David is one of my heroes. Look how cool he looks in a leather jacket. I was at an event that he spoke at and I was just blown away. This is the Washington Post. I don't know if you remember that event. And here he is. I did a tech demo with him years ago, AR augmented reality, and he's spoken at my event down in Davos and everyone loves David. He says provocative things, counter-intuitive things, really interesting things. And it's really important to hear from someone like David because if you fast forward to what he's doing now as the executive chairman of Nielsen, he knows what people are thinking. He's seen the data. He sees trends. And as AI becomes a tool to kind of do modeling, it'll be very interesting how companies like Nielsen go forward and I bet you have a take on it. And who's heard of the streaming wars?
Yeah, the TV streaming wars. No one's heard of it here? Yeah, you know, you pay a lot of money for different things. So, he has some insight into that and it'll be interesting. But his life started right there and he went to this junior high school? Yeah. What's it called?
It's Walter French Junior High School.
Yeah. And so we found your yearbook and this is a picture in your yearbook. Which one is you and which team is this and what does this say about the trajectory you were on as a little something to where you are today, a major leader, chair of the board of Best Buy, helped found Digitas and was acquired for billions to help run something at IBM. David is a really big deal, but it all started here. So tell us about this.
The nerds will prevail in the end. So, that is a 50-year-old picture from 1976. The junior high school also had Magic Johnson and Jay. So when my fellow teammates were going to make the NBA and the NFL, I was not awarded the same body type. So I had to find something else to do, which was to use the mind. The equations team was we had seven schools. You would roll the dice, get numbers and symbols, and make differential equations to equal the answer. Whoever got there fastest won. So you would devise an answer and an equation. I hope kids still know how to do that. I think AI can do it for you, but there's something about doing math. And you pointed out, there have been a few cases where I have been fortunate to be at the early end of trends. But you see trends through numbers, through data. And I think we can use data in unprecedented ways now. And I think all of us can find a lot more to learn about the world through equations.
And this was really 50 years this week? Is that right?
Probably, yeah. It's certainly 50 years this spring. So that was the spring 1976 yearbook photo.
So this is being recorded. All these names are going to be public domain. Have you kept up with any of these folks?
So I still talk to him. I don't know the rest. And like you noticed, there was only one girl in that. I would hope today it would have more gender parity.
And I'm going to foreshadow this, but you were the CEO of Nielsen, but you're also the chief —
Of Nielsen at the same time. And diversity's been a loaded word recently. I can't wait to hear —
Yeah. So I don't know. I can't wait for you to talk about that. All right. So you grew up in Michigan.
And then what is this logo?
Well, when I went there, it was called the General Motors Institute. So in 1929, the car industry was like the AI industry. You couldn't get enough talent, so they started their own college. It was a co-op school, we all went through. By the time I finished in 1984, GM realized it couldn't afford to run the school just by itself. And quite honestly, there's little diversity when everybody comes from GM and works at GM. So they opened it up to the rest of the industry and named it after their founder, Charles Kettering. So,
So were you there when it was a pipeline to work at GM?
But you didn't go that path.
So you went there thinking you were going to work at GM.
And I did after I graduated. And then they paid my way through Harvard Business School. And then I went back.
And then Bain called and I decided —
Do a stint at GM? I didn't realize that.
And was this a non-profit or for-profit school?
It's owned by a corporation.
Once Kettering spun out, I think it's a non-profit today. It's a fully accredited technical school. So it only gives five degrees: mechanical, chemical, electrical, computer science.
Yeah. So, you know, actually —
Just you made me think about this. Apparently Buffalo was offered to be the Detroit before the car, Ford could have set up shop in Buffalo but they passed. And it went to Detroit. And we think about Silicon Valley. And someone told me recently that Silicon Valley is equivalent GDP of China right now. But before Silicon Valley, there was Detroit and St. Louis and Route 128. So these things do move around. All right. So then you went to Harvard Business School.
It's on the Canadian border, so free trade had a lot to do with the creation of that car industry.
Yeah. It's a problem today. Yeah. So Harvard Business School, any interesting stories from your time there? What was that like?
Yeah. All right. All right.
Well, I would say, if you grow up the first kid in your family to go to college, you're on the equations team, you go to General Motors Institute. I had a strong but narrow view. The advantage of the business school is you meet people from all around the world doing all sorts of interesting things. So it was a great opening of the mind. The classes were great, but I would say the real education was the other students.
All right. So then you went to Bain and where were you based?
Gilbert's out here, so just I'm —
And what was your life like at Bain? What projects were you put on?
Paul and Sandy Edgerley, so —
You saw the equations things, so all of it's been data. I did a lot of interesting data work. Bain doesn't talk about most of its clients, so I respect that, but I did a lot in financial services, a lot in banking about the use of data to better serve people.
Great. All right. So then what did you do? How did you go from there? You made partner, and some people who become partners stay for life, but you left.
To do. I did, so one of the projects I did at Bain in 1994 was the first internet strategy for American Express. At that time the internet was AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Then it got me interested in how was that going to work? What was going to be a business model? Paywalls were not working. People were not paying for content. So this gave me the idea of advertising. And how would advertising work when you had so much more data? You could give the right ad to the right person at the right time. And that caused me to work with Helman and Friedman to buy Bronner Slosberg Humphrey and create Digitas.
Yeah, let me double down on that. So you bet on digital before anyone believed in it. You built Digitas into a billion-dollar company before most CMOs even had an email address. What did you see in 1997 that everyone around you was missing and what did it feel like to be betting your career on something nobody yet believed in?
Lots of CMOs had email, but they paid their assistant to read it and then they wrote the responses and paid their assistant to type it back in. Don't use AI that way.
There are people using AI exactly the same way.
Yeah, you've seen that movie.
So they wanted it to serve them, but you never get it exactly right. So we were early with this idea that you could communicate with people more effectively on digital. I'll later come to being right. Being right is important, but being right at the right time is super important. So we were ahead of the game and then everybody got excited and then there was the dot-com bubble and the company went from $100 million in total capital to $2 billion on the stock market to 88 cents. So it was never right, and you've always just got to know your intrinsic value. Because it's hard to get the timing right. Markets get frothy and then they get chilly, and the answer is always somewhere in the middle.
Okay. So tell us about this. You wrote this December 2000 in Harvard Business Review, Contextual Marketing. It was all about why the mobile device was actually going to be the preferred internet device. Apple Newton? Total bomb.
