Speaker 1: You're listening to Math and Magic, a production of My
Speaker 1: Heart Radio. At an age of eight, my father abandoned
Speaker 1: my mother and my sister and brother, and I had
Speaker 1: just brought into a restaurant in Jersey City. There, I
Speaker 1: watched my mother, who had been the person who walked
Speaker 1: me to school and made lunch for me, all of
Speaker 1: a sudden was thrown into the position of having to
Speaker 1: be a business person and run this restaurant. She had
Speaker 1: no experience. I'm like eight years old. I'm listening to
Speaker 1: her called vendors and she would say something like the
Speaker 1: accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bills, I want you
Speaker 1: to mock ten percent off your bill. And you can
Speaker 1: hear on the other side saying why would we do that,
Speaker 1: and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
Speaker 1: top of the pile, or it could be on the
Speaker 1: bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
Speaker 1: watched what I could only call now Moxie. When I
Speaker 1: did this negotiate for discs, I was ruthless. And that's
Speaker 1: who was sitting on my shoulder, him Bom Pittman. And
Speaker 1: welcome to another of our at home episodes of Math
Speaker 1: and Magic. Stories from the frontiers of marketing. Today, we
Speaker 1: have as our guest a great friend, incredible marketer, had
Speaker 1: a great storyteller, So get ready for some useful lessons
Speaker 1: and insights. She's the person responsible for that huge marketing
Speaker 1: success of AOL in the nineteen nineties, taking a O
Speaker 1: L from a few hundred thousand subscribers to over thirty million.
Speaker 1: And if you wonder who was behind the carpet bombing
Speaker 1: of a O L disc back, then well here's your culprit.
Speaker 1: Jan Brandt, the former vice chair and CMO of America Online.
Speaker 1: Jan was born in Brooklyn before Brooklyn was the home
Speaker 1: of cool. She grew up in New Jersey. Had a
Speaker 1: really interesting career marketing with a particular unique skill set
Speaker 1: in direct marketing. And to prove it, she has won
Speaker 1: numerous awards, received a lot of recognition almost every possible forum.
Speaker 1: She loves dogs, travel, and people, and she has a
Speaker 1: wicked sense of humor. Jan welcome, Well, thank you Bob.
Speaker 1: Before we dig into all the stories and your lessons,
Speaker 1: I want to do a little feature. We call you
Speaker 1: in sixty seconds. You're ready. Do you prefer sunrise or sunset? Sunset? California,
Speaker 1: Virginia California, Instagram or Twitter Twitter feature mountains, spring rottum
Speaker 1: Omaha steaks or Kansas City Steaks, steaks, aim or a
Speaker 1: well chat rooms, rooms, cats or dogs. Dogs. You've got
Speaker 1: mail or sleepless in Seattle. You've got mail, dial up
Speaker 1: or broadband. Okay, it's about to get harder. Smartest person
Speaker 1: you know? One clean first a O L. S Green name,
Speaker 1: private dancer, childhood hero, the lone ranger, first job, copywriter,
Speaker 1: favorite magazine, parenting, favorite city, Paris, guilty pleasure, watching movies
Speaker 1: all night long? And who would play you in a movie?
Speaker 1: Barbara Streisand all right, let's get going. Let's start with
Speaker 1: your most enduring legacy. A O L floppy disk and
Speaker 1: then CDs everywhere, mailboxes, computer boxes, newspaper inserts, even frozen steaks.
Speaker 1: You joined A O L in n near its beginning,
Speaker 1: and a few years before I joined, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 1: A O L just had a couple hundred thousand subs
Speaker 1: back then. But Steve Case and the management group had
Speaker 1: a very big vision. Can you describe that moment and
Speaker 1: how you pivoted to mass marketing. I think I was
Speaker 1: brought on to see how fast and how far we
Speaker 1: could grow the service. I don't think we ever expected
Speaker 1: it to be quite as fast as it was, but
Speaker 1: that was my mission. I was brought in specifically to
Speaker 1: grow the business. It was really an interesting point in
Speaker 1: time because people didn't have home computers very much. The
Speaker 1: penetration was fairly lowed. Mostly people were familiar with computers
Speaker 1: in the workplace. They were starting to migrate to the home.
Speaker 1: Those computers that people had at home, they didn't have modems,
Speaker 1: so a person actually had to have a computer and
Speaker 1: a modem in order to use the service. The first
Speaker 1: program started with a direct mail test that I did,
Speaker 1: mailing the discs out. It was a very very expensive proposition,
Speaker 1: and it was one that people thought was kind of
Speaker 1: a crazy thing to do because it was so expensive.
Speaker 1: A package in the mail directed or targeted to someone
Speaker 1: at that time probably was thirty five cents apiece. The
Speaker 1: disc alan was a dollar nineteen, so putting in the
Speaker 1: package of the mail probably caused us a dollar seventy
Speaker 1: five beats. But I felt that the only way that
Speaker 1: we could possibly describe the service to one was to
Speaker 1: let them try it themselves. It's really hard to imagine
Speaker 1: now and saying to someone, well, you're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: on your screen, You're going to be typing, and someone
Speaker 1: else is going to see what you're writing. We didn't
Speaker 1: have screen sharing then, people didn't have computers. They thought
Speaker 1: you were crazy. They would say, well, wanted could just
Speaker 1: pick up a phone and call the person, and so
Speaker 1: it was impossible to really describe the service and do
Speaker 1: it any justice. We sent that mailing out to maybe
Speaker 1: twelve lists. We needed about a three to five percent
Speaker 1: response difference in order to make it work, and we
Speaker 1: got that and more so we were off to the
Speaker 1: races at that point. When you took over, though, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna go back just a little bit. The view was
Speaker 1: that the only possible audience for this, we're sort of
Speaker 1: computer geeks. What was it that caused you and Steve
Speaker 1: and whoever else made this decision that, yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: all these people that don't even have a computer yet
Speaker 1: are barely have a computer and certainly don't know how
Speaker 1: operated are going to be the target market, and that's
Speaker 1: how we're gonna be. For me, I always have to
Speaker 1: look at any marketing endeavor and put myself in the
Speaker 1: position of the customer. One of my hidden talents is
Speaker 1: that I have a capacity for imagining that I'm the customer,
Speaker 1: and when Steve and I were first talking, he gave
Speaker 1: me a disk. I happened to have a Mac computer
Speaker 1: at the time and still do, and I started using
Speaker 1: the service. It was amazing. All of a sudden, I
Speaker 1: have all of these friends that live in my computer.
Speaker 1: And at that point there weren't many customers. We may
Speaker 1: have had three chat rooms open in the range of
Speaker 1: a hundred or fewer people on it, and I could
Speaker 1: see what was happening there. I could see the connections
Speaker 1: that were being made into me. It was always about community,
Speaker 1: and it was always about connecting people, whether it was
Speaker 1: through email or later instant messenger or shared interests. I
Speaker 1: really felt that that was at the core of it,
Speaker 1: and I felt the tug I felt and could understand
Speaker 1: what people, once they started using it, would get out
Speaker 1: of it. Our society was becoming more and more fragmented,
Speaker 1: more and more distant. There was a lot of upward mobility.
Speaker 1: There was a lot of geographic mobility, and to me,
Speaker 1: the secret sauce was the ability of a well to
Speaker 1: connect people. I didn't know it was gonna be thirty
Speaker 1: four million paid subscribers but I had every confidence that
Speaker 1: we were going to be able to reach larger and
Speaker 1: larger numbers. So now I see why you started it,
Speaker 1: why you decided to take that risk. You pushed out
Speaker 1: this very expensive direct marketing. What were the early results?
Speaker 1: Generally for a typical direct marketing package, you would expect
Speaker 1: a one to three percent response, you know, three percent
Speaker 1: would be on the higher level. And this was a test.
Speaker 1: So I was picking things that I thought might work,
Speaker 1: but I had no history. The results of that first
Speaker 1: test would was I think about a hundred or hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty thousand pieces. Was twelve within that twelve percent,
Speaker 1: because that's an average. There were lists that were pulling
Speaker 1: twent I had never before, never since ever seen anything
Speaker 1: like that. And keep in mind that this isn't just
Speaker 1: taking a free offer or a trial. It was a
Speaker 1: trial offer, but that the person had to take the
Speaker 1: credit card, give the credit card information, put the credit
Speaker 1: card information into a computer, and send it out into
Speaker 1: cyberspace and they would be built unless they canceled. It
Speaker 1: was staggering. It's clear it's a success. And I know
Speaker 1: you went on the drive cost down ridiculously low. At
Speaker 1: one point, I think you have more CDs and production
Speaker 1: for a O L than existed anywhere else in the world.
Speaker 1: But every time a competitor would do an offer, you
Speaker 1: did this very interesting thing is you would replicate the
Speaker 1: offer with the A Well name on it and tested
Speaker 1: to see if it was better than what you were doing.
Speaker 1: Why on earth do you think a Prodigy and compy
Speaker 1: Serve in the early days and MSN later didn't do
Speaker 1: that day O Well. What used to keep me up
Speaker 1: at night is coming into the office in the morning
Speaker 1: and seeing that Prodigy or CompuServe or Microsoft had copied
Speaker 1: what we were doing, just copied it. I can give
Speaker 1: you an idea of why some people didn't do this.
Speaker 1: Co worker Ted Leonsis did a lot of public speaking.
Speaker 1: Someone either from Prodigy or CompuServe went up to Ted
Speaker 1: and said, what the hell is going on in your company?
Speaker 1: That marketing person is spending so much money, you guys
Speaker 1: are nuts. Ted just shook his head when he came
Speaker 1: back to report that to me. I said, now here's
Speaker 1: what you say to them next time. That you've been
Speaker 1: trying to get that dumb broad fired for you know,
Speaker 1: the last two years, and it's driving you crazy and
Speaker 1: you can't believe that she's blowing that much money out
Speaker 1: because I just didn't want them to know how well
Speaker 1: it was working. And here's the error that they were
Speaker 1: all making. So they didn't understand the man, even though
Speaker 1: these were smart people. There is this fixation that people
Speaker 1: have on what's something cost. But the equation on an
Speaker 1: acquisition cost, which is what really matters, is the cost
Speaker 1: relative to the number of people that you bring in.
Speaker 1: If I spend five times as much but I bring
Speaker 1: in twenty times as many customers, it's in my favor.
Speaker 1: So the cost is clearly the hurdle. And I think
Speaker 1: you're right. I see it today and I'm sending it
Speaker 1: everywhere in my career too. They don't focus on value.
Speaker 1: They focus on cost. You found some other truisms too.
Speaker 1: You found out that the mention of any price always
Speaker 1: depressed results, no matter how good the price was. Yet
Speaker 1: every competitor kept talking about their price. What else did
Speaker 1: you consistently find truths that others clearly not see. I
Speaker 1: initiated a cancel safe program where rather than just processing
Speaker 1: a cancelation as other services were doing, we train reps
Speaker 1: to find out why the person actually got onto the service.
Speaker 1: To begin with what we're looking for. What inspired you? Oh,
Speaker 1: I see your lessening sounds Greek? Is that true? Or
Speaker 1: you a Greek heritage Oh yes, well we have a
Speaker 1: whole section about the Greek islands online, or we have
Speaker 1: a whole travel section and we have a whole history section. Oh,
Speaker 1: you wanted to work with your child, here's the encyclopedia.
Speaker 1: Part of it was never taking no for an answer,
Speaker 1: and another truism in the early stages, which was very
Speaker 1: counterintuitive again to people who just weren't paying attention or
Speaker 1: weren't analyzing it. People say, why are you sending us
Speaker 1: somebody just we actually built databases, you know, probably not
Speaker 1: as an exacting way as we would have the capability
Speaker 1: to do now. But back then where we knew how
Speaker 1: many disks that we were sending out to people. Now
Speaker 1: we couldn't track what they were finding in Barnes and
Speaker 1: Noble or what they were finding at their gas station.
Speaker 1: But in terms of the actual mail, we knew that
Speaker 1: in certain lists, on average we got response after they
Speaker 1: had received four efforts. We were actually tracking that. By
Speaker 1: the end of the Nannies, A o L had half
Speaker 1: the traffic of the Internet in the US, going through
Speaker 1: a well, we won't compy served, Prodigy was left by
Speaker 1: the wayside. MSN couldn't get a a well, why didn't
Speaker 1: any of the other services catch on that the key
Speaker 1: variable was easy convenient. I went to the mat a
Speaker 1: number of times where they wanted to put it on
Speaker 1: two discs, and I remember having knocked down Dragon Fight,
Speaker 1: saying no, it has to be easy, it has to
Speaker 1: be simple. Likewise, I was under a lot of pressure
Speaker 1: to go from floppy disks to c d s because
Speaker 1: c d s would fix that problem. And I knew that,
Speaker 1: but my customs didn't have c d s. I didn't
Speaker 1: want to switch the c d s when of our
Speaker 1: customers had a disk drive. The CD drive was an
Speaker 1: external add on. You may have been with me on
Speaker 1: this meeting, but I was out with Steve Jobs right
Speaker 1: after he returned to Apple, and he was getting ready
Speaker 1: to tell me about this new thing he had called
Speaker 1: the iMac, and his innovation was he said, I believe
Speaker 1: the computer is part of the Internet, and I'm gonna
Speaker 1: build the modem into a computer. Today it lives like huh,
Speaker 1: But back then it was such a step forward. He
Speaker 1: understood easy. Why do you think all these other smart
Speaker 1: people at these companies. A lot of resources didn't hit
Speaker 1: on easy. Everybody else have more, they have better, they
Speaker 1: had this, but nobody had easy except us. I can't
Speaker 1: explain that other than I really think that you really
Speaker 1: have to live and breathe a customer in order to
Speaker 1: really at it. I want to talk some about the
Speaker 1: Walled Garden, the early view of the Internet, but first
Speaker 1: I want to go to early Jan. You were born
Speaker 1: in Brooklyn, moved to New Jersey. I think when you
Speaker 1: were about eight. There's this wonderful story and very telling
Speaker 1: about you, about a five year old Jan who wanted
Speaker 1: a library card. Can you repeat that story? Gosh, how
Speaker 1: do you know that story? I know everything. Wow. So
Speaker 1: my mother, who at that time was a stay at
Speaker 1: home mother, she was an Avid and everyone in my
Speaker 1: family were avid Avid readers, newspapers, books, fiction, nonfiction, just
Speaker 1: voracious readers. And she would take me to the library
Speaker 1: and on her library card she was able to get
Speaker 1: four adult books and two children's books. And I would
Speaker 1: be with her and I said, I want four books.
Speaker 1: I don't want two books because I'd have to wait
Speaker 1: a whole week in order to get other ones. And
Speaker 1: so we went to the librarian and asked her to
Speaker 1: get a library part from me. And so she asked
Speaker 1: me to sign my name, and so of course I
Speaker 1: signed it in print, which you know, block letters, whatever
Speaker 1: they were. And she said, now we can't allow that.
Speaker 1: We have to have your name in script. And my
Speaker 1: mother had explained to me what script was. And after
Speaker 1: arguing with the librarian, we went home and my father
Speaker 1: took a piece of paper and he drew out my
Speaker 1: name several times, and he said, just sit here and trace.
Speaker 1: And so for a whole week I traced my name
Speaker 1: over and over and over and over again. I must
Speaker 1: have traced it ten thousand times. And the following week
Speaker 1: we went back to the library, I signed the card
Speaker 1: and got my own library card. Well, I've seen you
Speaker 1: repeat that lesson many times in your career. So this
Speaker 1: world you grew up in the fifties sixties, tell us
Speaker 1: a little bit about the world as you saw it
Speaker 1: then and how that affected you. We didn't have any money.
Speaker 1: We were poor. I mean, we were what they used
Speaker 1: to call back then, working class. You know. I grew
Speaker 1: up with two parents, and then my father, at an
Speaker 1: age of eight, abandoned my mother and my sister and
Speaker 1: brother and I he had just brought into a restaurant
Speaker 1: in Jersey City. We end up moving pretty quickly New
Speaker 1: Jersey City. There, I watched my mother, who had been
Speaker 1: the person who walked me to school and made lunch
Speaker 1: for me and played catch with me while I watched
Speaker 1: baseball games on t V. All of a sudden was
Speaker 1: thrown into the position of having to be a business
Speaker 1: person and run this restaurant. She had no experience. This
Speaker 1: was a restaurant that was open seven in a busy
Speaker 1: business area. She had an office that was in the
Speaker 1: basement and kind of smelled. I would sit there, I'd
Speaker 1: open up one of the drawers of the file cabinet
Speaker 1: lean on it while she'd be on the phone or
Speaker 1: doing the payroll or doing something like that. I'm like
Speaker 1: eight years old or nine years old. I'm listening to
Speaker 1: her called endors and she would say something like the
Speaker 1: accountants coming in tomorrow to pay bill, I want you
Speaker 1: to mock ten off your bill. And you can hear
Speaker 1: on the other side saying why would we do that,
Speaker 1: and she said, well, your invoice could be on the
Speaker 1: top of the pile, or it could be on the
Speaker 1: bottom of the pile. So that's your choice. And I
Speaker 1: watched what I can only call now Moxie. When I
Speaker 1: did this negotiating for discs, I was ruthless and that's
Speaker 1: who was sitting on my shoulder because my view was okay.
Speaker 1: So if they say no, they say no, no one
Speaker 1: is ever going to stop me from coming back and
Speaker 1: saying okay, any right, you know, I'll take that higher price.
Speaker 1: It wasn't about my ego. People get into a negotiation
Speaker 1: and it becomes a lot about their ego, and to me,
Speaker 1: it was always about the company. I remember jan times
Speaker 1: that we really had to dig deep to hit our numbers,
Speaker 1: and you would say, you know, I think I get
Speaker 1: a little more out of this vendor, and you always
Speaker 1: went to that well, and you know what, there always
Speaker 1: was a little more. So that was a great childhood lesson.
Speaker 1: We all benefited from it. It It worked with you. Let's
Speaker 1: move up a little bit. You went to Boston University
Speaker 1: School of Communications. You worked for Xerox. You got your
Speaker 1: MBA while while still working there. You're a copywriter for
Speaker 1: Xerox Education Publications, the company that published my Weekly Reader,
Speaker 1: which any one of my age remembers and was I
Speaker 1: think one of the biggest publications of its day. Why
Speaker 1: Xerox and why copyrighting? Where did that come from? Well?
Speaker 1: I wanted to be a writer. I really want to
Speaker 1: be a journalist, and so I had a lot of
Speaker 1: journalism courses and also media courses in undergraduate school. And
Speaker 1: how I fell into copyrighting. And it was the summer
Speaker 1: after college and I was visiting my boyfriend in Connecticut.
Speaker 1: I was sitting at the pool and I would tell
Speaker 1: everyone that I was looking for a job. I had
Speaker 1: no job. I never had a real job of waitressing
Speaker 1: before that. And I went into this gentleman who said, well,
Speaker 1: you know, there's this company, Zerrx Education Publications up the road.
Speaker 1: I don't know if any jobs that are open, but
Speaker 1: why don't you give them a call. I quickly ran
Speaker 1: into the house. I called them on the phone. They
Speaker 1: asked me to send a resume in and I said, oh,
Speaker 1: no problem, I'm really close by. I'm just going to
Speaker 1: drop it off. And so I showered, a dressed and
Speaker 1: you know everything, really quickly did my hair and went
Speaker 1: over and handed it to them. And I got a
Speaker 1: phone call from them within a few days. And that
Speaker 1: was it. I mean, that's how I got hired. So
Speaker 1: where did you become the marketer? Actually it was a xerox.
Speaker 1: I was a copywriter, and so product managers and marketing
Speaker 1: managers would come into me and direct me, essentially to
Speaker 1: sell their product. I went into my boss, Cathy House,
Speaker 1: who is my first great mentor. I said to her,
Speaker 1: you know, I don't really agree with what these people
Speaker 1: are saying that coming in and asked me to write
Speaker 1: things in certain ways. I'm willing to do that, but
Speaker 1: I want to know what I have to do because
Speaker 1: I want to be the person directing. And so she
Speaker 1: told me that I needed to be like a product
Speaker 1: manager or marketing manager. I didn't even know what that
Speaker 1: really meant exactly. When I looked in the back of
Speaker 1: some trade magazines at those positions, all of the s
Speaker 1: for these positions said NBA preferred or necessary or so forth.
Speaker 1: So I signed up to my n B A. I
Speaker 1: went to night school. While I was still working there,
Speaker 1: I switched over to the marketing room, so I actually
Speaker 1: started my marketing for a year there. More on math
Speaker 1: and magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to
Speaker 1: math and Magic. Let's hear more from my conversation with
Speaker 1: Jan Brandt. You go to California. You were CEO of
Speaker 1: a direct marketing agency with clients and included Greenpeace, Ted Kennedy,
Speaker 1: the California Democratic Party. You had your own company for
Speaker 1: four years in the mid eighties and Mountain View, California,
Speaker 1: and you helped start Paring magazine, and then you moved
Speaker 1: back East and finally in ninete you were hired at
Speaker 1: senior VP at A Well. That was about two years
Speaker 1: before I got there on the board in three years
Speaker 1: before I joined the management. Can you paint the picture
Speaker 1: of a O Well in n It was really the
Speaker 1: wild West. It was a lot of really energetic, smart
Speaker 1: people we used to call a building and flying it
Speaker 1: at the same time, and many of them not without
Speaker 1: a lot of experience and with not a lot of
Speaker 1: adult supervision. I used to look at myself as someone
Speaker 1: who was almost a transitional figure in the company in
Speaker 1: that I had worked in both small and large companies,
Speaker 1: and I thought I knew how to take from both
Speaker 1: models and try to make things work. I was able
Speaker 1: to traverse the growth, I think a little bit better
Speaker 1: than other people in those early days, trying to bring
Speaker 1: some sense of process, ways of trying to mentor people
Speaker 1: and bring them along when they had been doing it
Speaker 1: on their own for a while. That was being brought
Speaker 1: in to make the company bigger, and there are a
Speaker 1: lot of things that really had to change in order
Speaker 1: to do that. We had one person in the HR department,
Speaker 1: and that was tragic. If you had a new hire
Speaker 1: coming in at night, you go into people's offices and
Speaker 1: steal trash, baskets and pencils. It was. It was really crazy.
Speaker 1: I had a lot of latitude though. I remember we
Speaker 1: had an I T department. If my computer broke, they
Speaker 1: couldn't get it fixed right away. I didn't really care.
Speaker 1: I would just send my assistant and I'd say, you know,
Speaker 1: go to the computer store and get me a computer
Speaker 1: and we'll figure this out later. So it's not exactly
Speaker 1: the way things were supposed to happen, but as they say, now,
Speaker 1: you had to break a lot of glass. So let's
Speaker 1: advance a little bit. Some people don't remember are realized
Speaker 1: that actually A O L, along with Prodigy and copy Serve,
Speaker 1: began as proprietary computer networks. It was not the Internet.
Speaker 1: And as a matter of fact, even when I joined
Speaker 1: the board in there's still discussion about whether the Internet
Speaker 1: was friend or foe, and how much it should be
Speaker 1: embraced or whether it should be embraced. Obviously, a will
Speaker 1: jumped in with both feet, but product and copy serve didn't.
Speaker 1: And our big mission was to make the Internet as
Speaker 1: important to consumers as their telephones and TVs. It seems
Speaker 1: like a rather quaint goal looking back on it. And
Speaker 1: in that time Microsoft offered consumers but I think it
Speaker 1: was three dollars to switch to MSN from A O L.
Speaker 1: Other I s p s were free. We were charging
Speaker 1: over twenty dollars a month. There was a new threat
Speaker 1: almost every day. I don't know about you, but I
Speaker 1: sort of didn't want to wake up in the morning
Speaker 1: to find out what was lurking there that morning. How
Speaker 1: did you keep your bearings through all that? And that
Speaker 1: such rapid change, such fear competition, and companies with much
Speaker 1: bigger balance sheets than we had coming after us every day.
Speaker 1: We had such enormous energy, we had such maniacal focus.
Speaker 1: It had to have it to be around me. I
Speaker 1: became known in the early days as the Queen of No.
Speaker 1: What that meant was, no, we're not working on that, No,
Speaker 1: we're not working on that. Either this is what we're
Speaker 1: working on, and keeping people really, really, really focused. I've
Speaker 1: never seen a company and a group of people, especially
Speaker 1: in those earlier days, who really were trying their best
Speaker 1: to all ruin the same direction. We all swim in
Speaker 1: the same direction. Whatever that's saying is. There wasn't really
Speaker 1: a big focus on me, me, me, you know, what's
Speaker 1: my next job? Was my next salary, what's my next raise?
Speaker 1: How much stock options my getting? There wasn't a lot
Speaker 1: of focus on that because we were so energized by
Speaker 1: what we were doing. And what I can see and
Speaker 1: I have seen over and over and over again in
Speaker 1: larger companies, is that there becomes a sense of entitlement,
Speaker 1: there becomes a feeling of alienation, of not really being
Speaker 1: part of a bigger mission. We were on a mission.
Speaker 1: Of course, the stock options and the money and all
Speaker 1: of that helped, but we were on a mission. It
Speaker 1: wasn't just a job for most of us. We were
Speaker 1: also incredibly nimble. The amount of nimbleness, the fact that
Speaker 1: the buck stopped here and that I could see something
Speaker 1: going on in a company threatening us, and I could
Speaker 1: go boom, you know, get this done, do this. I
Speaker 1: didn't have to go through a lot of channels and committees.
Speaker 1: People didn't get in my way. No, they didn't get
Speaker 1: in your way. I can attest to that. Yet everyone
Speaker 1: was scared to death to cross you. I would say
Speaker 1: in a meeting, step beside, or I'm going to run
Speaker 1: over you. It really allowed for an enormous amount of nimbleness.
Speaker 1: It also gave me the freedom to make mistakes and
Speaker 1: correct for them. And you can't have an environment as
Speaker 1: many larger companies have in which you're judged by how
Speaker 1: many mistakes you make. If you don't make mistakes, you're
Speaker 1: really not gonna get anywhere big. You're gonna do everything incrementally.
Speaker 1: My great mentor, Steve Ross, who built Warner Communications and
Speaker 1: Time Warner, used to tell me, Bob, you'll never be
Speaker 1: fired here from making a mistake. Here, you'll be fired
Speaker 1: for not making a mistake. Because you're not making mistakes,
Speaker 1: tells me and not trying anything new. And that's your
Speaker 1: life blood, right. I never fired anyone making mistake. Make
Speaker 1: the same mistake, you know, two or three times, and
Speaker 1: you you know you're gonna be on thin ice. You
Speaker 1: need to hire people smarter than you and be confident
Speaker 1: My feeling has always been you want my job, come
Speaker 1: get it, come earn it. I have only benefited throughout
Speaker 1: my life in hiring the smartest people that I could
Speaker 1: convince it to working with me. So let's jump a
Speaker 1: little bit. I want to jump to the big crisis
Speaker 1: we have. Actually, the day I joined in management off
Speaker 1: the board in nine to run the A wall service,
Speaker 1: theef case and the company announced unlimited pricing, and almost
Speaker 1: immediately we had a crisis. Too much demand, not enough supply,
Speaker 1: Consumers are getting busy, signals couldn't get online. We were
Speaker 1: called America Offline. It was certainly the biggest business crisis
Speaker 1: of my career, other than maybe COVID. Right now, can
Speaker 1: you take us back to that time and what did
Speaker 1: you learn from it? My first feeling was they love us,
Speaker 1: they really love us, and that faded, of course, as
Speaker 1: we dealt with the crisis. I think that we expected
Speaker 1: some lips. There was no presidents for we were just
Speaker 1: all been wanting as fast as we could. A O
Speaker 1: well was really the best example probably over the last
Speaker 1: twenty years of the Walled Garden. Despite lots of pressure,
Speaker 1: we did not interot with other services deliberately and strategically,
Speaker 1: if you wanted to communicate with someone on All, you
Speaker 1: had to join ALL. Therefore, the more people in a well,
Speaker 1: the more people joined. It was sort of the perfect example,
Speaker 1: and you were a great defender of it. You could
Speaker 1: smell people trying to sneak around the wall or breach
Speaker 1: the wall. After my time at ALL and yours, someone
Speaker 1: opened up the walled garden. Facebook is probably the best
Speaker 1: example of the New world garden. You think they appreciate
Speaker 1: that lesson about a O L. I think they go
Speaker 1: to great lanes to keep you on their service. When
Speaker 1: I look at Facebook, I see AOL all over. We
Speaker 1: had a lot of the services that they had. We
Speaker 1: were probably early in introducing some of them. We did
Speaker 1: have these pages where you can collect your friends, your family.
Speaker 1: It was really you know, Facebook point five, not even
Speaker 1: Facebook one point oh well certainly got derailed with the
Speaker 1: All Time Warner merger, and probably if All had stated
Speaker 1: an independent company would have been the future of all. Yes,
Speaker 1: you point out many of the service developer actually being
Speaker 1: worked on at the time. There are many many services
Speaker 1: that I'll send a text or an email to say
Speaker 1: we did that, but we were early and it was
Speaker 1: a different time. So let me jump a little bit.
Speaker 1: As we began to come towards the end, If you
Speaker 1: could give your twenty one year old self some advice,
Speaker 1: what would it be? Wow? Someone gave me advice when
Speaker 1: I was about twenty one years old. He was a
Speaker 1: market He was my boss at my first company when
Speaker 1: I moved over to the marketing department, and he said
Speaker 1: to me, the problem with you is that you want
Speaker 1: to be something. You need to want to do something.
Speaker 1: I didn't quite get what he was saying at that point,
Speaker 1: but I did a few years later and realized that
Speaker 1: really my passion was marketing. My passion was connecting with
Speaker 1: people in that way, and it was what led me, frankly,
Speaker 1: to end up at a o L as opposed to
Speaker 1: I was interviewing other companies at that time, companies that
Speaker 1: people had actually heard of back then it was American Airlines,
Speaker 1: or I was interviewing your time ach at the time.
Speaker 1: You know. I went to a well because I felt
Speaker 1: that it was the best chance for me to spread
Speaker 1: my wings and to do what I was really passionate about.
Speaker 1: And I was passionate about marketing, and so I think
Speaker 1: that well, I couldn't have given myself that advice someone
Speaker 1: else did give it to me. Let's wind up today.
Speaker 1: We always end math and magic by looking at those
Speaker 1: two sides of marketing, the analytics math and the creative
Speaker 1: the magic. When you look back on all you've seen,
Speaker 1: who would you give the shout out to is the
Speaker 1: greatest math person in the marketing equation, in the brand
Speaker 1: of marketing that I was most involved in. You couldn't
Speaker 1: really separate the two. But it really couldn't have been
Speaker 1: a direct market or without being able to do both
Speaker 1: of those things. One of the reasons I think I
Speaker 1: was so successful is because I actually am very good
Speaker 1: at both sides. Yes you were, Let me jump to
Speaker 1: the other side. Then tell me who's the best magician.
Speaker 1: Every Bill Jamie, who was a copywriter, a great renown.
Speaker 1: Anyone from my error or before or even a little
Speaker 1: bit after, would have known him. He was prolific, did
Speaker 1: a lot of work in publishing, and he brought magic
Speaker 1: to paper. He was very expensive to use, and getting
Speaker 1: him to work on one of your projects you had
Speaker 1: a campaign for it. So Jan this has been great
Speaker 1: A O. L had to be the biggest success of
Speaker 1: my career and certainly one of the most exciting rides.
Speaker 1: Doing it you was inspiring. I loved being in the
Speaker 1: foxhole with you. I loved all the stories we have together.
Speaker 1: I have to thank you for all those great times,
Speaker 1: great memories, and thanks for sharing some just a little
Speaker 1: bit of your brilliance with us today. Thanks well, thank you.
Speaker 1: Here are a few things I picked up in my
Speaker 1: conversation with Jam. One. Be willing to make mistakes, as
Speaker 1: Jan says, if you don't make mistakes, you're not gonna
Speaker 1: get anywhere big. To keep it simple when introducing a
Speaker 1: new product like a o L. Consumers value simplicity, and
Speaker 1: ease of use O were just about anything else. Three.
Speaker 1: Cost is relative, as Jan often had to explain, her
Speaker 1: marketing efforts cost the company a lot of money, but
Speaker 1: her results were spectacular and worth it for. To stay focused,
Speaker 1: you sometimes have to say no. In the early days
Speaker 1: of a o L, Jan harnessed the tremendous energy of
Speaker 1: the company and kept everyone focused on achieving the core
Speaker 1: mission by not allowing her team to work on things
Speaker 1: that didn't move them all in the same direction. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening. I'm Bob Pittman. That's it for today's episode.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for Listening to Math and Magic, a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. This show is hosted by
Speaker 1: Bob Pittman. Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and
Speaker 1: wrangling our wonderful talent, which is no small feat. Nikki
Speaker 1: Eatre for pulling research, Bill Plax and Michael Asar for
Speaker 1: their acording helped our editor Ryan Murdoch, and of course
Speaker 1: Gaile Raoul, Eric Angel, Noel Mango and everyone who helped
Speaker 1: bring this show to your ears. Until next time, m
Speaker 1: HM