We can't think of a better guest for our 100th episode than Mr. Jim Gallagher. He is believed to have spent more hours "in the chair" doing morning drive than anyone in WJPZ history. Today you'll learn how lessons learned in Syracuse served him well in a truly remarkable career. And we open the episode with a classic station story - a live broadcast from the Denny's on Erie Boulevard when he tried to eat 89 pancakes.
Following his time at WJPZ, Jim did radio in Maine and Georgia. In Georgia, he made a mistake on the air that cost him his job and changed his perspective on doing a morning show. Eventually he decided to pursue one of his other passions - movie trailers and marketing.
Jim worked his way up the ladder, becoming President of Marketing for Disney and Pixar, reporting to Bob Iger. He was the one deciding where to spend ad money to put "butts in seats" for movies like Up. Wall-E, and Ratatouille.
Like in all media, regimes change, and people get "the zig." In fact, Jim says he was fired from 3 of the 6 top movie marketing jobs in the world, having also spent time at Dreamworks, Warner Brothers, and as a consultant. We spend some time talking about movies he worked on, and how the marketing world changed with the advent of the Internet.
At 50, Jim knew marketing was a younger man's game, and he had squirreled away every time he could during his career. This allowed him to start a "retirement" hobby. Given that he doesn't golf, he re-invented himself and took up stand-up comedy. He's been performing all over the country, honing his craft.
Comedy is a tricky thing - we close today's episode with a poignant conversation about "cancel culture" and comedians who claim they can't tell the jokes they want to tell. From Jim's perspective, if you generate more negative feelings in your audience than positive, than you should probably be doing something else.
For tour dates and more on Jim, visit his website: https://www.comedybyjimgallagher.com/
The WJPZ at 50 Podcast Series is produced by Jon Gay, Class of 2002, and his podcast production agency, JAG in Detroit Podcasts.
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JAG: Hey, it's Jag. Before we get into episode 100 of the WJPZ at 50 Podcast, I just want to thank you for your tremendous support of this project. Today's guest is Jim Gallagher, who went from WJPZ mornings to head of marketing for Disney and Pixar, and now stand-up comedy. But before you hear about his incredible career, we'll start with a classic Z89 story about another place near and dear to many of us, the Denny's on Erie Boulevard. Enjoy.
Jim: I really enjoyed writing material for the show. And one of the things that was going on in radio at the time was NutriSystem. And, morning guys tended to be really old and really fat, and so they were all on NutriSystem. And the Y94 guys, and the 93Q guys, and all these guys, were talking about, oh, I've lost 10 pounds. I've lost 600 pounds. I've lost whatever on NutriSystem.
And to me, one of the fundamental marketing differences between us and everybody else were we were young and we were hip and we were sexy and we were thin. And so I started doing this series of ads called BulkiSystem. The idea was that I was so painfully thin and had no ass whatsoever.
And so I needed to go on a system that was actually going to make me fill out my clothing in some way. And I can't remember if it was Henry's idea, but it is a great example of the brilliance of Kenny and Henry and Hal and Meach and those guys, in figuring out ways to generate revenue at the station.
I can't remember if it was my idea, but somebody took that BulkiSystem idea and sold it to the Denny's on Erie Boulevard. And the idea was I was going to eat 89 pancakes and we were going to do that over the course of the show. Now, at that time, we didn't do remote broadcasts. That's not what the station did.
Our idea of a remote broadcast was to put a really long microphone cord on one of the mics from the on-air booth and run it out to Waverly and broadcast from the corner. That's what we did. So many people, so many people, killed themselves to figure out the engineering on how to do a live show from the corner booth at Denny's that day.
JAG: How did you do it?
Jim: It was a Telex system, and honestly, I still don't know how it was pulled off. It sounded amazing. I this was 1989. This had no business sounding this good. It sounded fantastic. And it was really one of those wonderful moments where you really got the sense of how deeply into the community Z89 went because that place was packed and it was crazy because you would, every once in a while, run into people who listened, or a classmate or whatever, but you didn't really get as much of the sense that the entire community was there. That morning, the place was packed and we were broadcasting the whole morning and Rod and Sam and all the normal cast were there and they were doing the stuff they normally do with characters and voices that were so brilliant.
And I think at nine o'clock I started eating the pancakes. And the idea was I'm supposed to eat 89. The first two pancakes that came out of the kitchen. size of a dinner plate.
And so I saw the pancakes and we were playing a song, so we weren't on the air and I was like, are you fucking kidding me? Like, I got to eat 89 pancakes. You're making them the size of a pie tin! What are you doing to me?! So I got down the first two, and then they started making them smaller. And I ended up crapping out, I think, at about 13 or 14 pancakes.
But it was such a great party there. And such a great broadcast. And it was the best of Z89 in my opinion. Because it was all the senior staff who had worked so hard to put together this deal for this radio station that's up on the Hill. It was the engineering guys who got absolutely no credit ever in any situation, but they figured out a way to wire this thing.
So it actually happened. It was the on-air guys who came through and just delivered a great show. It was really, in my mind, it was a great example of what Z89 did absolutely best.
JAG: Why did you wait till nine to start eating?
Jim: I don't know, honestly. I think because I knew I wasn't gonna be able to get 89 in, and I wanted to be wallowing in the shame of that for as little time on the air as possible.
I didn't want to start eating at 7:30, be done by 8:10. And just be talking about the fact that I failed for two hours. (Intro)
JAG: Welcome to WJPZ at 50. I am very excited for today's guest. His praises have been sung to me both by Scott Meach as well as my great friend, Diane Brody. From the class of 1990, Mr. Jim Gallagher, welcome to the podcast.
Jim: Hey, Jon, how are you? I'm a long-time listener, so congratulations on the series.
JAG: Thanks so much, and you are somebody I've been wanting to get on for a while. We only spoke briefly when we met in Syracuse this year, so I'm excited to get to know more about you and your background. Let's start with your origin story of how you ended up at Syracuse, and then how you became probably the most reps of anybody doing The Morning Show on WJPZ History.
Jim: Yeah, not necessarily the best reps, just the most, I got to Syracuse in 86. And in 1984, there was an article in the back of Sports Illustrated magazine. We had print in those days and it was the Radio and Records column. And they did an entire column about WAER and the legacy of sports talent that had come out of there and. Starting with Costas and, Dick Clark and some of those other guys.
And clearly it only got more and more ridiculous in the years since. But at that time, they really made, I thought, a pretty persuasive case that if you want to be in sports broadcasting, Syracuse University is definitely a place to look at. So I applied to Syracuse. I didn't want to go. I want to go to UNC Chapel Hill.
JAG: Where are you from originally, Jim?
Jim: I'm originally from Delaware. I wanted to go to UNC Chapel Hill mainly because it was cheaper, but I didn't get in. And so my parents and I visited Syracuse in January. And I remember we were walking through campus and it was a typical January in Syracuse and it was totally, it was frozen.
And the ice islands and the snow islands were already stacked up around the light poles. And we saw a Nynex employee at the top of the light pole. I said to him, hey, does it snow like this every day? And the guy goes, "Every day, son. Every day." He just said it in such a way that made it sound like he wanted to kill himself.
And I thought, oh my gosh, I can't possibly go here. But that is where I ended up. And I'll say that, I certainly didn't get as great an education out of Syracuse as I could have, because I specialized in dodging as much work as I possibly could in all of my classes, but from the combination of the Daily Orange and UUTV, as it was called in the day, and Z89 and AER, not to mention all the stuff that has come since then, I can't imagine a university that better prepares you for a life in media and broadcast media than Syracuse University does, and that has nothing to do with Syracuse University. The classes. It's 100% the laboratories that we're given to play in.
JAG: Some of the things you're saying have echoed throughout previous episodes of the podcast. You mentioned the article in the back of Sports Illustrated. A lot of your contemporaries have mentioned that article. And then several years later, apparently there was a feature done on the Newhouse School during the NBA Finals that recruited all the 1990s kids that came through in the mid and late nineties. So it's funny to hear that. And then I couldn't agree with you more. I learned more at JPZ than I ever learned in the classroom. And so many guests in the podcast have said that it's about that on-campus media experience, but continue.
Jim: Yeah, it really is. And I think too, the size of the city of Syracuse is also a huge benefit if you're looking to be in broadcast in some way. When I was in Syracuse, one of the guys who now is probably the cornerstone of the reputation of sportscasters, Mike Tirico. Mike was in the class above me.
I think he got out in 89 and his part time job, we all had terrible part time jobs when we were in college. His part time job was doing the 6:00 sports on the CBS affiliate. I feel like there were certainly opportunities given the size of the city of Syracuse, that if it was radio or was television or it was printer was any of those places, you really had the opportunity not only to learn on campus, but also to learn off. And I don't know that those opportunities are going to be as readily available in bigger cities or different cities.
JAG: So you eschewed Tar Heel Blue for the white snow of Syracuse. Tell me about the radio station when you got there. Had it moved to FM when you were there?
Jim: Yeah, it had moved to FM. Honestly, Z89 was not on my radar when I got to Syracuse. And I really wanted to be a game show host. For as much as there was about sportscasting and all of those things. And I certainly thought that was a fantastic profession. I really wanted to give cars away to people from the Midwest.
I just thought that had to be the greatest job in the history of jobs, but there really aren't many game show host curricula out there anywhere. And so I thought sportscasting is probably as close as I'm going to get. But hard news, whether it's sports or otherwise, was not my bag. I was about trying to entertain people and trying to make people laugh, which is what I really love to do.
And I ended up meeting a guy in my geology class named Corey Watson. And Corey and I revved each other up into creating a television show for UUTV called Life Beyond the 8 Ball. And Corey and I were both brilliant salesmen. We didn't realize until later the product we were selling was horseshit.
And so we specialized in having 14-hour meetings where we would drink a case of Coke and whip each other up into a frenzy about how we were going to revolutionize broadcasting. And I was going to become the new young talent. He was going to become the brilliant director. And he did turn out to be a brilliant director, by the way.
But in going through the UUTV experience, it became clear to me that the parts of the job that I really loved were the entertaining parts of the job, being the talent. I was not as good at plumbing an organization, that I had to build my own show and figure out what that show was and who was on it and when we did it and all of those things were not my strength. And that was actually a great, fertile ground for Scott Meach to take advantage
JAG: of. I figured he'd enter the story here at some point.
Jim: Here's how he comes in. And actually, it wasn't until this morning and I was thinking about that I realized I met both Corey and Meach through geology. Which, I was taking just to get a science requirement scratched off the list, and little did I know I would meet two of the most important lifelong friends I've had.
JAG: There's a rock joke in there somewhere, but you're the comedian.
Jim: There absolutely is. Meach, who, as everybody knows, has the greatest laugh in the history of laughs. I very quickly decided that my best way through geology was I was just going to make Meach laugh. That was all I really cared about. I didn't really care about passing.
I didn't care about anything else. It was just 100% about the number of times I could make Meach unleash that fabulous laugh of his. My recollection is this is probably the spring of my freshman year, so this would have been 87. And Meach at that time said, hey, I do a morning show on Z89, is that something you would want to try?
And other than the getting up early part, which sucked. That actually worked really well based on my experience at UUTV where all I had to do was show up and try to be funny. And certainly I've spent my lifetime trying to make Meach laugh and so the beginning of that being four hours locked in a room on Waverly every day sounded like a great start and Meach was only doing Tuesdays at the time so that's how I started.
I was his cohost on Tuesday mornings. After that, it was pretty clear that nobody in their right mind wanted to do the morning show. In my mind, it was far and away the best shift. There are people who disagree with that now, but I think at the time morning radio was certainly the closest thing you could get to being a game show host.
And so I was really excited by that opportunity. I thought if the only thing standing between me. And having an entire radio station to play with for morning drive is getting up at 6 AM. Wow. I'll figure out how to do that. And so the morning show in 87, 88 was in a bit of a flux because it was coming off of the Larry Barron/Cousin Danny years.
And they were really just the cream of the crop. And I think in all situations where you've got someone who is really a dominant player, when that dominant player leaves. Any organization is going to try to fumble for a little bit to figure out what's going to come next. And I think we were in a little in that funfer.
Meach hosted Tuesday mornings, T Bone Harrison, Michael Tierney, hosted Thursday mornings, and then Jonathan Park, Jono, hosted Monday, Wednesday, and maybe Friday or maybe Friday, just. Any drunk who wandered in at six, so I don't really remember, but I quickly became the cohost for Jono as well. And so I was very quickly, I went from doing one day a week to doing four days a week, within, I think the first couple of weeks.
JAG: Did you see it just as an opportunity to get all the reps in and be that fill that game show jones you were having, or?
Jim: I just loved it. Another kind of media reference that was seminal for me and certainly probably people my age in regards to Z89 was WKRP in Cincinnati, which was a sitcom set in a radio station in Cincinnati, and I just thought that looked like the greatest way to spend a lifetime ever.
And so between those two things. And the theater of imagination that radio really let you play in, all of a sudden, I felt like a kid in a candy store. I went from not knowing about the radio station to being on four hours a week to being on 16 hours a week in about two weeks. And I just absolutely loved the experience.
I love the writing of it. We started off as the host would throw to me and I would come up with some dipshit thing and we would make each other laugh and then we would go into playing our “non-commercials.” But, I quickly got to a point where I started writing pretty heavily and I was show prep.
Garrison Keillor and Lake Wobegone was huge then. And so I started doing a parody called Lake Onondaga and it was pretty long and it was terrible radio, but it was basically, an audio soap opera about the lives of college kids. . And I also, we came up with a feature called, obviously Letterman was doing the top 10 then we had a music sweep at night that was called the top eight at nine where he played the top eight songs a day at nine o'clock. I very cleverly came up with the top eight at 9:10. We did a countdown every stop set at 9:10. It was some dumb rip off of Letterman top eight list.
Which I liked because it was two less than a top 10 and I generally had a hard time coming up with eight punchlines.
JAG: Any of those top eight lists come to mind for you, Jim?
Jim: Any number of them. And whether it was something on campus or it was, something in the national news, we normally started thinking about it after the 8 :0 stop set. And by 9:10, I generally at least had something. It was just tremendous fun. And I, hated it every morning when the alarm went off.
JAG: What time did the alarm go off?
Jim: The alarm went off at 5:55.
JAG: And the show started at 6?
Jim: Yes. I lived in Booth. And no matter what the weather was, I'd put on a pair of sweat, cut off shorts, a t shirt, a pair of Sebago docksiders, And I ran down the hill as quickly as I could. And when I was co-hosting, I didn't have to be there until 6:10, that first stop set. So I had it worked out pretty well that I would walk in as Roger. "I Want To Be Your Man" was fading. And then we could do whatever the stop set was. But it scratched so many itches and it was so perfect for me for any number of reasons, not the least of which, and I'm sure this is, very common no matter what age, you got to the station at. I felt like I had found my people for the first time in my life.
JAG: That finding your tribe thing has come up in almost every single episode of the podcast.
Jim: Absolutely. Four of my five groomsmen at my wedding came from the station,. It wasn't just the guys that I was doing the morning show with. Meach, who obviously is a lifelong friend and Bone and all of those guys, the guys who had nothing to do with the morning show, like Jim Mahoney and again, Michael Tierney and all of these different people just became the most important people in the world to me and 30 years later, they still are. And so that moment in time, the station and being able to just wander into the station morning, noon, and night and having it as a clubhouse, but also being very serious about it.
For me, it wasn't, I want to spend four hours a morning making my friends laugh. That's where it started, but it very quickly got to, okay, how can we make the best possible morning show we can? How can we take on 93Q? I was very competitive about it very quickly. And fairly quickly, the guys who were hosting fell away. I started hosting. And that's when, the guys who I really ended up doing the show with, Rod Oceans, and Sam Metler, and Matty Midovich, and...
Melinda Meals and Darren McKee and Bobby Wolf and Hollywood Hal and all these guys. That's when that happy crowd started. I don't really know exactly what the timing was, but as you said, I don't know who could have more on air hours than I did at Z89 because I was basically doing mornings for five days a week from 1987 to 1990.
JAG: This is a golden era in the time of the station, you're giving away cars at the state fair, the station is doing gangbusters, it's pulling huge ratings, 93Q's all pissed, and you're hosting the morning show, you're right at the center of it.
Jim: It was great, but none of those things were true that you just articulated. All of that shit happened after I left.
JAG: Oh, okay.
Jim: We didn't give away anything, Jag. I'll give you an example. It's been well documented. I know that Meach and many of the other guys who were instrumental in saving the station have talked about that timeframe. I was very, particularly after my UUTV experience.
I really worked hard to just be the talent. I worried about the morning show and I worried about it incessantly, but that's all I wanted to do. I wasn't going to get involved in the politics of the station. I wasn't going to be a senior staff. I didn't want to do any of that stuff.
But that moment in the station's history was pretty fraught. We were $8,000, I think, upside down when $8,000 was a ton of money. And the long-term future of the station was definitely not assured. And you had guys like Meach and Henry Ferri and Hal and Diane and all of these people, who walked in and became the adults in the room who really worried about keeping the lights on and making sure the station was going to be there the next day.
And then I just came in and plugged in my headphones and acted like a jackass for 4 hours. So the fact that those guys were doing what they did was the only reason I could do what I did. And I was cognizant of that at the time. The station was hanging on by a pretty narrow thread at that point until, Kenny and Meach and Hal and Henry really started the brain trust of, oh, even though we're a non-commercial station, here are ways we can make money and actually put the station on a firm financial footing.
And I would say that, the early years I was there, I'm sure there was a benefit to some kind of continuity. I always felt that was important in the morning show because I didn't feel like potential sponsors wanted to just turn on what I thought was the most important drive of the station and some other random idiot was going to be there every day.
I wanted to be the random idiot. I wanted to be there every day. And so I'm sure from that standpoint, it helped a little bit, but the Halcyon days that you speak of, and they're all absolutely true. I think they gave away the car at the state fair in 90. So all of that stuff was starting to happen because the right brains got there and got in the room and figured out how to pay off the debt and make us financially solvent and all of those things.
But that's all due to those guys.
JAG: Then I apologize. I'm nearly 100 episodes deep on this podcast. My math should have been better. I was off by a couple of years. You guys were the glue that helped get to that next level where they were doing all that stuff in the early 90s, so I stand corrected, but it's a valid point.
Jim: Yeah, I actually asked Meach about this recently, and he had no recollection of it. I remember pitching him the idea that to take care of the $8,000 we were in debt. I would broadcast for 89 straight hours and we would do it like a PBS telethon kind of thing. And my recollection of it was that got dangerously close.
Meach didn't even remember what the hell I was talking about. So I'm sure they were off on much better ideas, but as you said, they were giving away cars. When we got a VCR to give away, Henry got us a VCR to give away on the morning show. And that was like Wonka had come to town. It was the craziest thing ever.
And I remember we all really had such an insurgent mentality, because we really were hanging on by our fingertips. None of us were getting paid. We were all making the kind of mistakes that you make when you're 19, 20, 21. And yet, we were a giant thorn in the side of 93Q, which I love. And we got the VCR, and here's how it ties into the insurgent mentality thought process.
The VCR we were giving away, I decided to give it away with a contest I called Feedback's Hotel. I had this dog character named Feedback, and the idea was, the hotel was there were five rooms to a floor, there were ten floors. And so you would guess a room, we would take one caller a day, you would guess a room, we would open the door, we would see what was in that room, that hotel room.
And if you found Feedback, you got the VCR. If you didn't find Feedback, it was one of any number of drop ins or different running jokes that we had going at the station or whatever it happened to be. I was just telling somebody this story at the Banquet this year. I don't remember who it was, and if I did, I wouldn't tell you, because I certainly wouldn't want to implicate an adult.
JAG: Statute of limitations.
Jim: But my recollection was that the contest had gone for two or three weeks, and our biggest fear was that whoever was going to win this thing was going to win it the first guess, right? And then we would have no VCR to give away. We would have all these mentions that we would have to do.
We wouldn't have any contests to do them with. We were really panicked. And so someone had actually mentioned to me, hey, it's really lucky that we haven't given away the VCR yet. Two or three weeks into the contest. And I said that's not luck. I just haven't decided what the winning room is yet.
JAG: Ha!
Jim: And I remember it was an adult, so I don't know if it was Meach or it was Henry. But it was one of those guys who played by the rules. And they went, wait a minute, what? And I'm like if you haven't decided what room it is, nobody can win it. And they were like no, we get that part. You can't run a contest like that!
So I guess to my 19-year-old brain, that was just us in survival mode. Like we were just trying, we couldn't afford to give away the VCR. We were eventually going to give it away in a very up and up manner. It wasn't like one of us was taking the VCR home. A listener was going to get it. But we just couldn't afford to give it away on the first or second day.
And so that was my way of dealing with it. And then obviously, everybody got way more sophisticated. The station got more successful. They had a car to give away. And I assume that all was up and up. But at the time, that insurgent mentality was really an exciting part of being at the station.
And for me, when I look back and think back on Z89, the thing that I get most excited about was whether it was one of those persons that I've talked about, or 10 of those people, or 50 of those people, we always seemed to be in meetings where someone was saying what if we? And it was this wonderful magic of people who were teenagers, who were becoming young adults, who were let loose in this incredible playground and their creativity and their genius and their brilliance and all of the best parts of them had the opportunity to suddenly run wild. And it was really, I think the first time in my life where I not only got excited about that method of thinking, I also understood that method of thinking is only as good as the people you have in the room when you're doing it. And that really became kind of something that I kept with me throughout my career.
But I've never been blessed to be with a group of people who had more talent. More energy, more creativity than the folks who were at the station when I was there.
JAG: You weren't going to find that in Chapel Hill.
Jim: No, I was not.
JAG: Their loss was certainly our gain and the tremendous contributions you made to the radio station.
And lessons learned, you're already answering that question. So let's pivot on to your career after Syracuse, Jim. What happens after? So you graduated a semester early, end of 89, right?
Jim: Yeah, I ultimately was lucky enough to win a scholarship. And I had arrived at Syracuse and my goal, I was lucky enough to come in with several credits because Syracuse at least at that time had the most liberal AP policy in the history of the world.
If you could fog a mirror and you had taken the AP test, you got six credits. So I came in with an inordinate number of college credits already done. And because it was such a financial strain on my parents, I decided, okay I'm just going to get out in three years. And I met my freshman year, one of the most important people in my life, Dr. William Copeland, who was until recently the policy affairs PAF 101 teacher. I know it's been called a number of different things since then, but that's what it was called when I was there. And Copeland, who I think represents all the best possible attributes you can imagine in a mentor said to me at the time, don't be an idiot.
Don't get out in three years. College is the best point in your life. Take the full experience. And I said, I don't have the money. And he said, okay what if I told you there was a scholarship you could win that would get you the money? And so long story short, the first two years I was at Syracuse, I was on a track to graduate in three years.
I then won this thing called a Truman scholarship which turned out to take care of my tuition. And so at that point, I slammed the car into reverse. I started taking like nine credits a semester. That's why I was in this kind of weird netherworld in my senior year where I could graduate in December, I could graduate in May, I could do a number of different things.
In the fall of my semester, my, my senior year, I got a copy of R&R, Radio and Records. And I looked in the back and it just so happened that there were two radio stations that were advertising for morning shows. One was Z103 in Tallahassee, and one was 92 Moose in Augusta, Maine. And I thought, I'm just going to send these tapes out because I didn't really know what I was doing, but I had spent a lot of time doing it.
I wanted to get a sense of whether there was going to be a future for me in morning radio or not. I got a call back from 92 Moose. So I started having conversations with them. I started having conversations with a station that was going to come online in Utica-Rome. It just seemed like all of a sudden, everybody was excited about me doing a morning show.
And so I thought, boy, I got to get out of college. So I went ahead and graduated in December. Then of course there was radio silence. Nobody wanted me. So I just came back to school, even though I graduated and I was just doing the morning show in January, February, what would have been my senior year. And then 92 Moose called again.
Ironically, Rob Berrell, I didn't know this until the banquet this year. Rob Burrell was doing that morning show at 92 Moose and had decided to go back to his family in Minnesota and build his life in Minnesota. And so he was leaving Augusta. That's the only reason they had a morning show opening
JAG: it's so funny because you said 92 Moose and I immediately thought of Rusty and him talking about that in his episode of the podcast and I was wondering what the connection there was. There you go.
Jim: Yeah, it's crazy. I never knew it. The place was called 92 Moose. The morning show was called the Rocky and Bullwinkle breakfast show.
JAG: I love it.
Jim: So they had gone through a series of Rockies. Rocky Ride, Rocky Coast, Rocky Roads, whatever. And so they had only ever referred to Rob as Rocky, whoever the hell he was.
So I never put it together. And then we were at the Banquet this past February and we were talking and it came up and I was like, holy cow. I had no idea the Z89 of it all extended that far. But anyway, I went up to 92 Moose. I started doing mornings. I got there in February of 90. I was fired by November of 90.
JAG: Really?
Jim: I was just terrible at what they wanted me to do. At Z89, our demographic really was probably 14 to 25. I didn't have to worry about talking to anybody more than about four years older than I was. . When you get to a market the size of Augusta-Waterville, Maine, they define CHR as playing Rich Girl by Hall and Oates.
And this was, 1990. And so it was pretty broad. Their demographic were females, 35, 40 plus. I didn't know how to talk to females 21 plus. So I sure as hell didn't know how to deal with them. And I was just terrible at what they wanted me to do. And so I got fired from there. I was first time I got fired.
Then I was unemployed for about five months. I ended up getting the morning gig down at Rock 103 in Columbus, Georgia. And I did that for about three years, the last year of which I was also the program director. And I had come to this moment. I had been doing morning radio about seven years then I had worked very hard to get to a bigger market.
That was the way the game was played. I knew I just had to keep climbing and I just couldn't seem to get out of Columbus, Georgia, and I loved it there, but I was just, I didn't want to spend my life there. And so I had this Come to Jesus moment of, okay, am I going to stay in radio? If I am going to stay in radio, is it going to be as a morning guy or is it going to be as a PD?
Because I had a chance to go to Fort Wayne, Indiana as a program director. And I just decided at that point, I'd been doing morning radio about seven, eight years. I was never going to be great enough to get where I wanted to go. And so I was going to need to make some kind of change.
JAG: That's really interesting to me because you talk about your time at JPZ, Jim, and you had the tunnel vision, you had the blinders, you were doing the morning show.
That's all you were focused on. But then you end up getting the PD stripes in Georgia and you decide to go a completely different route to something you didn't even really have much to do with at Z89, from the way you're describing it.
Jim: Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And it's funny. I had an experience in Georgia, where I did this bid on the air that was just dumb. I did a bit on the air where I was making fun of a client.
JAG: Oh.
Jim: One of those things that seems like a great idea at seven o'clock in the morning when you're 24. I. I left the station at 10 o'clock. At 11 o'clock they sent the intern to my house to get me, came back to the station and I was fired by noon.
It was so disconcerting and jarring because the way I had always done the morning show, I didn't really worry too much about who I was offending. I didn't worry about if I was hurting people with what I said. I certainly didn't try to be mean-spirited, I think at that point in my life it was more important to get the laugh than to get the right laugh.
JAG: That's how I felt at 24, 25. I understand. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah. And so I definitely I goofed and I got fired and, three weeks later they rehired me because thankfully I was really popular with most of the customer base at the station. But then I did the morning show for about a year scared.
JAG: Oh, wow.
Jim: Where I was worried that every time I did something, somebody was going to get hurt or somebody was going to complain. And, you can't do the weather on a hundred thousand watt radio station without upsetting somebody. And so I really lost the love I had for it. And I had been lucky enough to find people in Georgia that I was doing the show with that were wonderful, incredibly talented people.
It wasn't JPZ, but I had finally found a situation where I was on the air with people who really, we worked well together. So it wasn't that I was just missing the college environment, it was that I suddenly just didn't think I was gonna be able to come back and do mornings the way I felt they needed to be done.
And I certainly wasn't going to get out of Columbus, Georgia. And so those two things dovetailed. And I just thought, it's probably time for me to try something completely different. Okay. So at that point, I basically was looking at three different scenarios. One was I was going to go to New York and try standup comedy. One was I was going to go to Los Angeles and try movie marketing. And one was I was going to move back to Delaware and teach high school English.
It was really a coin flip with New York and LA. And I got a postcard from Scott Simpson, who is probably my dearest friend. And he had just moved to Los Angeles and Simpson and I did the morning show together my senior year.
I had lost touch with him, but he had landed in Los Angeles and I thought, okay I know somebody in LA. I'm just going to LA. I came out to LA in September of 93 and started climbing the ranks of the movie advertising game. And basically, I came out here because I wanted to make movie trailers for a living.
I always thought they were the best parts of going to the movie where the trailers. And so I really was curious about how that was done. I'd always been really interested in marketing through the station and the work we had done there. And so those two things just dovetailed and I ended up, starting a career doing that.
JAG: So what happens next after you start climbing the ladder in movie trailers?
Jim: I got really lucky. I found out what I believe to be a truism that, most people are very generous with their time and love talking about what they do. And are willing to take the time and explain it to somebody who's on their way up.
And so I met a lot of those people. Within six months, I was at MGM working in their creative advertising department. And the first two years were straight up learning curve. It was just insane. And then two years later, I got to Disney. And then I was at Disney for 14 years and I became, by the end of that time, I had become president of marketing at Disney.
And then in 2009, there was a regime change and we all got blown out. But I stayed in movie marketing, worked as a consultant for about four years. I did my own thing. My daughter was young when I was at Disney as president of marketing. I was working a hundred hours a week, so I had no life whatsoever.
JAG: That's a catch 22 for your daughter. My dad's the president of marketing at Disney. I just never see him.
Jim: Correct. And it was great that we got to go to the park for free. But she didn't know who the hell I was when we were on the rides together. And so I can't say that I would have walked away from that job. In fact, I'm sure I wouldn't have.
It was, one of the best jobs in Hollywood.
JAG: What were you doing in that role, Jim?
Jim: I was responsible for the global marketing efforts for every movie released under the Touchstone, Disney Animation, or Pixar brand. I did the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 campaign and I did Wall-E and I did Ratatouille and I did Up.
And so those campaigns where I had started in advertising, I was just doing the television commercials or the trailers for those movies, that was great training because what that process taught you was how you were positioning the films. And the thing that I always really loved about movie marketing was, first of all, I love the product. I couldn't market soap.
JAG: Sure.
Jim: I just love the movies. And what was really fascinating to me about how you marketed movies was the product itself is fungible. If you're marketing soap, you're marketing soap. If I'm marketing Pearl Harbor, is it a historical drama? Is it an action film? Is it a romance? Is it a comedy?
And you got to figure that out. And then market that movie that you decide would make the most possible money at the box office around the world. It was a big job. And I really enjoyed it. I didn't want it. Because I knew it was a really hard job and would end up sucking life out of you.
But I wouldn't have left the job on my own just because, I was 40 years old. I was President at Disney. I just wasn't going to leave, but thank G-d I got fired. Because I don't know what kind of relationship I would have with my family if I hadn't.
JAG: Wow.
Jim: I didn't do a great job of multitasking. And so my job came first, everything came second, and I was working so much, anytime I was home, I was a vegetable. You don't realize these things at the time, but I got fired in 2009. As I said it wasn't me, it was a regime change, the chairman's studio got blown out and we all got blown out at the same time.
And so I became a movie marketing consultant and so I worked for Universal and DreamWorks Animation and all kinds of different places making marketing plans for them for their movies. I did that for about four years and it was great. I was working about 10% of what I was working before and I was able to go to school assemblies and do all that good stuff.
And then as my daughter got a little bit older, it became clear that I wanted to take another run. I wanted to play in the big leagues one more time. And so Jeffrey Katzenberg, who ran DreamWorks Animation at the time, was a client of mine. And he had me come in and I joined DreamWorks Animation. And I, so I was there from 2013 to 2019 and then I get fired again.
JAG: Before you get to that, what were some of the movies you worked on in that range? 2013 to 2019?
Jim: I did How To Train Your Dragon 2 and 3. I did Boss Baby. I did Trolls, did Kung Fu Panda 3. That was a situation where somebody like Disney is releasing 14 movies a year. So we had a movie every couple of weeks at Disney.
At DreamWorks animation we had two movies a year. So it was a completely different rhythm, but the stakes were just as high. And I really liked that high wire act. And I loved learning about marketing things around the globe because it was so vastly different from what was going on here. And obviously I had been doing movie marketing long enough that I was doing it before there was an internet, right?
Much less iPhones, much less anything else. And every time one of these new tools came online, we were having to try to figure out what the hell we were going to do with it.
JAG: That actually leads me to an interesting question though. So you talked about it being different internationally than domestically, how you market these things.
Did the advent of the internet and social media and all these different things, did that homogenize how you marketed a little bit? Or was it still very different in say, China or Japan or Egypt?
Jim: It was still very different because you could, at that point, you could still gatekeep a lot of this stuff in a lot of markets, not every market, but certainly a lot of markets, but the internet of it all was really fascinating, because when it came online, my last year in the job, I had a budget of $750 million to market these movies around the world.
And so everybody was constantly looking for ways to spend less in marketing. And I was too, but the point I always made to Bob Iger and those guys when they demanded that was, okay, please tell me what movie you want me to gamble with.
JAG: Okay?
Jim: What movie are you okay if we underperform at the box office, because we're going to spend less just to see how it goes, we're going to spend less on television.
And just hope that internet views are going to be the same conversion as television. We're going to spend less on trailers. We're going to spend less on media. We're going to spend less on all of these things. In other words, we're going to deliberately do less then we believe we should, hopefully we will learn that's the future and we should go.
But what if we don't? Because I felt my job was to make as much money as we could with each of these movies. And so I didn't feel like it should be my choice to say, okay, because I'm getting all this pressure to spend less money. I'm going to pick this movie and spend less on it. Because the funny thing about marketing to me was I always liken it to creating muddy water.
When you had built a great marketing campaign, the day the movie opens, the water is as muddy as possible. And what is contributing to that mud are television commercials and publicity events and promotions. And synergy, and Super Bowl spots and all of these different things. But believe it or not, we were not able, and we still can't, frankly.
But we were not able to determine what grain of sand in that mud delivered the most number of asses in seats, right? We couldn't do it. If we could do it, it would be easy. You would just stop doing the shit that delivered the least possible revenue against. But that's a little bit like saying just stop making the bad movies only make the hits. Boy, this job would be fabulous, right?
And so I would be getting all this pressure that you don't need television anymore because people are all online. What's so fascinating about it was the research of the first, 10,12 years of the Internet. The research told you that the conversion that you got from online communications, whether it was just running a trailer online or a television commercial or anything that you were doing online, but conversion was different than it was on a television spot. That consumers understood that if they were sitting there watching, ER and a television spot came up, they might get up and go to the bathroom, but they understood that I'm going to watch this television ad. It's for a movie that's coming out on Friday. And now I'm going to decide whether I want to go to that movie or not.
There was an agreement between the advertiser and the consumer. Online, what was interesting was people were consuming the stuff, but it was very passive. Like they would watch the trailer, but all that was doing was boosting their awareness of the movie that was coming out. It wasn't forcing them to make a decision about whether they were going to go or not.
JAG: It was more of a touch point than an actual conversion.
Jim: Exactly right. And so the mistake I think the industry was making was, oh, a touch point is the same as conversion methodology, and it isn't. And so it all gets very dorky and wonky and I love talking about this stuff and I got to do it for a long time, but just to say I was in it long enough that all these new tools that are now the most obviously important elements of what you do in marketing anything globally now didn't even exist.
And so we were all trying to make it up as we go. And so I was at DreamWorks for seven years, then Universal bought us. I got fired. Then I went to Warner Brothers. I was at Warner brothers for about 18 months. The pandemic came and I had been fortunate to figure out very early that movie marketing was a young man's game.
You got to be much past 50 and it didn't matter if you were the greatest marketer in the world, they were going to replace you with a younger version, or for various reasons. You weren't going to be the guy they wanted anymore. And that's exactly what happened. I got to be about 50 years old.
I was a very expensive piece of real estate and there were about six of these jobs in the world. I'd been fired from them, three of them. And when I left Warner Brothers. I had already made the determination, that this is my last contract. I'm not going to do this anymore. I've been fortunate to do it for a long time. I love doing it, but it's time for me to try a new adventure.
JAG: It is interesting. The full circle part of it, you talk about being too young coming out of JPZ and going to 92 Moose in Maine, that you were too young to relate to the audience. And now I'm not trying to make you feel bad, but you're almost talking about being on the opposite side of it.
Jim: No, it's absolutely true. And that's just life, right? The reality is. As you get older, you have to work harder to be relevant. It is that simple. Yeah. When I was doing the morning show at Z89, I prided myself on seeing every movie, every television commercial. I want it to be the one who was talking about something first.
Because I felt like we were younger and had more energy than the guys at 93Q. And so we needed to beat them. I want it to be talking about something that they were going to be talking about two weeks later.
JAG: Yeah.
Jim: You can definitely ride that wave. At a certain point, life catches up with you and you just get into a different point in your life, but other things are more important. I'm married. I've got a daughter and the game keeps changing, right? So social changes and there are all kinds of celebrities now that I know nothing about because they came through reality television, which I don't watch. And so there are all these reasons why I would no longer be any good at that.
And I'm totally comfortable with that. One of the things that. Is nice about getting older is that you realize that there is a season for everything and the memories you have from some of those seasons, you will carry with you the rest of your life. And I am certainly lucky enough to have those from Z89 and other places.
But you have to be self-aware enough to understand who you are at this point in your life and what you need out of a job or a career or a hobby or something else. You need to be self-aware enough to understand that need is going to change over your lifetime. You need to be nimble enough to make those changes, I think.
JAG: You mentioned experimenting with different things, asking Iger what movies can you gamble with. I've got to imagine some of that is rooted in what you learn being the ragtag bunch of kids at JPZ, the VCR story that you told and all this stuff of, finding a way, duct tape and bubble gum to make it work. I've got to imagine that plays into it. And any other lessons you feel like you learned from the station throughout your career?
Jim: The first thing I learned at the station that I think was the most interesting to me and the thing that most defined the path I would walk is you can outwork everyone. Now, I don't know that's the healthiest way to go, and I think there are very smart people who will debate various sides of it, but when I was coming up, what I realized was I might not be the smartest, I might not be the best, I might not be the fastest.
In my control is whether you outwork me. And you will never outwork me. And that I believed was the quickest path to whatever thing I wanted to achieve. The Z89 version of that was nobody wants to get up at 6am. If I just get up at 6am, I get to do this amazing thing that I would not ever be able to be qualified for or do in any other form.
The Disney part of that was equally true. It was just true in a different sense. Nobody can outwork me. If I wanted to become a guy who made movie trailers for a living. Okay. There are only 24 hours in a day and if I'm willing to work all 24, you can't beat me. So I'm going to work all 24 and just get to the knowledge and the information and make myself as good as I can as quickly as I can, which is something I've always been obsessed with doing.
That was definitely the first thing that I learned. I think the other thing I found too, was just, you got to find your people. And for some people that's really easy. Most people who know me find it hard to believe, but I'm really introverted. It's hard for me to find my people. And when I do find them, it tends to be a person, not a million people.
And so the station, there are probably 20 people who are among the most important in my life that I know through that radio station and I would say there are probably five or ten that I could call right now or who could call me right now and say, we need to get rid of a body and I'd be there.
JAG: I'm thinking of the same people that I would call in that situation and the list is growing in my head.
Jim: Yeah. Absolutely. For various reasons, I think when you have kids or you get involved in a career or whatever it is, you tend to go down a hole and you stay in that hole until there's a change.
And then you pop your head out of the hole. I was talking to some folks at the Banquet about this. For many reasons, I haven't, stayed in touch with many of my Z89 friends, because that's not something I'm particularly good at. I've had the opportunity to hang out a lot with Meach this year because of the Banquet and I ended up being in Atlanta quite a bit.
And it was like we had never left. It was like I went out to Cosmos to get pizza and then came back.
JAG: Oh, I miss Cosmos.
Jim: And it was just remarkable and I know for a fact that there are five different people, 10 different people that I knew from the station, who if I called today, I haven't talked to in 15 years and we'd pick up exactly where we left off. I think that's an important lesson. And I think the final lesson is most issues can be solved through creativity.
JAG: I like that.
Jim: Now, whether you define creativity as not picking which hotel room was going to give away the VCR for a couple of weeks, or if you define creativity as we're $8,000 in the hole, I need, I'm going to be on the air for 89 straight hours to make a difference.
I think there's so many examples of that throughout the station in the vast majority of people who worked in the station, whether they were on air or they were solving other issues. Yeah. As I said, the Diane, Henry, Scotty Meach, Kenny, Hal group that had to figure out how they were going to pull us back from the brink of insolvency.
They needed that creativity too. And they needed to figure it out in ways that 93Q wasn't going to figure it out, or the other people in the market weren't going to figure it out. And so the power of that really stuck with me. And I feel you get the right people in the room, you clearly identify the problem, and then you try to keep your egos at the door and find the best solution no matter where it comes from. That's a pretty powerful mechanism if you've got the right folks in the room. And I've been very lucky to know many of those people who I would want in the room.
JAG: So a moment ago, you mentioned being an introvert, which I find fascinating given what you're doing now. We left off at the pandemic. Tell our listeners what you've been doing in the last few years since. Cause this is, I love this.
Jim: As I said, I got out of movie marketing and I had been very lucky. I knew I wanted to get out early. And so I salted away every dime I possibly could for a 30-year career. So I say that because when I started telling people that I was doing stand-up comedy, there was a panic among most of my friends because they immediately assumed that's how I was going to support my family.
And they all immediately went to, hey, you're really funny. You're not that fucking funny.
We've met Katie. We've met Julie. They're lovely. You need to get a real job. And so everybody seems to relax a little bit when I finally tell them, no, this is my version of golf. This is a retirement hobby that I'm very serious about. I'm bringing to it the same passion and energy that I tried to unravel morning radio with, and I tried to unravel movie marketing with, but I'm doing standup comedy now.
JAG: Nationally. You're doing it all over the country.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. It's tremendous fun. I think it's one of those things where you don't often have an opportunity at 50 to suddenly abandon a lifetime of credibility and knowledge in a certain area where maybe you are one of the world's authorities and then go to something where you will absolutely suck, day after day.
And I think that's something that I have absolutely loved about it. That I love being at a place where I'm starting over. And every day is a straight up learning curve. I feel like I'm back at Z89 talking to T Bone about what makes a great morning show at Cosmos over a toasted honey bun.
Or, back at Disney trying to figure out how to make people go to movie theaters. And I just love that. And I think the other thing about it, and it reminds me a lot of golf, although I don't golf.
JAG: Me either.
Jim: Nobody's ever going to shoot an 18. There will always be room for improvement. And I like that part of it too, because I think that gives me a toy.
I've got OCD. And so that gives me a mental toy that I can play with morning, noon, and night, and try to figure out how to get better. I'll never be perfect, but I just want to be as good as I can be. And yeah, I've been really lucky. I've been able to travel across the country and do a number of shows. And I have quite a bit to learn and a lot better to get, but I am really enjoying the journey and it's tremendous fun.
JAG: It's funny to me to picture somebody sitting in an audience at one of your shows. Here's a guy that maybe they're just meeting for the first time up in front of them doing stand-up comedy, and he was the head of marketing for all these Pixar movies back in the day.
He was a morning radio show host, and they have no clue. They're sitting there just evaluating you on what you're doing now with that learning curve.
Jim: That's right.
JAG: Just to be clear, Jim, you don't get up there and say, “Do you fucking know who I am? You don't do that.
Jim: I don't. Not usually. I have in, a show or two. But not usually.
And the fact of the matter is, they don't care. That's the beauty of it, they don't care any more than my daughter cares. And I mean that with love. In a very practical sense, that I was great at doing a particular thing. Has very little impact on whether I'm a great dad or not.
And my daughter cares about that. And I think for a standup crowd, they care if you're funny. I heard Chris Rock say once that being famous buys you three minutes. In other words, people go to a Chris Rock concert. And for three minutes, they'll coast along. And if you're not killing it, they'll start to let you know, even though you're Chris rock.
JAG: It's funny. The same thing happens in podcasting. If you want to leg up on anybody starting a podcast, if you're famous, you'll get people to check out the show. But if the show sucks, once that coasting period is over, they're not coming back.
Jim: That's exactly right. And ultimately, it's 100% about product.
JAG: Yes.
Jim: And so I need to get much better. As a stand-up comic and I need to write more material and I need to tour more and do a bunch of things to make myself better at it because the fact of the matter is, whatever it is, I brought to the party that got me here when people look at me, they just assume I've been doing stand-up comedy for 30 years and I suck at it. That they don't realize that I've only been doing this a handful of years and I suck at it and I'm still on this journey.
So it's really important. It has been for me at least to find a new adventure, whatever that adventure is that keeps you curious and keep you moving. And cause I love to nap. That was one thing about morning radio gave me excuses to nap. I love to nap. So left to my own devices, I will just nap like crazy. Standup, gives me a reason not to nap like crazy all day.
JAG: Let me ask you this, because the craft of stand-up comedy is always fascinating to me. I know we're a little long, so we'll wrap it up here. But you mentioned earlier, losing the gig. Was it the Georgia gig? When you insulted the client on the air?
Jim: Yeah.
JAG: You mentioned being scared on the air. And this is not a political podcast, we don't do politics here, but I do I feel like I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you. This is an era, since #MeToo, and since all the cultural changes we've seen in the last couple years, basically since you've been in the game doing stand up comedy, where, I know people hate this phrase, but being cancelled, or saying the wrong thing to the wrong person, and you get doxed online, or whatever the phrasing is, how do you navigate being funny, but not getting in trouble? And where is that line?
Jim: Yeah, I think it's a great question. I was lucky enough to get to stand up after being canceled was a thing. And what I mean by that is. I have no problem being cancelled.
JAG: Okay.
Jim: I find it so tiresome to hear comedians whining that they can't tell the jokes they want to tell anymore without getting cancelled.
I got news for ya. The American public doesn't owe you dick. You are here at their pleasure. If you stop making them laugh... If they feel like the feelings that you generate in them are more negative than positive of course they're going to drop you. You don't have a G-d given right to be a comedian.
And so for me, the idea of bitching about the fact that I can't say whatever I want on a stage for fear that somebody will get offended and ruin my career? By the way, they should. It comes back to creativity to me. My job is to make you laugh. To me, it's a failure in creativity if I can't figure out things to make you laugh that won't make you hate me.
Now there are guys who that's their stock in trade, right? Anthony Jezelnik revels in saying the most horrifying things you can possibly imagine.
JAG: Think of those Comedy Central roasts from back in the day. Yeah.
Jim: Exactly. That's his brand and that's fine. But what I mean is the idea of getting canceled, to me, is basically everybody who's in a minority in this country suddenly feeling like they no longer want to feel like a target anymore.
JAG: Okay.
Jim: Women don't want to feel like a target. Trans kids don't want to feel like a target. Any minority. And I get so tired of old white guys going, oh, now I can't say anything I want to say. Dude, you've been a target for exactly six months.
And look how much you're bitching about it. Everybody else has been a target from the beginning of time. How can you not understand that the very basic decency these people should be afforded is to not feel badly when you're trying to entertain them. I just don't understand that whole concept. And so for me, I think part of it too, is I'm a little older.
I hate bullies. And so comics who get up there and bully the crowd or bully people who have less power than they do because they're a minority or because they think differently or act differently. I just have no time for that. I think that is one of the most disgraceful cowardly acts you can perpetrate, is actually bullying someone.
And I see it all the time in comedy. Now that doesn't mean that you're going to like everything I say, but what that does mean is I need to take responsibility and understand that if I want to say something, I need to be responsible for how that's going to hit your ears.
And the fact is, if it hits your ears in a negative way, and you are more representative of the majority of listeners than the people for whom it hits positively, I don't have a career anymore and that's completely and totally the right of the audience. When I was a movie marketer, I never believed in blaming the movie if it underperformed.
When I was on the morning show, I never believed in blaming external forces if I had a bad show. And now that I'm doing comedy, I don't believe in abdicating my responsibility for what I say. And the ideas I foment on stage, because I'm worried that if I offend somebody, it's going to be the end of the line.
I think the very least people can hope for, the very least. After living through a society where terrible, horrible things have happened to people of all stripes and races and religions, G-d Almighty, can't we find a way when we're actually sitting in a place where we're supposed to be laughing together?
Can't we find a way to do that without making everybody else a target? I don't mean to sound holier than. I have certainly laughed at things that, are based on stereotype. But I'm trying to evolve. I really am. And I would rather spend the rest of my time here bringing people joy than making people unhappy. It's just that simple.
JAG: You have just taught a masterclass to close out this show, and I think it's a wonderful place to leave it. That is the best answer I've ever heard to a question like that. So it's been great getting to know you, hearing the wonderful things you've accomplished in your career, the amazing contributions you've made to JPZ and obviously what you've gotten out of it too. And I can't thank you enough for spending so much time with us today, Jim.
Jim: Jon, I can't thank you enough. The series obviously has been the complete talk of not only the Banquet, but the entire Z89 world. And, I think I'm certainly not alone in the fact that those years were among some of the best of my life and the fact that you have spent such incredible time and care to actually get those stories and those people and those voices out and back to me 30 years after I left.
I know has been really important to me and I know that everybody else who's had a chance to listen has also felt that way. So congratulations. You've done amazing work here.
JAG: That really means a lot, Jim. Thank you.