Most of the Fred/Alan book is available right here at FredAlan.org, but we thought you might want to read the two introductions. Hereâs Alanâs.Â
Introduction by Alan GoodmanÂ
August 1970. I arrived at Columbia University as an experienced newspaper reporter and joined the college paper staff, getting my first assignment almost immediately. I was disillusioned just as quickly when I saw my article in print with virtually every word rewritten. That had never happened to me in two summers of working at my award-winning hometown paper.Â
Maybe radio, I thought. I rang the bell at WKCR-FM, and Fred Seibert answered the door. Heâs been opening doors for me ever since.
Iâve been telling that story for years. Itâs shown up in print a time or two. Recently I admitted to Fred Iâm not entirely certain itâs accurate. It happened more than 50 years ago. It might have been Lou Venech, who was at the station every minute he wasnât in a classroom, keeping a pot of coffee hot next to the porcelain frog âpiggy bankâ where you were supposed to drop a quarter-per-cup. When I say it may not be true, I mean the first part. The second part, where opportunity after opportunity became available to me in my career and life, that was all Fred for sure.
I know this book is about our company, Fred/Alan. But my relationship with Fred is deeper and longer than that and so much of who we were as a company was rooted in who and what Fred is as a human. Like anyone, I struggle to put into words how Fredâs massive intelligence, superior instinct, personal charisma, consistent point of view, and powers of persuasion were like an iceboat through a frozen corporate sea of immobility, copycat decision-making, blaming and shaming, and general inaction. It was amazing to see in person as co-workers, rivals, clients, and supervisors fell into line as Fred led any charge.
Those traits were on display early.Â
I remember a time at the radio station when we were in the midst of one of our trademark marathons celebrating a musicianâs birthday. This one happened to be a three-day event honoring Charles Mingus. At some point around mid-way through the special we started playing Mingusâ music chronologically. I believe it had been scheduled. When it was Fredâs turn to take the mic, he said âI thought weâd take a break from playing Mingusâ music chronologically and for the next few hours focus on the music that made us all fall in love with him as a bass player and composer.â He programmed his own three-hour shift. I stood there thinking, any one of us could have done that. Who cares about the schedule? It was college radio. Arenât you supposed to be a renegade? But none of us was, only Fred.
(People always said that at Fred/Alan we broke all the rules. Not true. We obeyed lots of rules. We only broke the stupid ones.) Â
After school we went off into the world, Fred into radio and I into film school, then advertising at CBS Records. We were in touch all the time. For a while I would call his new station in L.A., ask for Fred Seibert, and be corrected by the receptionist. âSei-BERG,â she would tell me as she quickly put me on hold before I could tell her I actually knew the guy.
In radio he became a protĂŠgĂŠ of Dale Pon, who in a few years Fred would hire as the advertising agency for MTV. Dale taught Fred, and later me, things like the inextricable link between media and creative, the value of numbers, the importance of making and backing up a claim, and how to build audiences. In following Dale, Fred wound up back to New York, where he was able to resume his side hustle in freelance record production. He was doing a date in the city once and called me to come sit with him in the control room. He had just had an offer from Bob Pittman, head of The Movie Channel, one of the new premium subscription channels springing up to take on HBO. Bob had gotten a recommendation from Dale for Fred to run promotion for the network (Bob and Dale knew each other from their days at NBC Radio). Fred was struggling with the decision. I looked at the musicians on the other side of the glass. One or two of them were drunk, I think there was an argument in progress, no one was sure what was happening, and it was unclear that anything worthwhile was going to get recorded that evening. âDo it,â I told him.
It wasnât long before I was by his side producing animation for the network and within days, working with him to plan MTV.Â
One of Fredâs great innovations in on-air promotion was bringing The Movie Channel subscribers to New York for two days of sightseeing, dining, and promo recording. He believed in the value of unscripted opinions from real people, a strategy we later employed at Nickelodeon with real kids. One commercial for The Movie Channel has stayed with me all these years. âThere are only three things in my town that are 24 hours,â the man told our camera. âThe hospital, the diner, and The Movie Channel.â Iâve never written anything that good.
â24 hours a dayâ was an example of a promotable promise for The Movie Channel that we also used for MTV, in an era when it was typical for us to develop a list of five or six promises for the networks we were promoting.Â
Again, Fredâs idea, borne out of his radio experience where the DJs had a set of âlinersâ theyâd use in breaks to call out the stationâs attributes.
Anyone who ever worked with us knows about our affection for promises. We objected to slogans â slogans wear out and get replaced. Also, we insisted on devoting a LOT of time to promotion, which would have hastened that burn-out. With the right promises, you could execute endlessly and never run out of ways to creatively tell each story. I could probably rattle off all the promises, to this day. Itâs a system that wouldnât work in todayâs era where everything is streamed, content is king, and brands are less valued. But for years I would run into generations of promo producers who learned from Fred and me, and would tell me about their promises, long after that strategy ceased being useful.
Another of our innovations was producing TV âaudio first.â As MTV began building its staff and Fred started hiring producers, he found he couldnât afford seasoned pros and none existed in TV who understood music the way we did. We had spent years doing segues and mixes and montages in college radio. Sound, we believed, mattered more than picture. If something doesnât sound right, itâs grating as hell. If a second-long image isnât right, what difference does it make? People are barely watching anyway. So we worked with newbies and sent them all to Clack Studios, a recording studio where I had worked in the music business, owned by the best audio engineer in New York. Audio studio time was $50 an hour. Video hours at video studios were $300 an hour, before they started adding all the extras like special effects processors, title generators, and dubs. Better to have novices crapping around at a lower rate than what the video joints charged. Like many things with Fred, there was a practical reason, but the aesthetic reason was there as well.Â
Later, as we built Fred/Alan, I was often in a position where young staff members were asking me to interpret Fred for them. âI brought him an ad to see,â theyâd tell me, âand he wrote a note on it, but I donât really know what he wants.â
I would try to explain Fred to them. âLook, Fred is at heart a jazz musician,â Iâd tell them. âYou brought him something, and based on what you showed him he started improvising. He started riffing. I guess he wants to see something different, because if he were in love with what you showed him he would have told you. But donât worry too much about what he told you. It was just a riff. He doesnât necessarily want to see that exact thing, and probably wonât even remember it. He wants you to think. He wants something that works. Go away and do some more work. Donât bring him one idea, because I can tell you he doesnât want to see one idea. Donât come back and tell him his idea doesnât work either. But if you come back and show him, âI tried this direction, and then I tried this, and then I tried this third one, and then I thought about this, and this seemed like the best way for us to go,â he may still not like what you have but he will totally respect your process of development and believe you did what he wants you to do.â
Other times Iâd tell them, âYeah, I canât read his writing either.â
While we could often finish each otherâs sentences, we werenât the same person.
An important thing to say about Fred is how he is the worldâs greatest champion of great ideas. A myth abounds that he only likes his own stuff. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have never seen anyone discard his own work faster in favor of someone elseâs when it was clear the other person had a better idea. It was a great lesson to me. There can be great satisfaction in recognizing the contributions of others.
I think of all the things we did at Fred/Alan I am most pleased about the careers we launched. Not the work. The work was great. I still have some of it hanging on the wall because I love looking at it. But nothing matches the joy I feel knowing I pulled people out of the team to tell them, âYouâre a writer. You donât know it yet, but youâre a writer.â And now those people are writers. Or the junior art director who was supposed to accompany me to a shoot I was directing who I told at the last moment, âIâm not going. Youâre directing.â It was his first of many. He just needed the push. Fred/Alan was a wonderful nest, but how thrilling when we could push someone out of the comfort and safety into the wider world.
At Fred/Alan we filled extra offices with colleagues who needed space because we wanted those brains around us. I once hired a comedy writer to write ads for us because he made me laugh. (Later he hired me to run his sitcom.) We made account executives out of people who had never been account executives before. We boosted voiceover artists into being producers. We convinced East Village artists to do advertising for MTV, getting them to take commercial work for the first time in their lives because we promised them they could do whatever they wanted â we wouldnât change a line in their drawings. (R. Crumb, the legendary underground comic book artist, did a full-page ad for MTV that was basically about how much he hated MTV. Itâs a brilliant drawing.)
In todayâs corporate world HR departments write job descriptions, then go looking for people who fit those descriptions. Itâs an impossible assignment, because no one will ever match your dream applicant. Our attitude was, letâs surround ourselves with smart people we like being with, and weâll figure out what theyâre good at. Our business cards never had titles on them. That wasnât the part we cared about. Instead, we gave people shots and we were loyal. I still work with suppliers who were Fred/Alan people 40 years ago.
It was also a great place for personal experimentation, craft building, and innovating. I would never have gotten the breaks I got without Fredâs cheerleading for me. When we were younger, he hired me to write liner notes for his records. He hired me to produce animation at The Movie Channel when all I had done to earn the job was attend one class in animation at film school before dropping the class. Itâs not common for advertising agency vice presidents to direct commercials, but I loved doing it and Fred was absolutely determined that I should do things that I loved, so I was often our director. When Nickelodeon was getting ready to produce its first sitcom, he told them the reason the pilot to âHey Dudeâ sucked was that they needed a story editor like Alan to supervise the writing. I had never done that job before. But I wrote a new pilot and we went on to do five seasons and suddenly my career as a writer/producer was launched.
Our Fred/Alan people were wonderful. But let me say this about the work. The work was frikken unbelievable. We did more work, and more great work, than seems possible to me now. Part of that comes from the fact that Fred and I love to work. A guy who was a big-deal consultant to MTV pointed this out to me early in our agencyâs life. He had sold his direct mail company to American Express and didnât have to do anything anymore. âIâve never seen anything like you guys before,â he told me. âYou really seem to still love doing the work.â
I donât know about Fred, but I donât think Iâll ever retire. What would I do? Neither one of us plays golf. We donât really have any interests. Weâre not great at small talk. Travel is okay, but itâs sort of an exhausting pain in the butt. Whatâs more fun than working, and talking about work?Â
Weâll always be checking up with each other, too, if only to take each otherâs temperature on some issue or another. I can usually count on him to fill in gaps in my memory or fact base. In 50 years Iâve never heard Fred express an opinion that wasnât apparently well-reasoned, deeply considered, poked and prodded for holes and flaws, and ultimately decided in a way that would allow him to have a ready answer if called upon to respond to a question on that subject. I say âapparentlyâ because no one could possibly have that many opinions all sorted and filed away. He has to be making it up as he goes, but always in a manner that makes you believe youâre not the first person to ask.
I canât imagine what my life would have been if I hadnât met Fred Seibert more than 50 years ago and fallen under his spell of creativity, inspiration, and delight in making things. I still measure a lot of what I decide based on âwhat would Fred do.âÂ
So much of the joy Iâve experienced in life I really owe to Fredâs moral, courageous, generous, and spirited example. I love him more than I could ever say.Â
Or maybe I owe it all to Lou Venech. I guess weâll never really know.
Photograph of Alan Goodman & Fred Seibert by Elena Seibert 1984