1983-1988
870 Seventh Avenue, @56th Street
The Omni Park Central Hotel
New York City
Original production home of the Jackie Gleason Show
The early 1990s made us face the limits of the business we’d built.
Starting as a production company in 1983, we made a TV series for the Playboy Channel and promos for TV networks and record companies. Soon we’d evolved into the only company branded cable channels; we’d introduced the idea to our former employers and clients at MTV and Nickelodeon. In 1988, Nickelodeon asked us to become their advertising agency. MTV and other clients soon followed.
At first we loved it. After a couple of years, we came to loath it.
The creative and strategy work was fabulous, when we could actually do it. Our lives had become the grind of supporting the overhead of over 40 people, constantly defending ourselves to clients who’s businesses we’d built from scratch, and constantly looking for new business.
Worst of all, Alan and I had stopped actually working together, the reason we started the agency in the first place. We were managing teams and arguing, not about the work (which would have been fine), but about the guarding of some real or imagined disputes between the members of our respective charges.
And the business of advertising agencies was getting stupid. Clients were coming to the conclusion that they could do much of the marketing strategy themselves, sometimes even the creative. There was constant downward pressure on fees, with the standard —15% of the media spend— coming down more than a point a year. The agency reaction was basically to combine in gigantic roll ups to protect themselves. Fred/Alan itself had buyout offers coming more rapidly every year.
I called Alan one night in February 1992 and before our conversation was over we’d agreed to announce the closing of Fred/Alan the next morning. We had a party for all our current and former colleagues at our offices on lower Broadway, a lot of laughs and tears were had, and locked the doors for good in May.
—Fred
See more of our Nick-at-Nite posts here.
Alan Goodman and I invented Nick-at-Nite.
It’s funny to see it in print. Ted Turner invented CNN the Cable News Network, Bill Paley created CBS the Columbia Broadcasting Company, John Lack invented MTV Music Television. But, there it is. Two guys most people never heard of invented America’s first oldies channel on television.
By mid-1985 Alan and I had developed the branding and vocabulary for MTV and Nickelodeon, and MTV President Bob Pittman had asked Nick General Manager Gerry Laybourne to figure out what to do with the dark hours after Nickelodeon went off the air at 8pm*. Gerry and her team tried to develop original programming for a number of months before giving up and asking us for suggestions. We were ready for them.
A couple of years before PIttman had purchased the rights to 300 episodes of The Donna Reed Show, a black & white series from from 1960s, because they were cheap and he thought they might be useful someday; I’d heard about the acquisition and started hatching up ways to use them. When we became independent producers in 1983 we spent over a year trying to convince ABC to create an “TV oldies” show in their daytime programming block. They eventually passed. “We’re a television network. We can’t run old, black and white shows!”
So, when Nick came a calling Alan and I had worked out the whole thing in our heads.We could run an entire network with programming that no one else wanted, but was solid enough to get a good rating. Perfect for the audience and perfect for advertisers. Our channel would be the television equivalent of oldies radio, the most successful format in decades. Just like “The Greatest Hits of All Time” we wouldn’t try to hide what we were. The network be reruns (sad face), we’d be RERUNS!!! (happy face!). It would be a blast.
The powers that be at Nickelodeon did not like The Donna Reed Show at all; it was seen as a pre-feminist throwback that set a depressing role model. I’d watched it for days at a time in high school during an illness, and figured any show that could hold the attention of a high school boy for weeks had to be, at the very least, entertaining.
We convinced them to give it a try. Look for shows that fit the budget, were good (meaning strong characters and solid stories), package it all up under our guidance, and go for it. No one was sure what we were smoking, but after our last ditch presentation to Pittman, met with smiles and enthusiasm, they agreed to let us at it.
Alan and I were at Nickelodeon everyday for months lining things up (though we were still ‘outsiders’ we effectively served as the channel’s creative directors for the next seven years). Programming chief Debby Beece came up with the name ‘Nick-at-Nite;’ and she lined up a great debut line-up of Donna Reed, My Three Sons (the black & white years), Mr. Ed, and Route 66. Tom Corey and Scott Nash had already designed the Nickelodeon logo, so we tapped them again. We had a couple of bumps with our Nick promo team, the most important element in our scheme, because a couple of them with hipper-than-thou and thought oldies TV was the dumbest idea in creation. We convinced them by pointing out we didn’t think we were doing great art, just “good TV” (eventually one of our cornerstone promises to the audience). Scott Webb, Bob Mittenthal, Jay Newell, and others wholeheartedly committed to our vision and created some of the most memorable packaging a television network had ever seen.
Nick-at-Nite was an instant success. Within months it was the #1 cable network in prime time. It started being referenced in the popular culture, and became shorthand for suddenly retro culture. In competitive research Nick-at-Nite got credit for any old program a viewer liked, no matter where it ran on TV. And, it paved the way for Nick spinning off the 24 hour TV Land (check out Alan’s first written “positioning” for NANin 1987, “HELLO OUT THERE FROM TV LAND!”).
In many ways, Nick-at-Nite was one of Fred/Alan’s most satisfying triumphs. Creating success where most everyone else thought we had nothing. It doesn’t get any better.
* Back in the day, satellite transponders were scarce and extremely expensive; Nickelodeon leased their nighttime hours to the ARTS channel. When they got their own 24 hour berth and became A&E the cost was too much for Nick to bear without hope for revenue.
—Fred
Positioning Nick-at-Nite, written by Alan Goodman (1987)
See more of our Nick-at-Nite posts here.
Nick-at-Nite had a big problem, and Fred/Alan needed to fix it.
Advertisers loved the Nick-at-Nite ratings (it was one of the top three primetime cable networks), but the ad sales team was inexperienced and unskilled, and they never knew how to answer the questions from the agencies media groups designed to push the cost of the spots down through the floor.
Primary among them was, “Why should we pay as much for your old black & white as for newer color ones?” Stupid as it sounds —the high ratings meant lots of the same people watching everything else on TV were watching Nick-at-Nite— the sales team thought it was a worthwhile argument.
For the first few years after the creation of Nick-at-Nite, Fred/Alan’s primary role was in the day-to-day activities of the network itself. Promotion, branding, programming, acquisitions, we were involved in every aspect of the channel.
Then, in 1988, our collaborations with MTV Networks had evolved so far that they asked us to morph our production/consulting company into their full service advertising agency. Not knowing all that much about advertising other than it seemed to pay a little better than consulting, we agreed.
Enter Noel Frankel.
The first Nick-at-Nite ad comp, on writer/designer Noel Frankel’s wall
Noel was an experienced ad man, a print designer and copywriter. Aside from his consummate graphic design and painting skills, Noel brought a sophisticated strategic mind and, maybe more importantly, a twisted, quirky sense of humor. Perfect for Fred/Alan, which needed to start acting like we knew what we were doing. Ideal for solving the Nick-at-Nite hurdle.
As his first freelance project for us Noel brought in comps for the Mr. Ed’s After-shave (“A trace of saddle blanket…bouquet of pasture…”). It captured the voice we’d inpsired, but it wasn’t dependent on footage from the episodes. There was a slick, color feel that belied the show’s black & whiteness, and when the ad ran in TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly, or any of the media trade publications, it would be a blast of fresh air. No network ever had such great fun with its own shows.
Then Noel adapted the campaign for small size, one color ads, and we added copywriter Bill Burnett to his team. If anything, Bill reveled in the weird even more than Noel, and the campaign started taking on some totally surreal tones.
The other agencies took notice. All of a sudden the networks started getting incoming calls looking for media time. The young media buyers were becoming big fans of the network and wanted their clients to be associated with our cool advertising; they started agitating their clients to get on board. Nick-at-Nite had solved their big problem.
Worthless? These worthless ads were really Fred/Alan’s agency coming out party.
Logo designed by Tom Corey & Scott Nash,
Corey McPherson Nash, Boston, Mass, USA
Tom Burchill had a good idea in 1984. Lifetime (the result of a merger between Cable Health Network and Daytime Television) would become “Talk Television”, the TV euqivalent of talk radio. The hosts would be everyone from Regis Philbin to Dr. Ruth. Good idea, poor execution, run by the wrong executives, who were still trying to make broadcast television, when cable had clearly morphed into something different. And even talk radio hadn’t yet supercharged into the conservative powerhouse Rush Limbaugh initiated in 1988.
But I enjoyed the work we did. Lifetime was our first Fred/Alan branded network after Nickelodeon, and the IDs were done with Corey McPherson Nash, Buzzco, Colossal Pictures, Olive Jar Productions. Tom Pomposello produced, and that’s Tina Potter as “the annoucer.”
(Tom Burchill recovered, I should hasten to add, when he dumped the talk format and Lifetime became the very successful “Television for Women.” We, alas, were not involved.)
Lifetime Network IDs 1985 from fredseibert on Vimeo.
Animation by Colossal Pictures, Buzzco Associates, Charlex, Olive Jar Studios, Filigree Films.
“Treadmill to Oblivion,” by Fred Allen
Alan found a frist edition somewhere and gave it to me with double meaning. The first was that I’d started an indie record company in the 70s called Oblivion Records. The second was that Fred Allen had some stunningly relevant quotes. My favorite?
“Advertising is 15% commission and 85% omission.”
—Fred
“This drugery, this sham, this goldmine.” —Fred Allen
From a xerox hanging on Fred’s door during our first five years.
In 1983, we (Alan and Fred) were in the lobby of the then-hot agency Scali, McCabe, and Sloves, having endured another excruciatingly boring advertising presentation for their employers, The Movie Channel; that is, the advertising was painful and dull.
“We could start our own agency. Obviously, it’s not that hard.”
“We could call it Fred Alan, that would be funny.” We barely had an idea who Fred Allen was, but we knew he’d been a superstar of radio and that he was hilarious.
We started laughing and looked over at the receptionist who’d heard the entire exchange. Stonfaced.
“I guess our clients would have to be old enough to remember him.”
—Fred
Nickelodeon Camp IDs from fredseibert on Vimeo
Howard Hoffman is an artist and animation director who’d worked with Fred/Alan on a number of projects. One day he presented a zany idea. Howard spent Augusts at the Maine summer camp of his youth running an animation workshop, and wouldn’t it be better if the kids were animating something “real” like some Nickelodeon network IDs? That could be cool, right?
Well, sure. How bad could they be?
Not bad at all, it turned out; they were great. Howard made Nick IDs (and we filmed the kids introducing their shorts) for several years, and they were some of the best pieces we ever ran on the network.
