Interview with Jack Myers, Media Ecologist, Educator, Author, Producer, Diversity Advocate
Transcript:
Julie:
Hello everybody and welcome to another edition of The Conversational. My name is Julie Roehm, and today I have the very great pleasure of introducing you to Jack Myers, who is not just my guest, but a long time friend. We were just speaking, I know that early 2000s is when we met, but Jack has done lots of amazing things in his life, one of which was starting a company called MediaVillage and I wrote blogs for it way back in the day. And he was reminding me that in 2011 was my first one and it was entitled, Do You Like Me and Should I Care?
I really care if Jack Myers likes me because he is such a great guy. I'm going to give you just a little bit about who Jack is and why I'm so effusive about him. He was born in Utica, New York, but beyond being a New Yorker he has established himself as one of the really great, I would say proponents of women in marketing and in media. So, he got his start in media in the early days. I'll let him tell you all about it, but along the way he has built his own companies. He has supported women in every walk of the media and marketing world, and he has let his principles really guide everything that he does.
So I want to get into this with you now, because I think that your story is one that is super inspiring and as we talk about these holy shit moments that get in our way and can sometimes get us off track, it is those things that sometimes lead us to who we were really meant to be and I think, for sure, that is what has happened with you. So, first of all, welcome. But second of all-
Jack:
Thank you, Julie. I have to tell you, you hark back to the 2011, 2012, when you were writing for MediaVillage and Do You Like Me? Yes, I truly like you. I remember the first time we met. You were giving a talk at an ANA or an IAB or a conference and it was on why media buying would move toward technology and it was pretty programmatic. And everyone's in the room nay-saying and I'm in the back typing away every word you were saying, which I found incredibly brilliant and I've liked you from that moment. And you were right, that's the interesting thing. Your whole career has been going a little against the tides, which I've always respected.
Julie:
Always. And you know what? It's actually such a nice segue because you were always a supporter of mine all the way through, and I was never one to not be controversial especially in that. I remember that where I suggested that the way we buy and sell TV should be done in the same way that we buy and sell on the NASDAQ and boy, I got a lot of, especially from the media agencies, I got a lot of dirty looks on that one. You were always super agnostic and just to your point, supportive of the new thinking and more than just the new thinking, you really always have been a very big cheerleader for women. For women in this space and for women in what were traditionally male-dominated spaces. So I admire you in a big way.
But let's go back, [crosstalk] let's tell them all about you and why I'm so effusive. Let's get into it. So you were born in Utica. I know that, in New York.
Jack:
It's in Central New York. My first, oh I'd say 14, 15 years, Utica was known as Sin City. Utica Club was the first brewery to open up after Prohibition primarily because it had never closed. Utica was part of the pipeline of hooch down from Canada out into Detroit and down into New York City, and so there was a large Mafia contingent there. And then when I was about 15 they had a reform mayor who came in and changed it to Sincerity City, so I missed out on all the fun, unfortunately.
Julie:
Oh my gosh, who knew? Who knew that that... You think of Utica as sleepy. I was like, this is [crosstalk].
Jack:
There was a time when it wasn't so sleepy.
Julie:
So tell my about your mom and dad. So what did your dad do?
Jack:
My dad was a college administrator, also early in his career was in PR, and then moved that into college administration at Utica College, which was part of Syracuse University. My mom, who just passed a couple of months ago at 99 years old, was incredibly inspirational, and I really didn't get to truly appreciate her work. She was one of the only working women in my neighborhood. She was a bookkeeper, put herself through college, night school, working full time. Going to classes three nights a week, homework the rest of the time. Summa Cum Laude graduate, went on to get her masters.
When my parents, when I went to college, they moved down to Texas, and my mom went to work as a civilian for the military, and this goes back into the very, very early days of computers, and became the Air Force's leading computer programming troubleshooter globally for all the PXs and commissaries. All the commercial assets that the Air Force operated. So my mom spent time working at the Pentagon. She traveled to Air Force bases around the world.
And I remember one day she came home, and just said, "I'll tell you, this Colonel keeps bothering me, and keeps overruling me. And I just walked right into the General's office and I told him." And I said, "Mom, you walked into the General's office?" And she said, "Yeah." And so, she was a very forceful woman, powerful woman, a role model. She was part of, even in Utica, as a bookkeeper was part of Governor Rockefeller's first council on women. After she passed I found... Actually it was just before she did, I found some documents that were from that. She wrote her masters thesis on, if you read her masters thesis today, you'd change a couple of words, a couple of the terms, and it would be like it could have been written yesterday. It's just so far ahead of the curve on so many things.
And my dad was just incredibly supportive of her career. When he retired and she continued working, he just really supported her travel, and ever step of the way. I never felt any... When she was a working mom and a working wife, when none of their friends or neighbors had a working woman in the household, I never felt any defensiveness about that. In fact, I just felt like he was just incredibly supportive of that. And it's only recently that I've come to recognize how influential they both were, and I've written a couple books on gender norms, and it's something that is so evolutionary.
Can I tell you a little, unrelated to that, story about Utica?
Julie:
Absolutely.
Jack:
Okay, so Utica was the home of General Electric radios, where they were built. I was a senior, it's 1965. I'm a senior in high school, and I get called into the office and told that GE is having what they call a focus group, and they've asked for two students, male and female, to go spend a few hours. So they took me down to the GE plant, which is now closed up and in ruins. And showed us into a room, there were two kids from each of the high schools. There were around 10 or 12 kids there, and we spent three hours talking about something brand new called transistor radios.
Julie:
No kidding.
Jack:
Again, this was a radical idea, and they had six samples, two of each, to pass around. Some were pretty big, had handles on them, leather cases, really beautiful. And then others got smaller and smaller, and there was this little red one, this little, teeny, red transistor radio. And then at the end of the focus group, they asked us all to just pick out which one we want, put it on a piece of paper, and put it in. And they'd pull out, and whichever one they pulled out you'd get, first come first serve. And every single kid put in the little, red, teeniest transistor radio.
This was radically different than what GE thought would be the result of the focus group. They thought everyone would want the pretty big box with the handle that you could carry around, that looked nice. And that was the beginning of those little, red transistor radios that you saw ubiquitously in the 1960s, and throughout the '70s.
Julie:
I had one. I had one, it was my first radio. Those little ones, that had that little string that your wrist could go through.
Jack:
Yeah, the little antenna that you lifted up, yep.
Julie:
Oh God, yeah, that's amazing. It's so funny because I... So one of the things that I thought, just knowing you, that we discussed was, I don't know if it was a hoshimo, but it was ever-present. But I think it helped make you who you are, and that speaks so much to, I think your support for women. You were just talking about your mom, and I kept thinking about the movie Hidden Figures, and there's probably a series of movies of influential women-
Jack:
Absolutely.
Julie:
... in our government, military development. She was probably one of those. I know you told me the story about how she got her accounting degree, but wasn't allowed to get her CPA, because only men we allowed to have them then.
Jack:
Exactly.
Julie:
But you also mentioned that, and it was a very difficult time, and having a really formidable presence in a very... A mom who was very into her career and ambitious was not the norm, and certainly when you were growing up was not at all. It was supposed to be, June Cleaver was the ideal-ic mother at the time, that was how the world looked, but-
Jack:
My ideal mom was Donna Reed, but-
Julie:
Donna Reed, okay, got it. Not June Cleaver, Donna Reed. Fair enough.
Jack:
Yeah, I wanted to be Paul Peterson, that's another generation, though.
Julie:
Well that's okay, it'll give something for people to look up, right? But how was it growing up, I mean, because it was so different? I'm sure that it changed your perspective and made you who you are today, but what did it feel like as a kid growing up with a mom who was very focused on her career?
Jack:
It sucked.
Julie:
Why?
Jack:
I have very clear memories of my mom just being, first of all, not being home. Coming home for dinner, one hour, and then leaving again for school, or moving into the other room to do her homework. And if I wanted to be around her when she was doing her homework, asking my dad to come and get me. It was really difficult. It was incredibly formative, to feel not wanted, frankly. And that really was very formative in relationships that I had later in life. Looking for those same qualities that were really destructive to my own self-image, self-esteem or needs, personal needs. As fortunately for me and for her, she had a very long life, and as I got to go through therapy, number one, go through relationships, and come to terms with how powerful a positive influence both she and my dad were, by being so different, and by being able to be comfortable in their differences. Both in their own relationship and in the society that they lived in at the time.
And my mom, I asked her just a few years ago, as the harassment issues and Me Too movement evolved, how she managed to navigate it in the military for all those years. And she said she recalled no overt harassment. That she was always taken in and accepted as part of the club, that she was supported. Apart from that one Colonel maybe, but that she was always supported, always reinforced, and never felt that she was judged by anything other than her skills and her talent. And that was a powerful message, I think. We don't necessarily always look at the military in that context.
So it was challenging as a child, and I think today we're really, in COVID-19, in the pandemic, we're seeing the extraordinary challenges of working, and being a working parent, and having children whose needs are significantly more, without the support infrastructure of the school system, or camps, or the after-school programs, or before-school programs, the child care. None of which she had.
Julie:
Yeah, it's just amazing to hear that she doesn't recall any stories, because you do-
Jack:
Amazing.
Julie:
The assumption is of course, that I think about my career as a woman in a lot of male-dominated industries, and I don't recall any overt, necessarily sexual harassment. But certainly, I guess people could've. But certainly the way that people spoke to you, how they referred to you, what they expected of you, certainly was not what you would expect today. And it's funny on how we look back. I would've never have thought of myself... I think it's just as you go through, when what is the norm is the norm, until your light is shone on, that that really shouldn't be. Sometimes you just take it, you just accept it, take it for granted. But I'm glad to hear that she really, even after the light was shone on all of this, that she couldn't think of anything. I mean, that's a great testament. It's great.
So I want to go back to, now I want to be you as a kid, because you've got this amazing story of... And it connects to that transistor radio story you were telling, about growing up. And it makes sense too, that without your mom there you were probably left to your own devices a lot. So you built a radio. At what age did you build a radio, and why did you build a radio?
Jack:
A crystal, what's called a crystal radio, at nine years old. I had a neighbor who was a disc jockey. They didn't call them, he was a radio announcer who played music and talked, and every Saturday morning he did the show live during the summer, from his car port. And I'd go over and visit with him, and got to talk on the radio a little bit, but more importantly, watch him. And I just became fascinated with radio, so I built one. And that crystal radio, you strung a wire up into a tree, and it was able to pick up AM signals from New York City. So I could listen late at night, when there were clouds in the AM, which bounces off the clouds, whereas FM is a straight line and have limited distance, AM can go on forever. So I'd listen to K-DKA from Pittsburgh, and I think W-DAF maybe, from Detroit. W-ABC from New York, and I'd listen to rock and roll radio. And it was just-
Julie:
That's cool.
Jack:
It was just, that's what I wanted to do. I wanted to be a disc jockey, I wanted to be in radio, which is why they asked me to go down and do the GE. They knew, even in high school they knew about my passion. Applied to what was then Syracuse University. It was the communications school, it was before it was the Newhouse School. It became the Newhouse School when I was there. And that's all I wanted to do. I got my, what's known as the third-degree FCC license to be a disc jockey. You had to have a license from the FCC, so my dad had to drive me out to Syracuse twice to take the FCC test, because I failed the first time. So, very upsetting, but I got my third-degree license, but I never got that job as a deejay. When I got to Syracuse I did a public affairs show, an interview show with the Maxwell School of Citizenship Professors. Which politics also fascinated me, so I had a minor in political science, and I'm still fascinated by politics.
But I'll tell you, the most important education that I ever got, Julie, was my masters at NYU in media ecology. It was the most formative experience in my life, and continues to inform everything I do. I proudly wear the title of being a media ecologist, and I think, I think I'm the leading practicing media ecologist, and they're actually hundreds of them around the world.
Julie:
I didn't know that there were. I mean, it is interesting to think about your trajectory. I thought, so you've got these... This is why I love doing these conversations, because there's so much richness when you think about your parents, and you think about your love of radio and how that stuck with you. Plus you were living in this town. I think you told me you were one of two Jews in a town of Catholics, and so you were-
Jack:
A high school of 1200, there were two Jews, yeah. 95% Italian Catholic, yep.
Julie:
Right, so you were always this outlier, this mom. But you had this passion that you found, because you just put yourself... This is how I envision you. Now, if I was going to write your story for a TV script, right? You found this niche and you just pursued it relentlessly, and you worked with GE, and then you came to New York and you worked for ad agencies. But you always had this political bent, and even in your interviews, when I think about, when you started MediaVillage in 2011, it wasn't so much political. But you took them on the way that you would think about interviewing candidates. You always had that very-
Jack:
Thank you.
Julie:
... process... No, it is absolutely a compliment. It's really, truly amazing. So when you came, I want to tell people, because just because I know the story. I want you to tell it. But you came to New York, as you said, but I think you worked for JWT, didn't you, for a while?
Jack:
Well no, I worked for a year in Syracuse. The university had a profit-making company called Civic Survey that was a research company. I went there for a year while I waited for my then-fiancee to graduate. Now ex-wife. But that got me into the advertising/research business. And then I came down to New York, and it was the beginning of a recessionary period. I was looking for a job. I knew no one. You know how important it is to have relationships to help you get jobs, especially then, in the advertising media business. And I wanted to work at CBS, ABC, in the radio or television business.
And I couldn't get a job. I had an interview at Prentice Hall to be a copywriter for direct response advertising. They offered me the job, and I remember they're saying, "The average person here has been here over 40 years, and when you retire," now again, remember I'm 21, 22 years old. "When you retire, you'll be a millionaire." And I'm looking around the room, I could not get out of there fast enough, even though it was the only job I'd been offered. And a few weeks later, I saw an ad for an account executive at a radio/television company. Account executive to me was like an AE at an ad agency. And at the same time, there was an opening at J. Walter Thompson for a copywriter.
Julie:
Ah, that's it.
Jack:
I did both interviews. I got the job at JWT working on the Ford account. Scheduled to start on Monday, I get a call on Friday, a freeze has been put on all hires.
Julie:
Oh my God. Don't [inaudible].
Jack:
And so I called back the interviewer, the personnel agency for the AE job, and I show up and they say, "Well this is a radio/TV company called Metromedia," which owned WNEW AM and FM, and WNEW TV, TV stations. It evolved into who knows what, but they own a company called Metromedia Outdoor, [inaudible], which owns bus advertising rights in cities around the country. And this is a job as a sales person for bus advertising. My brain went, "Oh my God, I can't sell. I don't know how to sell." The last thing I want to do is be a salesman, and the last thing I want to sell is bus advertising. The words that came out of my mouth were, "I really think bus advertising is an incredibly untapped opportunity, for especially local advertisers who need to have the bus on the street going past their businesses." That happened to be exactly what they were looking for in New York City. Someone to go out and sell in Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island.
And then they said, "Well how would you approach?" I said, "Well first of all, I see so many billboards and bus ads that have too much type. You want to get a really bold message out there, that's really clear, and a call to action. And they said, "All right, we're setting up the interview." I got the job. It was three years there. I thought it was a dead end, and I wanted to move on. Of course I was working next to a guy named Billy Apfelbaum, who I'm still friends with today. And Billy went on to make millions of dollars in the out-of-home business, owning the franchises.
But it was incredibly formative, because you had to go out and sell with no tools, no research, no data. The only thing you had was your own creativity, your own ideas, and your own inspiration. And I happened to have a couple of bosses who were really smart, and taught me how to sell. And I went on, one of the things that I of course noted, that there were no radio stations using bus advertising. So of course, I started calling on all the radio stations after a little bit and brought them in, and I got fortunate to be hired by ABC Radio to sell for them, and that led me to CBS Television, which I really consider to have been the foundation of the career since then. I was there at CBS-TV seven years, and they were an extraordinarily entrepreneurial company, at a time when there was no entrepreneurialism in our industry.
Julie:
Well you were... And that entrepreneurialism, I think, didn't you before, going to CBS and ABC, didn't you do your own startup in there?
Jack:
In the middle there, yeah. You've done your homework, Julie.
Julie:
Hey, that's what I do, right? Because I think that's the holy shit moment, right? You left that... That's super important in your story.
Jack:
Well as I said, I thought that bus advertising was a dead end, and I was a Rolling Stone reader, and I read that Rolling Stone had decided to grow old with their audience. So I said, "Well if they're going to grow old with their audience, who's going to fill that niche?" So I left Metromedia after developing a magazine, a tabloid magazine called Tambourine. Rolling Stone was a Bob Dylan song, Like a Rolling Stone. So I took Tambourine, another Bob Dylan song, Mr. Tambourine Man, and I spent a little over a year. I spent all of our savings that my wife and I had put away, and just was not a particularly good businessman, even though I put out a really good product. We put out four issues. Had an incredible team of people who are legendary in many ways, working editorially and graphic design. And it was basically for late high school, early college years. We had distribution models, we actually did pretty well, but had no idea how to run a business. And I still struggle with that.
Julie:
Well see, I wanted you to talk about it, because obviously you did start your own business, and it did do quite well. So we all start somewhere, but the fact that you did that and it didn't work, didn't-
Jack:
And the point that you make is that one of my biggest clients was WABC Radio, and ultimately I got hired by ABC Radio, to get into radio. So you're exactly right. And WCBS FM was a client of Tambourine, and that built relationships there. So it was the beginning of my relationships across the industry. I do remember that in college my goal was to be president of CBS Television. So when I got to CBS I had very high aspirations for myself.
Julie:
Well, but you were right. So I mean, and look. I think that's why some people could see it as a failure, but without that Tambourine, the ABC and CBS might not have happened. So CBS was really-
Jack:
Thank you Julie, I feel so much better.
Julie:
Good.
Jack:
I'm in fact going to make sure that my ex-wife listens, so she'll see that spending all of our savings was not for naught.
Julie:
It is not for naught. Look at you, you wouldn't have gone on to do the things you've done. You wouldn't have helped all the people. These things are, these are nothing-
Jack:
Thank you. It's true, it's true. Everything comes together, and I have the advantage at this point of being able to look back and see so many things that, in the aggregation, contribute to everything that I'm doing today, and have done, and have built at MediaVillage. That does not just go back to that moment at GE, and to my mom's experiences and my dad's, but to those formative experiences. And look, I'll share with you that at CBS it was really extraordinary. I was the most junior person on the Channel Two New York sales team, selling to retailers out in the boroughs.
And my boss got promoted, opening that job. And it was a job that was, it was a training ground for more senior sales management, and I'd only been there six months. And I went in to the person who was doing the hiring to replace my boss to say, "I'm really concerned that you've got this retail sales effort, and someone's going to go in there who has no passion or commitment to it. So I'm just sharing with you my concern. I know it's premature for me to pitch the job." This is a holy shit moment, for sure.
And his name is Mike Degenero, and Mike said, "Well why is it too early for you to pitch the job?" I pitched the job, I got the job. My first hire was a complete out-of-the-box hire, a woman at the time named Arlene Kekalos, then Arlene Manos, who went on to become very well known as head of sales and chief revenue officer at AMC Networks. Years at head of sales at A&E Networks. And while she was at A&E Networks, Mike Degenero was out of work, and she hired Mike.
Julie:
See? Yes, the connective system.
Jack:
They're a nexus.
Julie:
It is, it's so important. I mean, that is why these interconnectivities, this is why I do this. I don't want people to think that just because it doesn't go the way you think, then all is lost. These are so important when you look back, because they thread along. I think your bravery though, I wanted to go on one more with the bravery. I thought you were going to tell the story, not just about pitching the job, but about how you then brought up to CBS the fact that you thought cable might be a threat, and how they reacted to that.
Jack:
Well see, it was interesting at CBS, because we're talking in the late '70s, early '80s. Because of my success at Channel Two in the role of retail sales manager, I was promoted to head retail sales for the five owned and operated stations, TV stations, and did well there. And then I was promoted into a role as head of marketing for CBS TV stations. And marketing then, basically meant marketing services, and I decided that there was a vacuum. No one was looking at the stations group at the impact of new media technology on revenues, on advertising revenues. And CBS was very invested in something called teletext and video text, using that little black line, that for those of us old enough to remember, the TV screen that flipped. There was a black line as it flipped and that was, you could program in there. And that's where things like, when y you see simulcasting of the words that are being spoken superimposed, feed in there. They were very focused on that.
But cable was a... They wanted cable to die at CBS. And I became a big advocate of cable. I said, "This is a place where we should really be investing. We should go out to all of our affiliates. We should buy up rights to the local news, to provide the local news on cable." And CBS told me, if I liked cable so f-ing much, maybe I should go work for f-ing cable. CBS had a cable network they were launching, but I saw they were driving that. I was called CBS Cable, it was a cultural channel, and they spent ridiculous amounts of money to make sure it failed.
So I basically left, and went to a cable network called UTV that I spent two years at. It was probably the best job I ever had, in terms of opportunity, but it was at a time when it became very difficult to launch a new cable network. And I went and started what has become the Myers Report, which is a research business to basically explore the implications of new technologies on advertising, the advertising business, and specifically the ad sales side of the business, and to develop research to share back to the networks, and to advertisers, to agencies, about the impact of technology on their business models.
And that has evolved, and ultimately led to much of the work I'm doing now, to look at not just the technology, but the impact of technology on media, but also on culture and society. And that's part of the media ecology, which is the past, present, future of media impact on culture and society and business, and the impact of culture, society, and business on media. So that's evolved into what is MediaVillage today, which feeds off of the founder of media ecology, was Marshall McLuhan. And my schooling at NYU was Neil Postman, who was the mentee of Marshall McLuhan, and one of the founders of media ecology.
Julie:
The one piece of irony I thought in there, was that after CBS told you to pound sand for cable and go there, that you started Myers Report, but CBS hired you back to consult for them on how to make cable better. I thought that was super ironic.
Jack:
It was two years later, and yeah. They were really, they were my third client. ESPN was my first client. ABC had something called the Arts Channel, which merged with the NBCU's The Entertainment Channel to become A&E, and the CBS became, and has been... All three of them have been clients or members ever since, and it's been a great partnership with them, and with so many other of the media companies in the industry.
Julie:
Yeah, which is, and as it should be, right? It comes around. All right, so I want a final story, and then I want to culminate with your book and what you do, because it gets to your support of women and education and diversity. So the Myers Report we talked about, and then you founded MediaVillage, which is still thriving today. You've always shone a light on how poorly ad and media businesses do really in education and diversity in particular, which is why having somebody like yourself be a cheerleader for women, those of us in this industry, has been just such a blessing.
But you've really dedicated your career to it, and I wanted you to talk about that, but then I want you to tell the story about your board, and how you kind of-
Jack:
It all ties together, thanks Julie.
Julie:
Yeah, please.
Jack:
So, again going back to media ecology, and understanding the culture, and researching the cultural realities, and also economic realities. As I was studying the impact of technology on media and advertising, it became obvious that media is a stagnant industry. The economics are very share-based. There's very little organic growth, so the only way you win is taking share from someone else. Marketing budgets have been growing in the below-the-line. The realities were not.. The accurate forecasts a decade, a decade and a half ago, were that media would be struggling with the advent of digital.
And as I looked at the dynamics of, what are the pillars of growth for those companies and categories, outside of technology and finance? What are the pillars of growth? And there were two common pillars. One is an investment in education, both internally and for your external stakeholders. And two was new majority, investments in new majority talent. And 10, 12 years ago new majority talent became very obvious, that women, we would become, industry would become very female-centric. 60% of college graduates, female. 60% of high school graduates, female. Incredible, females just emerging. And it became obvious to me that the media industry had to do better in gender, changing the gender norms.
And so in 2011 I founded an organization called at the time Women in Media Mentoring Initiative. It evolved to womenadvancing.org, with a focus on recognizing the value of young women coming into the industry, and accelerating their growth by connecting them up with senior women, not to be mentored alone, but to also be mentors themselves to more senior people, because they have skills, knowledge, especially technology-oriented, and culturally, changing cultural norms. And that organization continues. We continue to host now virtual events, but at MediaVillage you have the womenadvancing.org platform, where we highlight women.
And then out of that evolved an understanding of youth in general, and the emergence of what we now know as Gen Z, so I began studying them. Wrote a book called Hooked Up, a New Generation's Surprising Take on Sex, Politics, and Changing the World, focused on changing gender norms, but more importantly the emergence of this generation. And that led, because I kept getting asked, "Well, what's happening to the men? Why aren't men performing?" And to get answers I did research and found there was no research. So I did extensive research on masculinity, and wrote a book called The Future of Men, published in 2016, just before the election, thinking we were going to have a little different world.
But I forecast, I forecast the backlash. A male dominated, angry backlash against the women's movement, which I think culturally we're seeing manifest itself not just in a backlash against changing gender norms, but changing cultural norms, and changing multi-cultural norms. So in 2017 I founded advancingdiversity.org, and I can announce with you today, Julie, that Phil Mackenzie, a diversity and inclusion leader for a couple of decades, founder of his own multi-cultural agency, graduate at Howard University, is joining us as executive director of advancingdiversity.org.
And I'm really proud he'll be joining us in a week, to lead our initiatives, which are really industry-leading, in supporting those organizations that are actually making a difference, and are not getting sufficient financial support from our industry. In advancing women into more senior positions of leadership, assuring that we have pay equality and that we're measuring it, and that we have not only gender diversity, multi-cultural diversity, but welcome veterans, and welcome all those underserved communities that have been excluded. Media and advertising continue to be at the low end of the industrial spectrum on investments in advancing diversity, advancements in education, investments in content marketing and communications. So at MediaVillage our goal is to really lead the industry in advancing education and diversity.
Julie:
And that again, is another great hoshimo, and I know we're towards the end of time here. But that 2017, that startup, and what you've just done, and what you've mentioned with Phil, and that would not have happened had you not stood for your principles with your board. [crosstalk].
Jack:
You're going to make me tell that story. I'm happy to tell it.
Julie:
Yes, because this-
Jack:
It's painful, it's painful. In 2016 I was told that in order to have a liquidity event in exiting the company, I needed to cede responsibility and bring in a management team, so I did. And I brought in a new president, who basically did not agree with my investments in diversity initiatives, and advancingdiversity.org, Women Advancing, and he went against me in setting his goals for the company. And we basically went to the board, and I presented my case, and he presented his case, and the board backed him, and said they did not think it was an appropriate way to build a company toward exit, by investing in either education or diversity. That they were dead ends, there were no funding for it, and there was no natural exit for it. So I basically disengaged myself from all day-to-day management, and funded those initiatives individually. And-
Julie:
And now, where you are.
Jack:
Today, education and... And two years later, I basically pushed that whole management team out, because they were not achieving their goals. Took over, elevated education and diversity back into the primary position, but maintained all of our core capabilities around the Myers Report. Research, our content marketing tools, but built it all under the umbrella of education, market intelligence, and advancing diversity through talent development. It's all integrated, and welcome your... I know you have a very large audience, and a lot of friends who like you, Julie, who listen. Just explore MediaVillage, and we just launched meetingprep.com, which is the only AI-based search engine for media marketing and advertising. It's in beta right now, and it's at MediaVillage. Meetingprep.com.
Julie:
And this is why I love you, because your principles are so strong, and it's the company you founded, and you pitched this very important thing against the grain again, which you support in all of us but you hold yourself to the standard. And you walked away for a year and came back and made it better, but you didn't waste that time away while you were gone. You did the Advancing Women project, and now that is leading in a time where it is so needed, but it's also now at least being embraced. And so you're pioneering, and I'm so grateful and I know others are, for what you've done to build this, to lead this, and to just continue to drive it in the face of so much adversity. So I want to thank you on behalf of all of us women in the marketing and advertising space for what you have done for us, and just congratulate you on such a spectacular life, really.
Jack:
Thanks, and I'd be doing a disservice if I didn't mention my wife, Rhonda Carnegie, because I talked earlier about spending all my savings to create Tambourine. And during that period I spent a lot of our savings to maintain and build the diversity initiatives, and Rhonda, who's a force in and of herself, having helped build the TED brand, has just been such an inspirational and supportive partner, that we are a team in what we do. Being so forcefully in support of strong women I think certainly paid dividends in being able to attract a wife as strong and powerful as Rhonda is.
Julie:
You float in good company, my friend. Yes, Rhonda is an amazing woman. I'll have to follow up with you and see if she would be interested in being a guest, too. I'm sure her backstory is amazing. So we are towards the end. Thank you so much for being so generous with your stories, letting me pull out these stories from your past. I know that they are making a difference for people who listen, and thank you again for all that you do, and for being my guest today.
Jack:
Thank you, Julie, for all you do, and for such a fun time with you. My God, this was great, and I don't usually have the opportunity to tell the stories, and I hope I didn't overwhelm your audience with too many of them.
Julie:
I don't think so, I think they're going to love it. This is why people listen in, so thank you again.
Jack:
Good to talk with you, and thank you again for everything you've done in your career, and your leadership.
Julie:
Aw, thanks.