Fred Seibert dot com

I WANT MY MTV! Part 3

Wed, 07 Apr 2010 00:41:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

‘I Want My MTV’ 1-4 1982-1983 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

I WANT MY MTV! took the phenomenon that had taken over the imaginations of young America and supercharged it into a famous brand with just about everyone in the country. I just googled “I Want My MTV” and it popped up almost 4,760,000 results. Pretty amazing for an advertising campaign that ceased to exist 22 years ago.* Pretty potent.

The whole thing was the work of my mentor and friend Dale Pon. He’d been my first boss in the commercial media, at WHN Radio in New York when it was a country music station. He’d recommended me for my job at Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, as the production director of The Movie Channel, and eventually as the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television. We’d fallen in and out over the years, but in late 1981, when it came time for us to hire an advertising agency again —at first, our big boss had vetoed Dale as not heavy enough for a company like ours— with a lot of help from my immediate supervisor Bob Pittman, I was able to convince everyone that Dale understood media promotion better than anyone else in America. Besides, didn’t he have “insurance” with his partner, legendary adman George Lois?

Dale Pon (via MTV: The Making of a Revolution)

No one had ever encountered an adman like Dale, because he had the unique ability to be completely and analytically strategic, and be wildly —and smartly— creative at the same time. An almost unheard of combination, especially in media advertising. Sure, he had a volatile nature, in advertising that was often a given (look at his partner). But it was his strategic, creative abilities that really set him apart.

We’d already done our first trade campaign, the “cable brats,” to the discomfort of most of the suits in the corporate marketing group (Bob and his team, me included, were in programming). But Dale didn’t buy into the efficacy of trade ads anyhow, so now were onto the big show, television advertising. The only problem was that we all recognized that an effective campaign would cost about $10,000,000. Our budget only had $2,000,000, and if we didn’t spend it quickly the corporate gods would probably take it away in the fall.

“I want my Maypo” commercials, created by John Hubley

Looking back, the core creative ended up being the most straightforward part. Dale’s closest friend and creative partner, Nancy Podbielniak had written the cable brats copy and had a tag line “Rock’n’roll wasn’t enough for them — now they want their MTV!” That rung a bell in George Lois, someone who never missed a chance to abscond with someone else’s good idea, and decided to rip off his own knock off of a Maypo campaign from the 1950s and 60s (animator John Hubley originated it as a set famous animated spots, and George had unsuccessfully knocked it off usin g sports stars) and presented a storyboard that completely duplicated his version. Rock stars like Mick Jagger were saying “I Want My MTV” and crying like babies, implying they were spoiled children being denied. No one was buying it until Dale let me know that there was no way he’d ask Pete Townshend or Mick to cry for us. “Pride! They need to show their pride in rock’n’roll! They’ll be shouting!” After a little corporate fuss we were able to sell it in.

AMERICA! DEMAND YOUR MTV!
Now, it was the next part that was completely and utterly brilliant. Because Dale came from the school that great creative was all well and good, but unless it could move the business needle, what good was it? In this case, the needle wasn’t ratings (cable TV didn’t have ratings in 1981), but active households, distribution for MTV. Cable operators were all relatively old guys who thought The Weather Channel was a better idea; they’d turned a deaf ear to their younger employees who were clamoring for us instead.

To dramatically simplify the strategy Dale organized, he decided to only advertise in markets where:

• There was enough penetration to justify a modest ad spend.

• But where there were critically large cable operators on the fence about taking MTV.

• And that we could afford a 300 gross rating point buy (three times heavier as any consumer products agency would suggest) for at least four weeks in a row (the traditional media spend would call for pulsing 10 days on and 10 days off).

The “G” in LPG/Pon was Dick Gershon. Along with data from our affiliate group, he crunched and crunched and crunched until he came up with a list of markets and dates we could afford. It was 20% of what we needed, but everyone figured if we could really start to knock off a bunch of cable systems, get them actually launch our network, the domino effect would solidify MTV’s hold on the market forever.

Strategy in place, the creative was back on the front burner. The basic campaign was a great way to get famous rock stars endorsing our channel, but where was the close? What would actually make the ‘ka-ching’ we needed? Luckily, back in the day there was only one way to for a homeowner get anything from your reluctant jerk of a cable operator (they figure they held all the cards, why should they do anything to make life better for their consumers?). And what was it that young adults loved to do? Dale knew immediately.

No one alive in front of a television set in the summer of 1982 could ever forget Pete Townshend, with the wackiest haircut of his career, shouting at the video camera:

“America! DEMAND your MTV! Call your cable operator and say, “I WANT MY MTV!!”

We shot the spots wherever the rock stars would have us for 20 minutes (they still weren’t really sure this MTV: Music Television thing was going to be good for them). Our director and producer, Tommy Schlamme and Buzz Potamkin, got together with some puppeteers to choreograph the ‘dancing’ stereo television. I asked my partner to go into the studio to edit the music sections when they weren’t rocking enough, and —poof!— famous advertising.

Nothing to it, yes?

…..
* For comparison, “I Want My Maypo” posts 112,000 results on Google. Or “Where’s the beef?”, another famous 1980’s campaign for Wendy’s returns 176,000 (or if you only use that phrase, which has been appropriated for all sorts of uses, you get 2,640,000).

"What do you expect us to do with this piece of shit logo?!"

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 16:44:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

“I Want My MTV!” from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Before “I Want My MTV!” Part 1.

I was torn.

My mentor, Dale Pon, had suggested me for my job at MTV Networks (née Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company). He was the creator of distinctive, innovative, and successful campaigns for radio stations across the United States, was a creative and media wizard, if a little, um, intense, and had worked at WNBC radio with my boss Bob Pittman, MTV programming chief. Dale had recently started an ad agency, LPG/Pon with advertising legend George Lois.

John Lack, our executive vice president, was very close to Ogilvy & Mather, the advertising agency for American Express, our half owner. My first exposure to the idea that advertising could be actually be smart came from reading founder David Ogilvy’s “Confessions of an Advertising Man.” (If fact, it was one of four books I gave to my young staff members.)

I wanted Dale to do the MTV advertising, convinced that only he understood how to promote media, a completely —completely— different beast from tradition consumer products. John wanted Ogilvy. They were the classy choice, and I had to admit it would make us feel, well, bigger. Better? Not so sure.

John won; he was the big boss, and Bob wasn’t going to fight him on this one yet. I became the MTV point person, but that was only a little good, because we had a corporate infrastructure above us that thought they should control the communications of the networks. From the first day it was a complete struggle.

We get to the first meeting, and the account team wants to convince us (me) that they deserve the account. They wheel in their resident hipster copywriter, wearing his green and yellow satin tour jacket. He says something about Bruce Springsteen. I point out that Bruce made the decision to rock not to write ads. This relationship was not going to end well.

Our first big fight was over the logo. Big agencies, especially O&M, wanted to control everything about the marketing of a product, which often included actually creating and naming a product. That was not going to happen with us. We’d battled for months about the name (reaching the no-one’s-happy compromise of MTV: Music Television) and I’d already been working on the logo with my childhood friend Frank Olinsky and his studio Manhattan Design for almost a year.

So an Ogilvy meeting happens where I tell them about the logo and why it’s awesome (this is after weeks of disagreement with our company suits who succeeded in killing the thing once before we swept it out of the fire). They all stare at us silently while the senior account guy pulls out a xeroxed “Ogilvy’s Rules for a Great Logo.” Checking off the points one by one I proudly point out that we’ve broken eight of the 11 rules. Perfect for rock’n’roll network!

After that the ads they did for us generally sucked. It was bad enough they kept trying to make logo look “good,” but they said nothing and lacked everything. No snap, crackle, or particularly, pop.

When it came time to do a TV ad, they came up with some thing with fancy computer generated purple grids that was supposed to be cool. I didn’t really know what a “national” commercial as supposed to be (I’d only produced local radio station spots for Dale) and everyone else seemed to think it was OK, so I went along.

When it came time to make the spot I was in the production company’s office (what was a production company anyhow? That’s how green we were) in the Hollywood Hills and I hear the producer say to the agency, “What do you want me to do with this logo?”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“We don’t do comic book stuff here. What do you expect us to do with this piece of shit logo?!”

You can imagine the screaming match that ensued, enough to make a wrestler blush. We came to an impasse, they made their junky (expensive) commercial, and somehow I became fast friends with the producer Sherry McKenna (now, the co-founder of Oddworld).

The commercial ran, no one noticed, we fired the famous Ogilvy and & Mather, and the company reluctantly agreed with Bob and me that we engage Dale and LPG/Pon.

Before "I Want My MTV!" Part 2

Wed, 24 Mar 2010 13:18:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

MTV had been on the air for six months and we’d fired the storied Ogilvy & Mather and hired Dale Pon’s LPG/Pon (a joint venture with George Lois) at my insistence. Now they were presenting their first trade campaign for advertisers and cable operators and my first big decision was being called into question.

America is fast becoming a land of Cable Brats!

“It’s audacious! Outrageous! Just like you guys.” George Lois was a big talker, a big seller, and a bit of a smart ass, loudmouth. He was also smart. Even though I knew he designed the “cable brats” thing, but my brilliant mentor Dale, who’d never steered me wrong creatively or strategically, was behind the whole thing. His ex-girlfriend, and now one of my best friends, Nancy Podbielniak, had written the copy. Besides, I agreed with Dale that generally trade advertising was a waste of time and bigger waste of money. Consumers were where it’s at, and weren’t all the tradesmen we were hopping to reach consumers too? If we had a knockout punch of consumer advertising our job would be done. I knew he was keeping his powder dry for the big show.

America is fast becoming a land of Cable Brats!

There’s an incorrigible new generation out there.
They grew up with music.
They grew up with television. So we put ‘em both together — for the Cable Brats, and they’re taking over America!
They’re men and women in the 18 to 34 age range advertisers want most — plus the increasingly important 12 to 17 segement.
The Cable Brats buy all the high volume, high ticket, high tech, high profit products of modern America.
They’re strong-willed, cunning, crazily impulsive — an advertiser’s peerless audience.
They look and listen and they want their MTV.
And they buy, buy, buy.

Rock’n’Roll wasn’t enough for them — now they want their MTV. (The exploding 24-hour Video Music Cable Network (and it’s Stereo!)

George was certainly right. It was audacious, and it was a touch outrageous. Somehow, the tone wasn’t quite right, but after the crap Ogilvy had done for us, it was way better.

Besides, hidden in there was the sand grain that was going to lead us to our pearl.

moth: The first ten minutes of MTV. From Wikipedia: On...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 13:10:00 -0500

moth:

The first ten minutes of MTV.

From Wikipedia:

On August 1, 1981, at 12:01 a.m., MTV: Music Television launched with the words “Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll,”spoken by John Lack. Those words were immediately followed by the original MTV theme song, a crunching guitar riff written by Jonathan Elias and John Petersen, playing over a montage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. With the flag having a picture of MTVs logo on it. MTV producers Alan Goodman and Fred Seibert used this public domain footage as a conceit, associating MTV with the most famous moment in world television history. Seibert said they had originally planned to use Neil Armstrong’s “One small step” quote, but lawyers said Armstrong owns his name and likeness, and Armstrong had refused, so the quote was replaced with a beeping sound. At the moment of its launch, only a few thousand people on a single cable system in northern New Jersey could see it.

Weirdest part for me is Adam Curry’s line at the end: “combining the best of TV with the best of radio.” There’s been a line in Next New Networks’ materials since we began: “combining the best of TV with the best of the web.” No coincidence that Fred was involved with both.

I rarely reblog here, but this clip seemed like a good bet. (Though that last VJ was actually Mark Goodman.)

My mentors: Lilliana & George Seibert

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 16:02:00 -0500

George & Lilliana Seibert at the Harbor Pharmacy, 1958

Most of the mentors I’ve written about have been work companions and no one I’ve worked with has had the same impact as George and Lilliana Seibert. It would have been their 60th anniversary today (George passed away in 2002) so it’s a great day to honor them.

Yes, Lilliana and George are my parents. And yes, most people can point to their parents as the prime influence on them, but I’m not going to completely bore you with too much personal biography. This blog is focused on work and my folks were my first bosses at their suburban pharmacy. The takeaway from my first work experience has shaped most of what I’ve done since. I picked up my complete love of work with them, and found out that for me “work to live” is not an option. “Live to work” is much more like it. I didn’t become a workaholic —I like my personal time as much as anyone— but I absorbed the real joy of the process of work itself.

I worked* in their store for more than 20 years. Along the way I picked up the building blocks of everything I’ve done ever since (as my parents had from their fathers’ local stores). Of course, there was the simple stuff that lots of kids learn at home, like responsibility and politeness. And small business basics. But working with them side by side went a lot deeper. The measures of an outfit’s viability. The service of a local enterprise to it’s customers and the community.

When I got into the television business it didn’t dawn on me that lessons learned in a mom & pop drugstore would have any direct usefulness. But, one day in 1985 my partner and I were sitting down with the president of Nickelodeon, and I was trying to convey a particular scheduling strategy, where we’d take a bunch of our network IDs that we’d run the sprocket holes off of and just switch them to a different daypart. It would save money on new ID production, and the network would get new dose of freshness.

“How do you know about this stuff?” The president knew I was as relatively new to television.

I explained to her a lesson my mother had taught me at the store. A basket of sale lipsticks had stopped moving, so my mom just placed the basket at the opposite end of the counter. An hour later they were selling again. Transposing the exercise to media placement seemed like a good idea to me, nutty as it was. By the way, it worked on television too, and it was only the first of dozens of surprising tips I could put to good use.

Two decades in the family store netted me oceans more than can recounted here. Not to short shrift our home at all; my two sisters and I had a wonderful, warm life together with my parents. But, suffice it to say, when it comes to work, I was one lucky dude.

…..

* The Harbor Pharmacy opened in suburban New York in 1954, and I started “working” right away. Babysitting was expensive and though most of what was given to me was busywork I took it as seriously as a child could. Stocking shelves was my first important duty, but I rapidly ascended to checking out customers (a classic cash register is way better than a toy for a boy). Accompanying the delivery “boys” (men from 16 to 60) on their rounds was the highlight of my day (not theirs, I’d bet), and my driver’s license led to my next promotion. By the time of my last stint in 1977, I was writing and designing their local Pennysaver ads.

** A quick word about the modern American Gothic photograph up top. Early in our pharmacy’s life a trade magazine was writing a story and sent an art director to supervise the photography. My father, a complete and proud professional, felt the proper attire for a business owner was a shirt and tie, which he wore at work every day for over thirty years. But, the art director thought that the appropriate pharmacist’s attire was the same lab smock it had been for decades. He insisted my father conform. It irritated Dad forever.

Producing records.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:39:00 -0500

Click here for more posts about music and producing records.

At 19 I was determined to become a record producer rather than a chemist (my plan since I was six). I’d played music since I was seven, The Beatles had infected me at 12, and the excitement of recorded music completely enveloped me by the time I was working at my college radio station. I was the only one to jump at the chance to record visiting jazz musicians, even though my interest was popular music. When Gunter Hampel, a German avant-garde multi-intrumentalist, released an album I had engineered, and put my name of the cover (!), I was was hooked.

It was an explosive era of independent record labels and my new friend, local record retailer Tom Pomposello, and I decided we’d start a label. We’d release great, underappreciated blues and jazz, and not incidentially, Tom’s solo music too. Our 1972 debut album on Oblivion Records came from tapes I’d recorded when Tom guested with country blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell. We had an great time and released some amazing music. Five more releases and our lack of capital, lack of acumen, and insufficient entrepeneurial zeal closed the label in 1976.

Now I had the bug, and during my short career the demand for my production services grew enough that I produced almost thirty albums (one with a Grammy nomination), many of them for the tiny New York independent Muse Records.

For most of the jazz ‘producing’ was a misnomer, it was actually ‘recording supervision.’ I mean, what was an a rock’n’roll playing, 26 year old kid from the suburbs going to tell a master musician to do? Play faster? Better? The records weren’t always what I would’ve wanted, but they reflected the vision of the artist. That was my job.

All the magazine articles about producers celebrated activist visionaries like Phil Spector, but artist oriented folks Jerry Wexler, George Martin and Alfred Lion were the ones I admired most. They became the kind of models I carried forward with me to filmmaking.

Alas, I never found my way into the pop world I coveted. And therefore, no surprise, I couldn’t make a decent living the way I was going. I slowly, reluctantly, started to morph the dream.

My complete discography

Oblivion Records

Some of my independent record productions

A brief history of Oblivion Records.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:38:00 -0500

Click here for more posts about music and producing records.

In late 1971 my new friend Tom Pomposello and I decided to start a record company to record his music, and so I could become an instant record producer (it was easier than convincing some big company to let me do it). He was 21, married with a small child, and owned a local hippie record store in Huntington, New York. I was 19, single, a college student in New York City. By the time it was over, five years later, we had six world class releases.

We both emerged from the pop and rock fans of the 69s, but had broadened. Tom loved the blues. I loved jazz, especially the avant garde variety. We both wanted to do more to promote artists we believed in.

And it was the early 70s, the height of don’t trust anyone over 30 and the man can’t bust our music, and indie record culture was starting to flourish again.

It seemed like a smart move not to start with the unknown Tom’s record —especially since we hadn’t figured out exactly what it would be yet— but we had a viable, commercial tape we’d recorded of college concert star Mississippi Fred McDowell (with Tom on bass guitar) at the Village Gaslight in Greenwich Village. With the sales of this sure fire hit, we’d be on our way to the big time of indie labels [wink]. Our agreement was to make blues records for Tom and jazz records for me. We had a passion for underexposed American music and we were certain we’d be the two to bring unknown artists to prominence.

The only question that lingered was where we would get the outrageous sum of $1800 to press the first 2000 copies? Tom came to rescue by bringing in our third partner Richard (Dick) Pennington, a friend of his from, uh, somewhere (I never actually found out). Dick stepped right up with enthusiasm and verve and stayed until our fourth album when he and Tom fell explosively out over something neither of them ever revealed.

Mississippi Harmonica" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2045/2170238864_582d4b9f4d_m.jpg"/> Charles Walker & the New York City Blues Band" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2237/2138185029_240baa9c5c_m.jpg"/> Livin' High Off Nickels and Dimes" src="http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2236/2138966382_e40c128058.jpg"/>
Tom chose the name “Oblivion” off of the back of a Leo Kottke LP and we released Obivion OD-1 —’Mississippi Fred McDowell: Live in New York‘— in 1972; altogether we put out six records in five years (it still feels like 100 records in 1000 years) before we flamed out with musical dignity intact. Tom’s album was our last, so we had fulfilled our mission.

You can listen to the complete Oblivion Records library (and bonus tracks) here and get more of the stories behind the records here.

All the Oblivion records.

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:31:00 -0500

My Oblivion Records partner Tom Pomposello and I were incredibly proud of our discography of releases. We were two young guys in the thrall of the world’s music explosion everywhere around us and we wanted to be part of it. (Just click on the covers and you’ll be able to play the complete collection.)

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Mississippi Fred McDowell Live in New York OD-1 (1972)

Not only our first record, but our most celebrated and successful. Fred McDowell had become a country blues world touring sensation in the late 60s and early 70s, and Tom, budding suburban bluesman, became his pupil and bassist. This was Fred’s last recording before his untimely passing.

…..

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Johnny Woods Mississippi Harmonica o#2 (1972)

Our only single came during Tom’s last trip to Mississippi when he asked Fred McDowell to locate harpist Johnny Woods, Fred’s sometimes duet partner. They found Mr. Woods at his farmhand living quarters, and in true field recording style, Tom took out his trusty Panasonic cassette machine, gave Johnny one of his Hohner harmonicas, and recorded two songs. Then he whipped out his Kodak Instamatic, posed Johnny in front of Fred’s Pontiac. Now we had enough for a record.

…..

Marc Cohen, John Abercrombie, Clint Houston, Jeff Williams Friends OD-3 (1973)

When Marc Cohen (now Copeland) first showed up at my college radio station he played an awesome mainstream alto saxophone. So he shocked me the day he came in with a trio wired up and echoplexed I felt like I’d seen a future first defined by the Tony Williams Lifetime. We made a deal and he brought back a quartet, and before it was branded we called his music ‘electronic jazz.’ No jazz-rock here, just plugged in supercharged jazz.

…..

Charles Walker & the New York City Blues Band" width="100%"/>
Charles Walker & the NYC Blues Band Blues From The Apple OD-4 (1974)

Tom really wanted to discover a bluesman. Which was really hard to do in New York City. So a talented blues hustler called Charles Walker kept turning up musicians and songs and we kept recording them, for more than a year. Our smallest selling album, with one of my favorite tracks.

…..

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Joe Lee Wilson Livin’ High Off Nickels & Dimes OD-5 (1974)

Never paying much attention to mainstream jazz singers, I initially paid no attention to the hubbub surrounding a session I missed one summer in 1972 at WKCR. But then I heard the tape. Joe Lee Wilson was great.

The record caused a sensation and became a turntable hit at the biggest New York jazz station, but we were too inexperienced and broke to work it properly. A great record faded again into oblivion.

…..

Honest Tom Pomposello OD-6 (1975)

Tom Pomposello, my great friend and the artist that inspired our record company. And our final release. Recorded in bits and pieces over four years in dozens of locations, with Tom’s truth telling slogan •file under: Suburban Blues.

Honest Tom Pomposello: Your Candidate for Receiver of Taxes

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 09:30:00 -0500

Tom Pomposello was my great friend and partner.

HONEST TOM POMPOSELLO
YOUR CANDIDATE FOR RECEIVER OF TAXES

Hi there! My name is Thomas (Honest Tom) Pomposello. I’d like to cordially inform all my friends that I am the Huntington Tea Party’s candidate for Receiver of Taxes in the 1971 local elections. If things are as they seem, this year promises to be one that will be full of surprises in Our Town. So may the best man lose (why should this year be any different?), and I’ll see you all at the polls.

Yours intact,
Honest Tom Pomposello

P.S.: Here are a few of my numerous qualifications - -

• I AM INDISPUTABLY THE LARGEST PERSON TO RUN FOR THE OFFICE OF RECEIVER OF TAXES IN THE LAST 40 YEARS. At 6’0” even in boots with one-half inch heels and 267½ lbs. without those same boots, it would seem that this be more than an unfounded claim. However, in the interest of fairness, upon request I can present factual data. (Actually the closest contender I suppose would be Mrs. Rosemary Bacon who held the office from 1936 - 1938; but even though she did tend a bit toward the chub, in reality she is little competition for me.)

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO HAS THE UNCONDITIONAL SUPPORT OF MISSISSIPPI FRED McDOWELL. I’m not sure what actual value this has since Fred can’t even vote for me (being an out of state resident and all that) but you’ve got to admit, it certainly does look impressive.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO FRED SEIBERT WOULD EVEN CONSIDER PUTTING ON HIS RADIO SHOW. I’ve been of Fred’s show three times now, twice by proxy.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO IS REALLY CLEAN-CUT. My mother says so.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE MATURE ENOUGH TO REMEMBER BOTH THE “RUDY KAZODEE” AND “CRUSADER RABBIT” TV SHOWS. In fact, in college I did my Honors Thesis on this very subject.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO IS NOT ASHAMED TO ADMIT THAT WHEN I TAKE SHOWERS, I DRAW CLOSED THE BATH CURTAINS. Perfunctory.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO REALLY TAKES THIS ELECTION SERIOUSLY. I need not prove this to you further - - simply re-read my above qualifications.

• I AM THE ONLY CANDIDATE WHO WOULD DELIBERATELY PUBLISH A FACT SHEET THAT IS IN ACTUALITY HALF LIES. Perhaps I should re-phrase that. I am the only candidate in this election who would ADMIT to deliberately publishing a fact sheet that is in actuality half lies.

You'll never look at music the same way again.

Mon, 04 Jan 2010 22:03:00 -0500

MTV: The Making of a Revolution, written by Tom McGrath

By the mid-1990s, a teenager who’d had his mind blown by the music video visual feast was old enough to be a damn good writer and reporter, so Scranton’s Tom McGrath (now the Executive Editor of Philadephia Magazine) decided to literally write the book. MTV: The Making of a Revolution told the whole story (it’s sadly now out of print, maybe since MTV: Music Television has become MTV) behind and in front of the camera.

As I remember, Mr. McGrath’s reporting was fairly complete and, all in all, accurate, in and of itself often a rarity in media reporting. He made me and the work my teams did look good, which made my mother and father very happy. Me too.

Click here for more of my posts about MTV.

My mentors: Nick Moy

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 21:19:00 -0400

Nick Moy, New York City, circa 1975

To call such a buddy a “mentor” might seem an overstatement (he’ll probably find it silly), but it’s safe to say that I wouldn’t be in the career I have without Nick Moy.

The son of two pharmacists, I entered school planning on a career as a chemist. Six weeks in I turned to my lab partner and said, “I like the Beatles more than this.” And a lifetime obsession was over, synthesized into a new one. Marching over to the college ra dio station, I volunteered and began indulging in media overload. Though my tastes veered towards pop, rock, and soul, the station specialized in classical, folk, news, and jazz. It couldn’t be helped, my knowledge instantly exploded.

Nick, his wife Sherry Wolf, and I have been great friends since we met at WKC R-FM in 1969. When Nick and I became roommates four years later, our conversations ranged from politics to music, and though he was the station’s best announcer and classical DJ, his interests exceeded expansive, with a deep grasp of mainstream jazz, R&B and funk, and a solid understanding and attraction to the avant-garde.

More conservative in life approach than me (understatement; I was an undisciplined jumble of nerve endings shooting off in every direction at once) Nick was always open to new ideas, with non-judgmental encouragement to the dumbest thoughts, and an eager companion to almost anything I would cook up. By 1973, we were rooming together in Morningside Heights, where I was running my half of a record company out of our apartment and the college radio studio. Nick had a real job in the public policy world, working for weasel-to-be Dick Morris, making $5000 a year. I was barely earning a dollar, picking up day work here and there while I tried to make the record company a success, and recording anyone and anything, mainly new jazz musicians, usually for no fee.

Most roommates, even friends, would have thrown me out. But, Nick picked up the rent when I didn’t have it (pretty often), bought the groceries and cooked them up (not a horrible burden; I think I was only eating one meal a day then). My temporary quid pro quo was that every once in a while I’d get us some free passes to a club or a record company showcase (we saw everyone from Tom Waits to Charlie Rich to Cecil Taylor.) I think my credits helped him get the Grammy discount for piles of new LPs every month, which enriched us both. From disco to Bach, our apartment was the required stop for our friends to check out the new culture. (One day, percussionist Andrew Cyrille came by for me to record his African drums for his first album. Luckily, we weren’t evicted.)

For five years, Nick Moy was right there for me. Smart as a whip, he prodded my thinking further than any place it had ever been. Funny and dry, he rarely was without a quip when it was needed. Patient and supportive past measure, he was virtually my patron, giving me the room I needed to develop my skills, insights, and fortitude, the space necessary to make my way in a world that I wasn’t sure really existed.

There’s a straight line from my life with Nick right through to cartoons and the internet. Over the years, we tried to keep track, and eventually (very eventually) I paid Nick back the money he laid out for me. But, just the money, the other stuff was beyond value.

My mentors: Ralph Ginzburg (?)

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 20:24:00 -0400

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It’s hard to call Ralph Ginzburg a mentor of mine. I’m not sure he talked to me more than once, and after a few months on the night shift at his magazine Moneysworth, he had me fired. But a mentor to me he indeed was. Without either of us knowing it, the path I started at Ralph’s would continue for 15 years.

By the time I went to work for his publication in the summer of 1976, Ralph was on his last publication. He was notorious for being convicted and jailed for obscenity relating to his hard cover magazine Eros (though there were some who said he was less obscene than just completely annoying). Moneysworth was to be his last hurrah.

I worked in the production department. Ralph was around often, talking loudly and smartly about everything from design to circulation to advertising. All I had to do was absorb it all. It was the place I saw first hand and up close how design, language, marketing, and promotion worked in the real world.

Ralph showed me (inadvertently) the practical meaning of graphic design (the only things I knew were from reading my girlfriend’s book about Milton Glaser); he talked so much, and so eloquently about Herb Lubalin, I felt like I’d actually worked with him myself. And watching him lay out his trademark full page New York Times ads (like the ones above and below) was an education by itself, about design and typography.

But, it was really in the area of writing, strategy, and direct selling that I got my Ginzburgian education. I won’t belabor the details, but let me tell me you… He’d sit down directly at the typesetting machine (like a big IBM Selectric) and, in real time, type out the kind of ad that’s posted here. He’d intone the sentences out loud as he thought of them. He’d explain why he was writing what, even as he was typing something else entirely. He’d explain his philosophy of selling, direct selling, through the ads, why certain words worked better than others to grab subscriptions, and why he used the extra thick dotted lines around the return coupon.

I made a lifelong friend at Moneysworth. And I learned a lot. It doesn’t get any better even though I was fired. Ralph Ginzburg was a MF, in every way.

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MTV: Music Television, The Logo

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:12:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

The “first MTV logo, designed by Manhattan Design

The mutating MTV logo, 1981, designed by Manhattan Design

I was the first Creative Director of MTV: Music Television, joining the parent company (then called Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company) May 5, 1980. My boss, Bob Pittman asked me to oversee all of the original production and programming for the fledging cable television channel (who had even heard of cable TV as anything other than a service for rural audiences?) though I’d never seen a television camera.

The first job? Establish a vocabulary, “voice,” and look for the thing. The first move? Hire my oldest and best friends, Alan Goodman and Frank Olinsky.

In my MTV office, 1981. Photo by Alan Goodman

As far as I can remember, the article below was the first written on the MTV logo (designed by Pat Gorman, Frank Olinsky & Patti Rogoff); it’s from June 1982, about 10 months after the network launched. My favorite part is the illustration of the what was essentially the “first” MTV logo (illustrated above). Notice the section in the article on Nickelodeon was about their redesign, but that was only two years before Alan Goodman and I oversaw a the next change (designed by Tom Corey and Scott Nash) that lasted over 25 years.

(You can read more about my adventures with MTV here or at The Fred/Alan Archive.

New Network Look: Hairy, Fat

Ten years after: The MTV logo examined.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:10:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

“Over the Edge with MTV”

It’s funny, but for all the influence the MTV graphics have had, not much has been written about them. Probably because we were all media people, rather than directly from the graphic design community, we never really worked the press on behalf of ourselves.

But the Oscar winning animator Jon Canemaker is also a dedicated historian. He wrote his thoroughly researched story in the September/October 1992 Print Magazine about the logo and its animation ten years after the channel’s debut.

You can read the original article (complete with illustrations) above. Here’s the entire text:

Over the Edge with MTV

By John Canemaker

The decade-old video music channel has profoundly influenced pop culture, in part through its dealing, innovative animation.

The broadcast phenomenon known as MTV was launched in 1981 by Warner Communications and American Express with a certain amount of skepticism and worry about its potential fur success. Robert Pittman, then Warner/Amex’s 27-year-old director of 24-hour cable service programming (now president and CEO of Quantum Media), had sold his corporate bosses on a concept for a video music channel “with no programs, no beginning, no middle, no end.”

After a decade, there is no doubting MTV’s enormous success and impact on popular culture. It has influenced fashion. graphic design, music, and movies, as weil as our attitudes about television and advertising, and even our concept of time. The idea for a TV music service was not new, hut Pittman’s vision and its execution were. “We realized that almost all TV was narrative in form,” wrote Pittman in the Los Angeles Times last year. “The appeal of music, however, has nothing to do with that structure. Music is about emotion and attitude—it makes you feel. It moves you. Within the creation of MTV. we changed the form of TV to fit the form of music, as opposed to trying to fit music into a narrative structure.

In opposition to the practice of the big three television networks, which broadcast a variety of fare to attract the widest possible general audience, MTV would “narrowcast,” targeting an audience between the ages of 12 and 35—that is. baby boomers and the generation that came after them. The music would be their music: rock-‘n’- roll, and all that that implies.

“It was meant to drive a 55-year-old person crazy,” MTV Chairman/CEO [Tom Freston] told the Washington Post in 1989. Conceived as a free-form, open-ended visual showcase of rock-‘n’- roll. MTV needed a graphic image that bespoke youth and anti-authority/anti-establishment attitudes, something forever-changing, ever-evolving, and totally cool—on-the-edge and in-your-face. The famous MTV logo—numerous 10-second animated station identification spots seen throughout each day for over a decade—conveys all of the above.

Constantly layered and manipulated, the basic blocky M overlapped by a thin, spray-painted TV remains the same, a logo that is now among an exclusive pantheon of instantly recognizable symbols, such as Coca-Cola bottles, Mickey Mouse, and the CBS eye.

The development of the logo and other MTV graphics, and the extensive use ol animation on MTV, was both organic and pragmatic, according to Fred Seibert and Alan Goodman, partners in the advertising agency Fred/Alan, Inc., which produces on- air promos, sales films, and network identifications for MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH-1, among other clients. Seven years ago, Seibert and Goodman were the team that defined, as Seibert recently explained, “the voice, the sound, the content, the ideas behind MTV the reasons it was important.

Both men come from recording and radio backgrounds: Seibert produced jazz records before Robert Pittman hired him in 1980 to create promotions and programming for the 24-hour Movie Channel, the Warner/Amex cable service that preceded MTV. When Seibert volunteered lo work simultaneously on the proposed music video channel, he brought on Goodman, who had run the copy department for five years at CBS Records’ in-house agency, which made album covers, advertisements for radio, and “promotional films that became known as music videos.”

“We grew up in a time when rock-‘n’-roll was characterized by album covers, as was the culture of out generation,” says Seibert. “These rovers defined what we liked to look at, as well as what we believed in. We milted to create little animated album covers for the new generation.”

“The MTV logo and animation,” says Goodman, “had so much to do with accidents, with ratings. and the limits of technology at the lime, rather than any artistic vision we had.” For example, the 10-second running lime of the ID logos resulted from the inability, of the old 2” videotape carts (custom-altered to play in stereo) to cycle cassettes faster. Ten seconds was “interminable” to Seibert and Goodman, who originally wanted three- to four-second IDs, as short as those heard on radio.

They needed an ID that would be memorable to viewers who, in pre-electronic ratings days, wrote down what they watched on TV in a diary. “We were competing against 10, 20 channels and knew We were going to compete against 50, although they didn’t exist yet,” says Seibert. “We knew we had to create an MTV not for 1980, but for 1990 We had to reach out of the TV set, shake every viewer, and say ‘Watch us!”

In developing the image, they considered the nature of rock-‘n’-roll—always in a slate of evolution—and its audience, which is always growing up with it and out of it. A certain anti-establishment attitude was apparent among the young turks who created MTV, must of whom, like Pittman, Seibert, and Goodman, were in their twenties. “We didn’t want in follow,” explains Seibert. “The hell with that. We wanted to lead with our generation. Why hire some designer or art director who graphically defined the last generation? Let’s create our own look.”

A kinetic, out-sized symbol glimmered undefined in their imaginations, but because neither idea man could draw, Seibert and Goodman sought a graphic design studio. There was only one such place, they felt, that could make their ideas visible: Manhattan Design, a small office run by friend (Frank Olinsky and Pat Gorman) behind a Ti Chi workshop in Greenwich Village. “Their studio was as big as this table. You tell Warner Brothers and American Express that this is who is going to define their logo—they had a cow!” Seibert exclaims.

Manhattan Design produced about 500 logo designs. “They kept coming back with more.” recalls Goodman. “The closest to being accepted was a squeezable musical note grabbed in the ass by a Mickey Mouse-style hand and the notes came out of the fingers. We liked it mainly because it was active. The notes were secondary. Our logo, we thought, should have action, unlike the CBS eye.” Goodman had, in fact, contacted the “CBS logo policeman,” who lead him a list of rules pertaining to the CBS symbol, e.g., it never moves; it never changes: and it can never be put on gym bags or hats, only on pens (or salesmen and top clients. Goodman went down the menu and said, ‘We’re not going to do this, we’re not going to do that, we’re not going to do this.”

The big M design was on the bottom of a pile of the last 10 sketches submitted, with the TV originally graftitied in, punk- like. “We said that one’s it. Go and develop it more, Frank came back with lots of color treatments. ‘Here’s one.’ he’d say, ‘that looks as if the M hadn’t shaved and the TV was shaving cream: here’s one where it’s a taxi with yellow stripes; here’s one with the bottom like linoleum; here’s one all spattered.’ We liked each one better than the last,” says Goodman.

“It filled the screen and was dimensionalized from the first. It reminds us of Superman comics and the 20th Century-Fox logo. It’s grand, big. The spray-painted TV implied action. There was the M and something was done to it. The shadow implied dimension and 3D image. It was more than a 2-D image. It was a logo that willingly accepted juvenile delinquency!”

At the same lime the logo was being developed, Seibert and Goodman were creating short snippets of sound to match the as-yet-undefined IDs. “For the most visually stunning network ever lo launch, we decided to make it sound-based. Build the pictures on top of it, like cartoons,” relates Goodman. With no idea how the music would be used, they kept working with musicians until they liked what they heard for 10 seconds and added it to a master reel.

“Again, it was pragmatic.” Goodman explains. “We’re sound guys, We started in radio and we know music. TV is a talking toaster, if it doesn’t sound right, who cares what it looks like.” Seibert concurs: “II we put brilliant sound together with medium-to-good pictures, we’d have something great. If we put great sound with great pictures, everyone would salute.”

Seibert and Goodman pinned the different versions of the MTV logo on the wall for days and thought about them. Minutes before their big presentation meeting with the powers-that-be at Warner/Amex, “we decided to use them all at once, all the time.” Seibert recalls. One of the marketing heads (an older man) balked (“I hate this! It’s a piece of junkl”), but he was overruled. “Running on pure adrenaline and instinct.” the creative team had six weeks before launch date to come up with nine videos versions of the logo.

They chose animation as a medium for yet another practical reason. Explains Seibert, “Virtually all the videos at that time were in live-action. We knew our M had to be different to stand out.” The pre-packaged sound biles were to be handed out to selected animation studios. The only problem was that Seibert and his colleagues didn’t know any animators. “We knew Disney’s name, that was all,” he recalls. They tailed in 100 sample reels from trade paper ads and “hated one more than the other.”

A few rock- ‘n’ -roll spots using Xerography (Xeroxed photos manipulated under the camera frame-by-frame) appeared on a reel from a small company in San Francisco called Colossal Pictures. “All of a sudden.” says Seibert, “everything else was Doc Severinson and this was Little Richard. These guys had the beat! They got it! We jumped up and down. ‘It can be done!’” They sought reels from other little-known independent animators, instead of large established cartoon shops, who wanted a package of spots for big bucks.

“Anything else that anyone was doing, we weren’t going to do,” says Seibert. Indeed, this idea became a kind of rallying cry. They surveyed the standard cel techniques used in the studios and went in the other direction- finding animators who specialized in alternative frame-by frame designs using clay, cut-out, puppets, and pastels, crayon, or watercolors on paper. “We wanted to do what everybody else was absolutely ignoring.” Budgets were small and schedules tight, but the independents eagerly undertook the work, for MTV offered a rare national showcase for personal, quirky, non-traditional animation.

Colossal Pictures filtered a group of West Coast animators through their company to MTV, to join a growing number of colleagues from the East and points north, including Eli Noyes, Broadcast Arts, George Griffin, Jerry Lieberman, and Joey Album in New York, Olive Jar in Boston, and International Rocketship in Vancouver, “We wanted on-the-fringe people, like us, People we felt comfortable with,” says Seibert. “To this day, we have our closest relationships with the animation community.”

Ironically. “Man on the Moon,” one of the most famous of the earliest animated logos, with a now-familiar electric guitar riff, was animated by Buzzco, a commercial animation studio. “At the time.” says Seibert, “we shared space with Buzz Potemkin, head of Buzzco, and we liked him. We said to him we felt MTV was as big a TV event as ever happened; it was going to change TV that much. We had this idea of copying the biggest TV event in world history—the man walking on the moon—usurp it to ourselves, the juvenile delinquents of MTV,” Potemkin agreed to produce the spot, which used public domain NASA footage of a rocket blasting off, cross-dissolving into stills of the 1969 landing on the moon. The American flag was cut out and various types of MTVs were substituted. The original piece, intercut with coming attractions, was 10 seconds, so Seibert and Goodman looped one of their prepackaged, free-form music pieces (a guitar solo) three times.

Over the last 10 years, the popularity of animation on MTV has been enhanced by top rock performers using the medium creatively in videos. The increased number of videos using animation, and using non-traditional frame-by-frame graphics, is a direct result of the audiovisual impact of the off-the-wall I0-second logos.

Among the more memorable videos in terms of imagery and an impressive variety of unusual animation techniques are “Sledgehammer,” in which Peter Gabriel’s face and body and other three-dimensional objects are pixilated; “Opposites Attract,” which features Paula Abdul’s tap adagio with a cartoon alley cat (modeled nostalgically on Gene Kelly’s workout with Jerry the Mouse); “Harlem Shuffle.” which intercuts Mick Jagger with Bob Clampett-like cartoon cats: “Hard Woman,” in which Jagger appears with a computer-generated female; and “Leave Me Alone,” in which Michael Jackson combines photo animation and Xerography of himself and Elizabeth Taylor in a surreal Jacksonland amusement park.

MTV’s decade of continuous showcasing of all kinds of animation has been an important component in its public acceptance, which is at an all-time high. Always on the lookout lor things other people are ignoring. MTV itself continues lo compete with its own brand of on-the-edge animation.

John Payson, director of creative, and Abby Terkuhle, VP-creative, are currently responsible for all MTV on-air promotions, as well as the overall look and packaging of ongoing and new programs, contests, and image productions, including network IDs and an breaks. Their commitment to animation on MTV is strong.

“Animation is a direct line from the director’s brain to the screen.” says Payson. “It’s become a viable adult entertainment medium. There’s no limn to what the imagination ran do.” adds Terkuhle, who keeps abreast of current animation designs and artists by attending international animation festivals around the world. The team produces a dozen or more logos annually, though now says Terkuhle. “we have global talents to lap into, including MTV Europe. MTV Asia. MTV Brazil, and soon,” international affiliates that have been established with MTV’s growing success.

Three years ago, Payson and Terkuhle look steps to develop and expand MTV’s animation offerings in a number of imaginative ways. They commissioned “short form” pieces (films longer than 10 seconds) to play between videos, such as the serialized “Stevie and Zorn” by Joe Zorn, “Brute” from Britain’s Mike Smith and Malcolm Bennett, and “Slow Bob in the Lower Dimensions.” from Henry Selick on the West Coast.

With MTV U.S. and MTV Europe, they sponsored an international competition for IDs, and, more recently, animated public service announcements addressing world problems and solutions. Over 600 entries were received, 10 of which will be aired on MTV affiliates throughout the world.

Showcased on late-night weekends is a series originally produced for Nickelodeon. ”The Ren & Stimpy Show.” an anarchic throwback to the wild, stretchy squashy old-Style Warners/Bob Clampett animation beloved by boomers, who have made the show an instant cult favorite.

Most provocative of the current animation projects, however, is MTV’s “Liquid Television,” a half hour animated variety series combining “underground animation, over-the-edge graphics, and stories from beyond the fringe.” Colossal Pictures (the original MTV animation supplier, now a large and diversified animation/live action producer) shopped a proposal for an animated magazine first to HA! and then to MTV. With changes, “it was perfect for us,” says Terkuhle. “sort of a melting pot of different animators showcasing what we were doing in short forms and IDs in a half-hour show.”

Now in its second season, “Liquid Television.” with both self-contained and serialized segments, pushes the edge in animation looks, content, and format. Techniques are dazzlingly eclectic, ranging from traditional cel, 3-D puppets, and clay, to computer paintbox. Fifty-seven different segments composed the first “Liquid TV” shows, with nine Colossal Pictures directors creating segments and 13 other directors providing more. According to the trade journal R.E.R, “All of these pieces had to be woven into a continuous tapestry of animation and sound by Colossal/Music Amex Audio Post-Production,” which is based in San Francisco.

The programming is varied; there are the violent “Dangerous Puppets,” who beats the Stuffing out of one another: and “Aeon flux,” an action/intrigue, slick-looking cel animation serial, described as “non-stop death” by Advertising Age. “Stick Figure Theatre” presents reductions of scenes from famous movies, plays, newsreels, and music videos, performed by a forgotten troop of line drawings from “the other side of the inkwell.” “Invisible Hand’s” is a multi-plane animation by underground comix artist Richard Sala. “Art School Girls of Doom” uses live-action against collaged backgrounds. Clay animator David Daniels’s “Buzz Box” uses the so-called “stratocut” technique, which involves slicing through a lump of clay that has sequential images inside of it. “Ms. Lydia’s Makeover,” by director/writer Gordon Clark, employs Macintosh Photo Shop and Quantel Paintbox to present “Eastern European expert” Ms. Lydia, who weekly enhances the physical features of well-known celebrities with a “beauty computer,” and whose personal credo is “the better you look, the more you see.”

“We’re more into animation than special effects,” Payson told Advertising Age recently. “We’re more interested in animation per se—that direct line to the unconscious. We think simple, which is something I always strive for. Effects for effects sake are not what we’re looking for.”

“Liquid Television’ is the greatest,” comments Alan Goodman. “Payson is brilliant,” says Fred Seibert, “and we could never produce what Abby [Terkuhle] produces. ‘Liquid’ is never going to get big ratings on MTV because for the general audience it’s just a little too out there. But it’ll do well enough, and it maintains the image MTV has to have. Even if they don’l watch it, they have to know its there, they have to know MTV is pushing the boundaries.”

John Payson concurs: “One of ihe things we’ve had to overcome in ibis country it the perception thai animation is for kids, light and fluffy .mil Saturday morning. I like to think MTV is helping to overcome that misconception. We’re able to show the potential lor this kind of storytelling. We’re a small part of a renaissance, something really exciting in the industry-at-large.”

The evolution of a famous logo.

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 15:05:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

Jon Canemaker’s 1992 article on MTV’s graphic design included some of the original logo development I had forgotten about for 30 years, and it makes a nice companion to my first logo post. My creative partner Alan Goodman and I were interviewed, as was the Manhattan Design group that created the logo in the first place. Also, the teams put together by Judy McGrath and Abby Terkuhle are well represented with the great work they did after we left.

Our early 1980 logo choice came before the channel was even named, so we opted for a pure graphic. Manhattan Design thought it was symbolized “fresh squeezed music.” We thought it was fun.

We also liked the idea that musicians (like Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick) could interact with the logo. The network would hold onto the idea even when the logo evolved.

Finally, in the spring of 1981 we settled on a compromise name that no one really liked (really. “MTV” sounded clunky to some and reminded others of the really popular MTM production company), and Manhattan Design quickly tried to integrate the squeezable note into the call letters. Alan and I just as quickly decided we needed to go in another direction. Did I mention we needed to do it quickly?

MD partner Patti Rogoff came up with the “M”. Frank Olinsky drew this “TV” because of the prevailing “new wave” design trends. “M” good, “TV” *gong*.

I barely remember this version. MD’s Pat Gorman says in the article that it was because of “nervous higher ups.” She could be right.

MD’s Frank Olinsky spray painted the “TV”, drips and all, in the Manhattan Design stairwell. The “M” was painted later when someone was worried about the big M not reading. Or something like that.

The MTV Network IDs.

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 10:40:00 -0400

Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert, MTV IDs 1981-83 from fredseibert on Vimeo.

Here’s a compilation of the very first two years of MTV animated logos.

From the minute I went to work for Bob Pittman (he was 25, I was 27) at the Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Company in May of 1980, he told me about the company’s plan for a television channel that would be exclusively rock videos and how he envisioned the TV equivalent of radio jingles: network identifications (‘IDs’) short, wacked out pieces of animation that would reveal the network logo. Not like the staid CBS Eye (“You’re watching CBS.”) but rock’n’roll wrapped up into a little picture explosion.

As soon as we started working on what would become MTV: Music Television a month later I started thinking about these IDs and realized they could be the album covers of the new generation of music fans. For baby boomers the album cover came of age with the first American Beatles album representing every phase of their cultural development. I had bemoaned my lateness to that party, but my self-importance hoped the MTV network IDs could serve the same purpose.

Little did I know they’d achieve an almost equal prominence, and more. For me and Alan Goodman, my first partner in the enterprise (and countless more), they led the way for how we would become the first people to ‘brand’ American cable television networks throughout the 1980s. First as employees at MTV, then for our clients at Fred/Alan, we made over 1000 more of these 10-second visual operas for networks ranging from Nickelodeon and Comedy Central to TMTV in Japan and Lifetime. We worked with some of the greatest indie animators the world had to offer (some we’re still doing projects with today) and started a lot of companies on their way. These IDs might have been the most fun I had during the years we were doing television branding. (And for me, inadvertendly, they began what was to become a late life career change into producing cartoons.)

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

The very first MTV T-shirt.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 22:08:00 -0400

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

“You’ll never look at music the same way again.”

Everything’s always hard at a start-up. Even T-shirts. Believe it or not, even at MTV.

The first time doing everything is torture, and in an organization, it’s organizational torment. No matter who’s in charge of what, everyone wants a say in everything. After all, we want to put our best foot forward to the world, don’t we? So, even a T-shirt (maybe, especially a T-shirt) becomes a matter of earth shattering importance.

I don’t think we’d even launched the channel —we’re probably talking July, 1981— when we realized we needed a T for some trade show or other. And honestly, we didn’t know how MTV worked yet. The vibe hadn’t really started, and we hadn’t finished much of any of the actual on-air work yet. The VJ’s were rehearsing and a set had been built (definitely not the vibe), and we had a logo (barely), but we didn’t really know how the logo worked yet. We knew about the changing colors and all, but nothing else. Our network IDs would explain it to us, but they were still being produced, and our promos were still a mess. The graphic identity was unformed and we wouldn’t understand our own work for over a year.

I’m not sure who designed the shirt, maybe Manhattan Design, the visionaries behind the logo. Alan Goodman, my key creative partner, had written the copy (“You’ll never look at music the same way again.”) for our first pitch tape that spring, and in lieu of anything else (“I Want My MTV” was still a year away) it was our key shout out.

This shirt only lasted for a couple of minutes before the “real” t-shirt came into being. (Don’t ask me why the new one was better, but it lasted for a year or more.)

What’s in a T-shirt? Not much, but, really, everything. We all love this thing.

Click here for my other posts about MTV.

More than 75,000 times.

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:53:00 -0400

Click here for my posts about MTV.

This post is about two animated spots during MTV’s first year. One’s the most popular, the other was only played once, and not on television.

“One Small Step” from fredseibert on Vimeo.

There were very few “ideas” for spots I could claim as mine at MTV. Identifying talent and strategy were my strengths, and I felt from there everything else would flow. But this spot was different; it’s the one for which I feel complete ownership.

Bob Pittman wanted there to be a signal identification at the top and bottom of each and every hour of MTV: Music Television, where the VJ would identify the most important music videos in that half hour. We agreed it would be voice over animation, with stills IDing the songs.

But, what should the animation be? It had to be memorable, repeatable, and not drive a viewer completely crazy. After all, it was going to play almost 17,000 times every year. And we had only 90 days until launch.

It seemed to me MTV had the most stuck up and conceited view of ourselves. We were completely enamored of the fact that we had no TV shows on our TV networks (a new “show” every three minutes, when a new video started). That was world changing, right? (Well, not really. CNN beat us to it. But we conveniently forgot about that.)

My mentor Dale Pon had introduced me to the treasure trove of free images and film from NASA, a public government entity which we all “owned” as US citizens. It would be an inexpensive source of public domain video for us. As a start-up —no one was really sure this thing would work except us— we needed all the financial short-cuts we could find.

“Space is very rock’n’roll,” said senior producer Marcy Brafman.

This spot was going to be our most important. There would be over 30 changing video pieces every hour (music videos, promos, VJs, and commercials) and this would be the only thing all day that was constant. It would get a lot of scrutiny.

So, I thought the “top of the hour” spot should do it’s job and reflect our conceit, be inexpensive, and use our ever changing logo. Oh right, it had to have that indefinable rock attitude.

I thought the simplest way to combine all that stuff was to steal the shine from an already existing piece of video. Let’s take the most famous television moment ever and fold, spindle, and mutilate it to our nefarious purposes.

Our brainstorming turned up some famous, or really infamous, stuff. The biggest one we thought about was the Lee Harvey Oswald shooting by Jack Ruby that was live on television in 1963. Aside from it’s wrongness, it occurred to me that it was only an American moment. We were claiming that MTV would be “the world’s first video music channel.” We needed a world moment.

Right then it came to me. In the summer of ‘69 I was traveling behind the Iron Curtain with my family on the day of the Apollo 11 moonwalk. The streets of dirt poor Sofia, Bulgaria were chocked with walkers looking for apartments with televisions to witness this seemingly impossible achievement of man. Truly, the most memorable worldwide event in TV history.

Let’s cop it, I figured. The worst that could happen is that a generation of kids would grow up wondering why NASA photoshopped in an American flag with MTV’s used to be.

Alan Goodman and I enlisted Buzz Potamkin’s Perpetual Motion Pictures (soon to be Buzzco) to put together the spot. David Sameth produced for Buzz, Candy Kugel illustrated and directed (logos originally designed and illustrated by Manhattan Design), and music was by John Petersen and Jonathan Elias at Elias/Peterson.

By the way, this version of the spot never ran. The day before launch the lawyers informed me we needed, and would never receive, permission from astronaut Neil Armstrong to use his quotation. For launch night only —midnight, August 1, 1981— one of our big bosses did a voice over. John Lack, the executive vice president of our parent, Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company, who’s idea had been the seed from which MTV grew, announced, “Ladies and Gentlemen, rock’n’roll.” John, a huge music fan was proud of his role in jump starting this phase of the evolution. And from 1 a.m. until the very end, the rocket blast sounded with only a ‘beep beep beep’ in place of Mr. Armstrong.

The VMA Moonman

The spot ran more than 75,000 times, through variations of animation and music. Now, it’s sense memory DNA is left in the “Moonman” award from the VMAs (the idea of Manhattan Design’s Frank Olinsky, I believe); no one in the audience knows why it exists. It was only retired, tragically, on January 28, 1986, when the Challenger Shuttle exploded in mid-air. The end of the first space era.

“Freddie Buys It” from fredseibert on Vimeo.

This story’s shorter. A couple of months after the network launch, Bob promoted me to Vice President, MTV’s first (a big deal in those pre-title inflationary days); I was probably whining too much about how hard I was working. He put together a huge congratulatory event and asked Alan to make some video just for the party. He asked director Steve Oakes and producer Peter Rosenthal at Broadcast Arts in Washington DC to modify one of the awesome claymation spots they’d made for us. They put a plasticine me in the spot and ignobly ran me over. I got what I deserved.

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The first MTV bumper sticker.

Sun, 06 Sep 2009 15:52:00 -0400

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I came upon this photo on Flickr of the first MTV bumper sticker (part of a 1981 pre-launch promotional package that included a duffel bag, poster, buttons, and this) and a few trivia things about pricked by attention, completely aside from the fact that it was ‘the first.’

The first approved MTV logo design & colors

• The logo:

Like with everything at the beginning of a venture, everyone thinks they’re an expert. And when it came to the MTV logo, which broke almost every rule in the book, there were even more opinions as to what was wrong with it, and what could be changed to make it right.

In this case, there were many who believed you couldn’t read ‘Music Television’ on the logo design. And that would be tragic; people wouldn’t know what we were! So, they asked me to have the designers to “fix it.” Manhattan Design came up with a decent solution, which was only used this once; expand and extend ‘Music Television’ BIG, for those who couldn’t read.

• “On cable.”:

Almost no one in America knew what cable television was in 1981, and if they did, they thought it was synonymous with HBO (or “the Home Box” as many put it); fewer than 500,000 homes could get MTV when it launched. We had to tell people where to see this weird all music television thing. Was it on CBS? Channel 13? Where?

• “In stereo”:

“A television is a metal box which a crappy speaker in the side,” said the company’s first president.

Hard to believe, but no television sets could play programs in stereo in 1981. We were selling MTV to a generation that only wanted the quality of stereo (hell, we were that generation) and we knew it was a technological must.

We went really far to do this do. “In stereo” was one of the top “promises” we made on the air, producing hundreds of wacky promos to prove our point. Since no TV’s had two speakers, we created our own kit where you could link your stereo record player to your set (“You Can Make Your TV Stereo!!!” named by Alan Goodman), which was sold locally through the cable operator (another way for them to make some dough during a time that was no so assured in the cable biz).

And the music itself. The videos came to us with an believably bad, mono, audio track; it hadn’t mattered to the music companies up until then, the videos were mainly for play on international television stations, even more technically backwards than ours. Andy Setos, the head of the engineering team, went in an re-synced every single one of the clips from a stereo audio master, and, if necessary, took an LP (an LP!!) for the sync. Geez.

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Bumper sticker on my office wall, 1981

Click here for my posts about MTV. On May 5, 1980 I lucked into my first job in television...

Sat, 05 Sep 2009 20:28:00 -0400

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On May 5, 1980 I lucked into my first job in television —cable television— at Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment Company (WASEC). Within 30 days programming head Bob Pittman started putting together the team to launch ‘The Music Channel’ (the working name for what eventually became MTV) and had me add to my existing duties as the head of promotion for The Movie Channel and work on music television too.

We had an incredible team to develop the image and vocabulary for the network. Against all odds, the unique logo, network IDs, and promos set the look and sound for the media over the next 20 years. Eventually, my departments included promotion, studio production, programming, advertising, and creative services.

By 1983 the entrepreneurial genes were straining so my longtime creative partner, writer/producer Alan Goodman, and I left the company to form a consulting/advertising/production agency.

Our first client? MTV Networks, until 1992.

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In my MTV office, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, NYC, 1981