Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [163]
At the end of the day, I did fire John Lack and it was the right thing to do. I forget how long his tenure was. I think he was there for all of three years. The mistake was in my hiring him. Look, he created MTV and deserves the acknowledgment. But he didn’t execute MTV. He was incredibly important to me in keeping the focus that I had to launch ESPN2. Other than that, a mistake.
JOHN LACK:
It wasn’t my vision that was running this company. It was my personality and a vision that I tried to get other people to share. At that level in business, as you know, you get things done through other people, you don’t do them yourself. It wasn’t my company. I didn’t own it. I was brought in to develop it and they kind of let me do it. In two and a half years, I had very few confrontations.
BILL CREASY:
In my humble opinion, in the history of both ESPN and ESPN2, John’s personality and his drive were a pretty big thread at that time.
I always firmly believed that if Steve left, John Lack was the perfect president. I think in the end a lot of people wanted to like him, but Lack turned them off with his forceful personality. I always called John 1-A, so whenever he came by, he would say “1-A checking in,” as in “the heir apparent.” He hurt himself with his obvious, maybe self-deprecating “Oh, I’m just 1-A,” but hidden in there, people would read that he really wanted to be president after Steve left—if Steve ever left.
JOHN LACK:
In the end, Steve was intimidated by me doing it, so he finally said, “Look, I’m going to get rid of this guy; I don’t need him anymore.” You’re always going to have conflicts with people in business, but especially if you’re not from the original culture. But I can’t complain. I can’t look back, nor should anybody else, and say, “Jesus, Lack didn’t get a chance to do what he wanted.” I pretty much did it all. I hired Keith and Suzy against all their objections.
HOWARD KATZ:
I think John came in there believing that the culture that existed at ESPN was not the right culture, and was a culture that John Walsh had built to a large extent in terms of the work ethic and the way you treat people, and John was just about results. John Walsh was very concerned about the way you went about things—and that was an enormous clash there. John Lack was a culture shock to what had been created at ESPN.
The year 1994 brought another major change for ESPN—this time, in the way the network promoted itself and its image. There’d been plenty of promos over the years, but nothing like the campaign about to be launched. Even the choice of ad agency was a break from conservative company tradition; ESPN called upon the maverick firm of Wieden + Kennedy, based in faraway Portland, Oregon, and globally acclaimed for its artfully soft-sell “Just Do It” Nike campaign.
In a sense, the campaign constituted a seismic paradox: the network that considered the star system to be anathema was going to be putting its performers in the spotlight over and over again, hardly a gateway to anonymity. But the hope was that the brand would be the real star of the campaign. It was unlike anything ever before attempted in Bristol, so naturally there was opposition and skepticism at first encounter.
JUDY FEARING, Senior Vice President of Marketing:
Wieden + Kennedy wrote this great white-paper and it became our mantra when developing advertising. We never look at ESPN as a television network;