He Got His MTV

TOM FRESTON helped birth MTV and reinvent television. In an excerpt from his new memoir, Unplugged: Adventures from MTV to Timbuktu, he recalls the campaign that saved the network

- 

By the summer of 1982, MTV was in desperate straits. We were still big in Oklahoma, but few other cable companies were adding MTV to their lineups. In American business, if you ain't growing, you're dying. We were in danger of being shut down if we couldn't convince more cable guys to carry us before the money ran out.

Enter George Lois and Dale Pon, a wild-eyed, smiling but scary-looking dude whose specialty was “media promotion,” which involved banging people over the head repeatedly with a simple idea, such as: “Love songs, nothing but love songs. WPIX FM.” Years earlier, Lois had overseen an ad campaign for an oatmeal brand that enlisted Mickey Mantle and Wilt Chamberlain to cry on camera and whine, “I want my Maypo!” It was ironic, it was satiric, it was bold, it was ridiculous. It was advertising that became more famous than the product.

Pon and Lois were hired to help us beat the reaper. Being solicitous of the cable operators had gotten us nowhere. The next step was to get legions of spoiled young-adult baby boomers to demand their MTV just like they had once demanded their Maypo.

So was born the campaign “I want my MTV.” Now we had to identify which stars were the rock-and-roll equivalents of Mickey Mantle and Wilt the Stilt. Lois answered that immediately. “You need to get Mick Jagger. He’s the biggest star in the world.” Sure, George, no problem.

We had learned some lessons about big stars and MTV. Early on, we had struggled to get permission even to use photos of recording artists. My partner, John Sykes, and I realized we were asking the wrong people. To the record labels, we might as well have been a high school fan club asking for free pictures. They were oriented toward radio and print, not TV. It was worse when we tried to go through the lawyers. They said no as a policy. It seemed to defy logic, but we found that the easiest people to deal with were the hardest people to get to: the artists themselves.