The difference is is your gut conditioned by what your kids told you and your wife or is it conditioned out of all this data you've just gone through, But you have to make a decision. There's a guy named Marshall Cohen did the original concept test for MTV and that brought him in as our research director and has been with me through a number of things. And Marshall and I fight like cats and dogs always have, over exactly the same set of data. We're staring at the same thing, but two different interpretations. And I think what's happened in the creative world. It's gone from a proclamation to a hypothesis. And now I mean have a hypothesis. It may be proven to be correct, it may be proven to be wrong, and we now have information which helps us figure out which it is. Well. But if you think about it even one step further, Bob, when you look at what Amazon didive capability, Bob Pittman, we know you've ordered these three books, you will like these. We all see it today. At some point that was scary to people because how would you know what I want? Well, I know because I know what you just I know all the purchases you've just made. And it's obvious programming decisions are being made like that in every aspect of our life. And I don't just mean programming in television and radio and podcasting, I mean it in everything we do. Predictive modeling took on a whole new importance because you actually have the empirical evidence to be able to validate well. There are two things that have always gone on advertising. There's measurability and respectiveness, and the two don't always go together absolutely, And my favorite example is MTV launched. There were no ratings. No one want to buy us except Roger and ricok Pepsi, who observes all the kids I know are watching MTV. Perhaps he should be there. My biggest advertiser, Coca Cola, said, well, they're no ratings. Finally Nielsen rates us. Go back to Coca Colt and they said, sorry, we have a role that you need a three rating and a sixty five and making this number up. I think it's about right, though sixty five percent reach to be considered a network. We can't buy you. Roger continues to be my biggest advertiser, probably Coca call it and buy a spot for the first five or six years on MTV, and in that period of time, Pepsi moved the market share the most it's ever been moved before or after because they were somewhere where their major competitor wasn't because Coke wanted measurability and Roger wanted results. How does that play out today in a world in which I see people going I found them, and I go, yeah, what are you going to do with them? You know, it's funny because when you say I've got them. The problem with the Holy Grailed demographic that everybody seems to want, whether it's women eighteen to thirty four, men twenty five, the problem is, especially with the younger demographic, by the time you find them, it's too late. They need to find you, So that discoverability is critical in that pool factor is critical. What Roger en Rico really did understand was Pepsi was the new generation. So what he did was he found the new generation with you at MTV, and it was brilliant because he did actually find the demo that he wanted, and the whole era of utilizing rock stars, whether it be Britney Spears or Michael Jackson or whoever it was. At the various times that PEPSI did that, they did it brilliantly because they appealed to a new generation. Let's hit some other topics. Smart speakers. How are they changing advertising dramatically just because of the ability to be programming in a different way. This is a trick question because we love it in radio, because yeah, of course it is a big use case on smart speakers. Then well radio, But you know, Bob, you taught me something, so I'm going to correct you. I don't think of your business today as radio. You think of your business's audio sys And correcting, Bob, it is a new device to receive that wonderful programming game exact. Actually, we had a focus group a couple of years ago with young people. We kept talking about radio and they were looking at sort of like the dog looks at you, and things don't make sense. And in the middle of this conversation finally like somebody break, that's what's going on here, and they go, well, why are you calling it radio? And you go because it's radio, and they go, that's just one of the devices. I get on, why would you be calling it the device name? And say what would you call it? And this was for Z one hundred, they call well, I call it Z one hundred, or I called Elvis Durant and you go, wow, that's just like a new world. I was an eye opener, but at exactly the same point you're, oh, law, but you taught me the interesting message about the audio side of the world, the curation, and that companionship that one enjoys with their favorite disc jockey, with their favorite radio commentator, because even disc jockey is a term that probably most people wouldn't know what I mean, but I guess I know I was a teenage DJ, but I'd now say I was a teenage radio announcer. TV reach has gone down dramatically. Advertised to support a TV now naturally below radio. TV's not the big reach medium anymore. Now it's very expensive and the reach is limited. How are people rethinking that? And what's the new model? Well, the new model is branded content and you shouldn't be relying on the commercial break to get your commercial message over. And it's something that I learned working with you over the years, Bob. Native advertising was invented in radio. Your DJ was talking about what you're doing tomorrow night. You go, hey, gotta go see that movie. That's not a commercial break. Sometimes it was commercial break, sometimes it wasn't, but you could never know. I remember when we were working with the traffic groups, Metro Traffic and Shadow Traffic, and you certainly know those companies well back in week we have them all exactly. They're all part of iHeart these days. But I remember doing a great solid for the Walt Disney Company, and that solid was we'd have the helicopters flying over the four h five Freeway or the ten Freeway and say we're here flying over the matterhorn at Disney. That was a commercial message, make no mistake about it. That logic is how advertisers are approaching marketing in a different way today. But to your point about television being supplanted on people's media plans, interestingly enough, it's still not being supplanted. But the good news for this conversation is in the most recent media and creative reviews we've been managing, we've seen audio. We've seen the iHeartRadio logo pop up, the new thing. My favorite story of what's gone on now has been this huge success that Mark Pritchard has had at P ANDNG of getting efficiency out of media by changing the mix. Maybe Digital's not got everything and Pull's reported a couple hundred million dollars out of it. I think in the speech to the a Anda he said what's old is new again and looked at the stuff he had used before and took a second look at it and said it actually gets really good results. And I think P and G, if they're not the biggest advertiser and radio this year, they're sure close to it, and three years ago they were sort of not even there. And I think the same with Outdoor too. I think they've moved money. There is the field leveling again, And are the media mix models finally being replaced by real attribution now that everyone has data? Well, as you know, because you and I spent a lot of time on this, Bob, so many of the media mix models. It's that old adage about garbage in, garbage out. The inputs weren't right, so you're not going to get the right answer. You and I did a little bit of a road show on this where we actually went out and said, hey, wait a minute, these media mixed models are wrong because the inputs are wrong. I think media mixed modeling is changing because the data is better. And the holy Grail, Bob, as you well know, is attribution. What was the thing that pushed that consumer over the top. That's still the question everybody's asking. It's no longer the famous fifty percent of my advertising's wasted? Which fifty percent? We're over that already right now. It's that attribution question that is so critical. So as we begin to wrap up, I want to call upon your unique perch as an observer of the entire advertising industry, hit a couple of issues. Here are silos breaking down at agencies. We talk to the agencies and they say, look, we want everything on one planning platform so we can plan across not in silos. Is that happening yes. I think what we're seeing is the dashboards that are being created by the agencies to serve up to their clients. Are giving a client and ability to move the dials on one dashboard and see an entire media plan in a holistic fashion. We are seeing that because the clients are demanding it. So where the future leaders of the business coming from, What kind of experience, what kind of expertise, Got any favorite up and comers. We're doing a massive search for one of the most high profile chief marketing officer jobs in the world. Can't obviously talk about it, but it's wow, we're making news right here. Yeah, and it's a big one. They're looking for somebody who can both be a marketer and a transformation officer in one person. Will they find that it's really tough because it's different muscle. And I'll tell you one other thing that we're seeing and it's so prevalent today, Bob, the move towards a merging of two sides of marketing. Traditionally, you had what we would call performance and precision marketers on the way in math, and on the other hand you had brand marketers fuzzy warm magic. What I've learned and we're trying to trade name this word right now, brandformance. We've looked at the way marketing's done today and say it's a merger, if you will, or a morphing rather of precision and performance marketing on the one hand, brand marketing on the other hand, because just brand marketing in and of itself, without a call to action, without driving a consumer to do something, not exciting anymore to any marketer, and where we're seeing it manifested. Really right now, Bob is in the entertainment industry. Disney plus HBO, Max, CBS and Viacom will have their version of that. Comcast is coming with their next version of Exfinity. You've got Netflix, You've got Hulu, You've got Jeffrey and Meg doing quibbi. Apple just announced there four ninety nine a month all you can eat subscription platform. All of that marketing isn't any longer brand marketing. That is absolute pure performance what we call subac subscriber acquisition marketing. It's changing the entire focus for some of the largest marketers in the world who traditionally wanted to build brands. Now they've got to get you to become a subscriber, and goddamn, they got to make sure you don't churn the subscriptions because that'll hurt them more. So you've got to find subscribers that are going to stay. You know the story with AOL. We were very early on that spent at one point of billion dollars a year on Breck marketing, some of it with me, God bless you, and what we managed to do though, is on top of that performance marketing. I guess it's called day. Back then it was direct marketing. We put a layer of brand advertising, and at first our direct marketers said, don't do that because we're not going to get any subs through radio and TV and how do you know, Well, they're not going to call the eight hundred number, and I go, that's not why we're doing it. The reason we're doing it is to enhance the response rate. And what we found is we almost doubled response rates. So when people that had brand advertising, they had heard about AOL and they got a disc, they said, oh, I've heard of this. If they hadn't heard the brand advertising, OK, and go what is this, they would have chucked it. And that difference in reaction double the response rate. I'm obviously talking to a lot of subscription people here and coming out of the background, but I think you're exactly right, and you're on it. Everybody seems to be finally understanding the need for both. Yeah, it's true. So Michael, we end every episode with a note that really goes to the title. Here Mathe and magic, So let's do some shout outs. Who's the greatest math person in our industry. In advertising, oh god, it has to be your wengoutlie. But it's an easy question to answer, greatest creative, who's the magician? I think there's a few today that really stand out. I think you have to look at folks like David Droga. You have to look at folks like Colleen de Corsi at Widen and Kennedy. These are just brilliant creative people who continue to win the day with their creative ideas. John Heggerty certainly still out there and united. People like that are the ones that I think of at the top of the ladder in creativity. Michael, You've got a wildly interesting life. You've got magnificent stories. Thanks for sharing it. Thank you, Bob. Here's a few things I've picked up from my chat with Michael. One, storytelling is still the most important thing in marketing. The greatest media plan can't save bad creative. Two. As a great connector, Michael thinks a lot about how to orchestrate the right meeting. If you have the right menu, the right venue, and the right seating, it can be an entirely different meeting. Three. Treat your business relationships like you do your personal One. And Michael's words, if you have a disagreement with your spouse, you don't go to a bar to meet a new one. Take the time to talk it out instead of just looking for new partners. Thanks for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of iHeartRadio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat Niki Etoor for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Azar for their recording help, our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course Gail Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped bring this show to your ears. Until next time,