Why You Wanted Your MTV

CUNY Lecture Series – CUNY Podcasts

In this message-oversatuartion era, marketers have to “pick an audience and superserve them,” says branding guru Alan Goodman, who teaches a marketing master class at Macaulay Honors College. At MTV, where he developed the logo and the iconic animation IDs, Goodman says he saw the network as more than just a music video channel, and identified the audience as young people and proposed to reach them by offering programs that would annoy their parents. The campaign for Nickelodeon, he says, took the kids’ network from the lowest-rated basic cable network to the highest in nine months without changing programming. One tool he used in his Nick campaign was doo-wop, which people told him was a mistake because it was out of style. Kids responded to it, he says, because it was different.