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00:00:01
OhHello - Richy Glassberg (Part 1)
35 Plays1 year ago
OhHello!!
We got a 2-parter!!
Welcome to Episode 64 (and Episode 65 drops tomorrow!) - this online advertising icon is beyond proud to be a newly inducted mentor on OhHello.io 🌞☕️ with so much to offer!
Richy Glassberg shares with us his invaluable insights throughout his extensive career. From the early days of working at MTV on Live Aid to Yo! MTV Raps, MTV Spring Break and then pioneering the #onlineadvertising #internet #digitalmedia business we all know today!
We broke this conversation into 2 quick hits that have far too many gems to pack into one episode.
As the founder of SafeGuard Privacy, founding team of CNN.com, co-founder of the IAB, and co-founding Board Member of Breastcancer.org - this OhHello.io mentor has rolled-up his sleeves and has so much knowledge/advice to give back to the community. Please watch, comment, share, like, and join our OhHello.io tribe.
Go book time with Richy Glassberg (after his trip down to #iabalm )
Recommended
Transcript
Introductions and Pleasantries
00:00:04
Speaker
Oh, hello, Richie. Hello, Jeremy. How are you? I am fantastic. How are you? I'm great. We just had such an awesome jam session right before this just catching up getting to know each other better. We've been on a number of different zooms together we have
00:00:24
Speaker
We've messaged back and forth, but really getting to know you and spending this time over the past hour has been fantastic.
Career Highlights and Reflections
00:00:30
Speaker
You are a legend within the advertising media and ad tech, Martech, SaaS ecosystem. So I have the pleasure of knowing who you are. Why don't you tell our, Oh, hello audience, our listeners, our viewers. Who the hell am I talking to? Who are you?
00:00:48
Speaker
Well, I appreciate a thing that's very flattering. I like to, when I talk to people outside of our industry who don't know what we do, they ask who I am and what I do. And I say, I'm a PIP, a previously important person.
00:01:02
Speaker
I'm running my seventh startup. I've done three inside big, mini companies and four out. But I would argue that I'm the luckiest human being and I've had one of the coolest careers that any human being could ever have. And I'm incredibly grateful for the mentors I've had and the lucky breaks I've had because it is. No matter how smart you are, it's right place, right time and people believing in you.
Early Career at MTV Networks
00:01:26
Speaker
I started as a kid at MTV Networks in 1985. Yeah, I'm old as dirt. I did every live show from Live Aid until Amnesty International got to do the pilots of Yo! MTV Raps. Love this. I mean, it was amazing.
00:01:44
Speaker
I begged Bob Pittman and Tom Freston to get in a sales side and like, wait, you've got the greatest job of all, you're doing every live show, t-shirts, you're running around the world. I said, but I wanted to be on the business side. And there was a guy named Harvey Guineau who was running sales for Nickelodeon and there was a great leader, Gerald Dean Layborn, who ran Nickelodeon.
00:02:06
Speaker
And they believed in me and they gave a kid out of production when back then in television, because there was no, it wasn't internet, it was all television. They were only hiring people from media rep firms. And I was the first person they ever hired internally. And I got a break and I sold all the MTV networks for a bunch of years.
Innovations in Digital Media
00:02:23
Speaker
And then I got hired by a bunch of great people at Turner Broadcasting. And five years in,
00:02:29
Speaker
Long story interminable, I got asked, called in a conference room by my mentor, the president of sales, a guy named Rick Cervitis, with Ted Turner, a guy named Harry Matros, Scott Woolfel, Jimmy and Mark Bernstein, and they said, we're gonna start a website on the internet, January of 1995, and you guys are gonna do it, and I'm like, what's the internet?
00:02:52
Speaker
I'm like, figure it out. Harry was the M&A guy. Scott was from the news desk. Jimmy and Mark were down in Atlanta. I was a kid in New York. And frankly, half the senior management of sales said, you're throwing away your career. And my attitude is, if Ted Turner tells you to do something, you say, how high can I jump?
Founding the IAB and Digital Standards
00:03:12
Speaker
And I call that my entrepreneur mentorship, right? So for a year, all five of us had to have a different job inside of Turner, and we had to start CNN.com January of 95. We had to get it launched by August 31st of 95. We all did two jobs, and we learned how to do it. It was awesome. Launched it, ran it around the world, got to hire some great people, got to work with some incredible people.
00:03:39
Speaker
And then, because I grew up in the cable world, there was something called the Cable Advertising Bureau. And I was trained in the fight of cable versus broadcast, why cable versus broadcast? So about 30 people met outside of Halsey Miner's office.
00:03:54
Speaker
Sometime in 1996, I forget the month, and then eight of us founded the IAB with a bunch of other support. So Rich Lefurgey from Star Wave was the chairman. I was the vice chairman from CNN. We ran it as a volunteer organization until we hired our first professional outsider.
Entrepreneurship Amidst the Dot-Com Bubble
00:04:11
Speaker
I think that was 2000, 2001. And then, you know, obviously the IAB has grown where Randall Rothenberg did great things. David Cohen's now running it.
00:04:21
Speaker
But we all did it as our volunteer job and Rich and I, we did the first standard eight standard banner sizes, we did the T's and C's, we did all kinds of stuff for the industry. And then, you know, all my friends were doing startups and I was at Turner Broadcasting and I had an idea and I was brave enough to quit.
00:04:43
Speaker
And with some great help from some people in the industry, John Danner from NetGravity and a whole bunch of other people, I founded the first rep firm, digital premium rep firm called Phase Two Media, built it up from 99 to 2001, filed to go public 2000, the world dropped out, got wiped out.
Career Transitions and Legal Tech Ventures
00:05:03
Speaker
I had some family issues with a young kid and I went for safety, but I went for startup and safety. And a guy named Jeff Shell, who was CEO of NewsCorp's cable, hired me to... They had bought something called Speed Vision for a lot of money. I had to start a sales team, biz dev, start the internet, did that.
00:05:23
Speaker
Then did another turnaround for News Corp. under Jeff for Gemstar TV Guide under Rich Batista who ran Time Inc. and Ryan O'Hara and some great mentors. Then stepped off, did a startup in the West Coast for a year and a half that didn't really work in the healthcare internet space.
00:05:41
Speaker
helped a great entrepreneur, Eric Litman and founder and Jayper Fisher Gotham pivot and turn around medialets and sell it successfully to WPP. And then I came out of there and I said, what do I want to do? So this is really my seventh startup, three inside big media companies, four out. This is my second one all on my own. And I had an idea in 2018 that GDPR was really a response to the 15 years of programmatic for getting the consumer.
00:06:09
Speaker
So I built a legal privacy compliance platform. I know I'm insane Selling to no one I have any contact with because it's bought by general counsels not media people so that's what I've done and then the only other thing I'll mention is when I left Turner and started face to media and
00:06:28
Speaker
some of my older sisters face breast cancer, and we went through that as a family, and I got some great help from a woman named Dr.
Philanthropic Efforts and Charitable Work
00:06:37
Speaker
Marisa Weiss who wrote the book, Living Me on Breast Cancer. When my sister made it around the curve and survived, she came to me in 1999-2000 and said, hey, you're the dot-com guy. I wrote this book, and I helped found breastcancer.org, which we launched in 2000.
00:06:54
Speaker
I was on the board for the last 22 years. We're the largest informational site for women in the world. We served 23 million women last year. So for my, oh, hello, my charity will be breastcancer.org and I'll donate everything to breastcancer.org. We run the whole site for about 5 million a year, served 23 million women. We ran a boulevard with everybody in the ad industry for 10 years in the city before the pandemic.
Career Reflections and Learnings
00:07:20
Speaker
So like I said, I have had the coolest, most amazing career that any human being could have. I've been a publisher, a network guy, a agency person, an ad tech person. I've just been incredibly lucky because I've had amazing mentors and amazing people who have believed in me and helped me throughout my career.