Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing with Bob Pittman

Allen Grubman is a legend in the music business, but he’s not a musician. He’s an entertainment lawyer who for over 50 years has been making deals for superstars in music and media. He’s a trusted advisor to Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, and, of course, Bob Pittman. Bob sat down with his longtime friend and confidante to learn how he went from Brooklyn kid to Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee. All it took was a stint singing on NBC’s Children’s Hour, an infectious personality, and a keen attention to the business of music. 

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With Boom Supersonic, Blake Scholl is reaching for the impossible. When the Concorde was grounded in 2003, dreams of a profitable model for supersonic aviation were abandoned. It took an introverted kid obsessed with aviation to prove skeptics wrong. Today, Boom has orders to make over 100 supersonic aircrafts for the US Airforce, United Airlines, and more, ensuring that supersonic travel is about to make a comeback. Of course, Blake didn’t achieve this overnight. He sat down with Bob to relay how his time in the early days of tech at Amazon and Groupon taught him the do’s and dont’s of startups and how he realized that above all else, it’s passion that makes a business soar. 

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Join iHeartMedia Chairman and CEO Bob Pittman for the new season of Math & Magic: Stories from the Frontiers of Marketing.

This season, Bob sits down with leaders across various fields –from A-list entrepreneurs to a supersonic aviator and everyone in-between—to learn how they’ve used data and creativity to push their businesses into the future. There’s nothing these visionaries can’t teach us about how to find success in our ever-changing world.

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You might be surprised to learn that legendary sportscaster Colin Cowherd rarely checks his ratings. As he puts it: checking your ratings doesn’t make your ratings better. Instead, Colin has some other tried-and-true ways to build an engaged audience— and it shows. With his program on Fox Sports and two podcast networks in partnership with iHeartPodcasts, Colin hasn’t just built an audience, he’s built an empire. Colin joins Bob to share insights on audience growth, his advice for advertisers and what lessons from pro athletes we can apply to any industry.

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Throughout the tumultuous pandemic, Christian Juhl kept a steady hand at the helm of GroupM at WPP—the world’s largest advertising and media investment company. The key to Christian’s powerful leadership lies within his early experiences in the eye of the dot com boom and bust. The memories of wondering whether his paychecks would cash have not faded, and neither have the corresponding lessons. Listen as Christian shares those lessons with Bob; plus, how Christian and his team are leveraging GroupM’s size to change the industry, and the world, for the better.

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After a brief stint as a Blackjack dealer, Mike Meldman thought he’d try his hand as a real estate developer. Cut to the present: Mike and his team at Discovery Land Company have created over thirty luxury communities worldwide. But Mike is not just providing four walls and a roof: he’s providing community. Bob sits down to find out how Mike has achieved that— and where Casamigos, the award-winning tequila brand Mike co-founded, fits in.

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Although Byron Sharp grew up on a sheep farm, he’s spent his career defying herd mentality. As Director of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science, Byron has debunked marketing conventions and helped brands stick to what works. Along the way, he wrote the seminal book “How Brands Grow,” which you can find on any CMO’s desk who is worth their salt. In today’s special episode of Math & Magic, Bob shares the mic with iHeart’s CMO Gayle Troberman for a conversation with Byron on the marketing strategies backed by science.

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It’s impossible to make good business decisions with bad information. That’s where truth-seeking reporters like Stephanie Ruhle come in. Host of the 11th Hour on MSNBC and Senior Business Analyst for NBC News, Stephanie has brought truth and accountability to power by breaking momentous stories like the London Whale loss. Bob talks to Stephanie about how she navigated a major career pivot, the surprising role New York City restaurants played in her career advancements, and how companies can get media coverage (spoiler alert: it’s easier than you think!).

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In 2019, the Black Information Network— a full-time news service by and for the black community— was in the early stages of planning at iHeartMedia. But when George Floyd was murdered, Tony Coles, one of iHeart’s Division Presidents who had been overseeing BIN’s development, knew the platform needed to launch immediately. Tony, now President of BIN, reflects on how he and his team were able to spring into action so effectively, some stories that have made the biggest impact, and why triumphs deserve as much coverage as tragedies.

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Jeff Bewkes started at HBO as something of a traveling salesman; his job was to urge motels to add HBO to their properties and their marquees. Later, Jeff would become the last CEO of Time Warner, and engineered the company’s sale to AT&T. Jeff shares the original programming gambles that paid off, what television in the 90s teaches us about the streaming wars and how spending childhood summers on a farm shaped his business sense. Plus, Bob and Jeff give their intersecting stories from the historic Time Inc. / Warner Communications merger.

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