TORONTO-BORN BRAD SCHWARTZ’s task looks to be a programmers dream.
To establish a new, analog channel with 4.5 million pre-existing paying customers using one of the world’s best-known media brands among the highly coveted young set: MTV.
The man knows his television. His first job in the industry was as assistant to Saturday Night Live founder and executive producer Lorne Michaels. From there, Schwartz hung around the music and media industries, working his way onto MTV and up the ladder there to director of global marketing in New York, before returning to Toronto as senior vice-president and general manager to run the MTV-CTV joint venture.
It’s a bit different running a Canadian cable channel, he acknowledged. First of all, they’re called specialties here. Second, there are certain Canadian content quotas to hit and third, license conditions prohibiting MTV (Music Television) from playing much music.
Last week Schwartz (pictured below) chatted with cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien about MTV Canada’s first eight weeks of broadcast. What follows is an edited transcript.
GOB: Has MTV in Canada so far hit your expectations or have there been challenges to it?
BS: I think there are always challenges. But it’s a very, very exciting thing we’ve built. You know, when I came up in September 2005, we had 56,000 square feet in an 88 year old building, and they said, go. So it was an exciting ramp-up. And we hired and – you know I’m going to say this, of course, but it’s because I believe it – the absolute best, young, aggressive media team in the business.
GOB: How many are there?
BS: That’s a tough question for me to answer because there’s the business staff that run programming and marketing and communications, the ad sales, the creative, the production and all that. And then obviously we make a lot of Canadian productions and we do a live television show here every day at six o’clock. We produce documentaries and stuff. But, when we did our launch party and Kanye West performed and we had to go around the building and wanted to give everybody on the staff a ticket it was around 160. It’s become fairly significant team (not all of whom work exclusively for MTV in Canada).
GOB: That’s quite a step up from Talk TV, which I think in its last year of operation they had zero staffers listed (according to CRTC figures).
BS: Whoa… But forget about what we’re doing. This has been a wonderful addition to the Canadian creative community, a wonderful addition to the Canadian production community – a lot of jobs, a lot of investment and a lot of new Canadian productions. So that’s been a very, very cool thing about it.
GOB: And it’s a bit of a different thing here where you have to worry about the Canadian aspect of it, where you didn’t really have to be all that concerned about it before. I mean, you didn’t have Canadian content quotas to hit, or you know, or American content or wherever you were.
BS: No, but I can speak actually fairly intelligently about that. MTV when they first started jumping the pond and taking MTV around the world, they had this one size fits all mentality – and it didn’t work. 
Every local small little music video channel would just eat their lunch. Then, MTV got wise and started their localization strategy where all of the channels were programmed locally – local staff, local sensibility, local everything. And now you go to MTV Brazil and you check out that channel, they don’t have (content) quotas but you look at that channel, it’s very sexy, very hot, it’s very summery. Big bright colors.
You go to MTV Indonesia and there’s a call to prayer four times a day. Look at MTV Japan, and it’s a very tech – very digital, anime type of channel
So forget about Canadian content quotas. The fact is that the most famous slogan in MTV’s history is the “I want my MTV” where the most important word in that sentence is “my.” And therefore, every Canadian needs to feel like this is their MTV, Canadian content quotas or not. So that’s why it’s just really smart to position ourselves as an extraordinarily Canadian brand.
GOB: But, the one regulatory or licensing aspect of the channel is the limitations on how much music you’re able to play.
BS: Very true.
GOB: Is that a major problem? MTV in the States has moved so far away from a flow of videos. I mean, you look at their schedule and there’s not a lot of music videos there, really.
BS: Not at all.
GOB: So in Canada, does it matter that you’re so limited to what you can play in terms of music and are tied to talk?
BS: MTV has most certainly evolved into an entertainment and lifestyle channel… they’re not just a back-to-back music video channel anymore. The great thing with this is we also have this unprecedented, nothing like it in Canada, broadband video channel: Overdrive. There are 12,000 music videos for you to watch whenever you want on demand.
It’s been a phenomenal success for us. In just two months of operation, Overdrive has streamed over two million videos. And that’s not just music videos. We have short-form content up there. We have full episodes of “Laguna Beach.” You can go and watch full episodes of shows, or aftershows. But over two million pieces of video content have been streamed from Overdrive in eight weeks… and the average amount of time spent on it is 23 minutes.
I mean, Sympatico would be five minutes. Google would be three minutes, Amazon – seven or eight minutes. And we’ve people coming to our site and hanging out on average for basically the length of an entire show.
So, if you want to get your music… Overdrive is the place. That’s where people can go and watch what they want when they want it. It’s really the definition of “I want my MTV.”
GOB: Do you think music videos are moving permanently into that space where you maybe won’t see as much of them made, period?
BS: No. I think it’s still a pretty key component to music sales. But the days of seeing Michael Jackson spend millions of dollars on a 23-minute “Thriller” video – might be over. There’ll always be music videos, I just don’t think that with the economics of the music world that they’re going to spend tons of money on them.
They’ll just get more creative. Hire younger people. And do them better and cheaper… some of the best music videos of the last 10 years have been done for pennies.
Overall, yes our license doesn’t allow us to (show very much music), but I think even if it did, I don’t know how much more music you’d see.
GOB: What about the CTV block of MTV programming? How has that gone?
BS: We have a brand promise to fulfill at MTV and there are certain aspects of the brand that we need to get across to the consumer – to the viewer. So they feel passionate about every aspect of this brand. To do that, we obviously have our talk channel which allows us to air programming from certain categories and certain restrictions. Then we have Overdrive, which is where we can run a lot of our digital content, from music videos and that gives a whole other side of the brand to the people.
But, there are also shows MTV has that unfortunately do not fit into our talk license and we needed an outlet for those. So the idea of putting an MTV-branded block in a late-night time slot on CTV was just another way for us to touch the consumers with content that we might not be able to have on the other platforms. The idea is that we completely circle our viewers with all of these different MTV platforms.
And that also includes a mobile phone – and Rogers and Shaw will start offering video on demand over the next few months. It also includes live events. Kanye West, one of the five biggest stars in the world, performed live in our legendary music venue in front of 600 people.
All of a sudden, you put all these touch points together and you have a really, really substantial brand put out there for all Canadians to enjoy. And that was really the thinking of adding the programming block to the main network.
We did a “Making of the Video” with Nick Lachey that aired Friday night at 1 a.m. in our MTV on CTV block and we pulled over 202,000 viewers. Now, those are numbers that we’re not getting and right now MuchMusic is not getting – or any specialty. I don’t want to pick on MuchMusic but there aren’t specialty channels out there pulling 202,000 viewers.
GOB: When you look at all the multiplatform aspects and the way that your demographic accesses MTV, is it getting more confusing to be able to touch that young person demographic or is it easier because you’ve got so many different ways to get to them?
BS: I think MTV has pretty much proven itself to be the biggest and best multiplatform brand in the world. Or at least leading the charge. Things like Overdrive and video clips on phones is stuff MTV has been doing long before this upfront season where now CBS, NBC, ABC – everyone and their dog is doing it.
But to get back to your question about whether it’s confusing. I think the amount of technology and multimedia things out there is getting confusing because there is so much of it. But the way you navigate through all of that confusion and this is the way we’ve always been from the beginning of time – that strong media brands navigate you through technology… People are going to look to a brand like MTV to help them navigate them through everything.
Or you can pick up your mobile phone and go into your deck on your mobile phone and you’re going to click on MTV and you’re going to say what is MTV going to do for me on my mobile phone? That brand’s going to take me through.
GOB: With all of the different technologies, is it easier to reach your young target-demographic now, because you don’t have to drive them all just to the one TV channel?
BS: It’s such an on-demand world now, and there are people out there that don’t go anywhere without their iPod and there are people who don’t go anywhere without their mobile phone. People are working harder than they have before and getting home later and that’s why time-shifting has become such a trend.
So I don’t know if reaching them is easier. It’s just that people want their entertainment, their content in many, many, many different forms. And, if you’re going to be a powerful brand in their lives, you need to be wherever they are.
GOB: How much more of a challenge is it that when you’re doing your own production that you’ve got to think, okay, this has to work on a little tiny screen as well as a big TV screen?
BS: You’re absolutely right. But the great thing about starting this company from scratch… is that we can really instill that in every employee as they walk through the door. It’s in everything we do. We have to think multiplatform with it all and ask: "how does this show live on all of these different areas?" It’s not just programming at 9 o’clock on MTV.
GOB: Where you’d just slot it in the TV schedule in the past.
BS: This company’s very young and very creative and it’s now the way we all think. Some of us don’t even think of it as a challenge – it’s just how we do it. 
GOB: I wanted to touch on your on-air staff (Daryn Jones, left, and Jessi Cruickshank are pictured here with rapper and host of "Pimp my Ride", Xzibit). I think it’s fair to say they’re inexperienced?
BS: Absolutely.
GOB: Was that a conscious choice –so that they would grow up with the channel? I mean, you can see some of the growing pains when you’re looking at it. Was that a conscious choice?
BS: That’s a great question. And I have a great answer for you because I feel very, very passionate about this. I’ve been in the United States for a few years, but the one thing I’ve always known about the Canadian media scene is that it’s very small, right? Everybody knows everybody. And if you look around – not only does everyone know everybody, everyone’s worked somewhere else.
GOB: And usually they’ve all somehow worked at CBC at least once.
BS: Right. So, the last thing I wanted to do is have on-air talent that were somewhere else before. I didn’t want someone that was on something else or has had any association with any other brand or channel. I mandated from the very beginning that I wanted to like, be a star-maker.
I wanted us to find young, awesome new Canadians and give them opportunities. And the great thing – another great thing about the MTV brand – is that it’s okay to screw up.
The biggest hit show – well, besides “Laguna Beach” – the biggest hit show in MTV’s history is "The Osbournes” and it was made out of doing a “Cribs” episode at the Osbournes’ house. And someone fell upon this idea.
That’s always been the MTV way – making mistakes and falling forward because the brand allows you to challenge yourself to do crazy things – so I said "you know what, let’s be a star-maker. Let’s take some young kids and try and make them stars."
GOB: Are they panning out the way you had hoped?
BS: Some faster than others. But I won’t tell you who I think will be the ones that really shine six months from now. But, I think the ones that are going to shine in the next six months are going to be very different than the ones that are going to shine six months to a year from now.
