I’m at a life stage where unfortunately when I get private outreaches from friends/fans it often isn’t good news. It’s not that we necessarily obsess about death per se; it’s just the reality that many of the folks who helped shaped our career paths and in many cases were directly responsible for the quality of life we’ve been able to carve out, slightly a generation older than us, are reaching the end of their lines. In many cases, these mentors and executives weren’t quite so significant as to warrant a memorial story from a wide-reaching outlet. Such was the case earlier this week when I was directed to the LinkedIn profile of one such mogul fortunately still with us, one Alfred Kahn, who had this news at the top of his feed:
It is my duty to share the terrible news, that my friend and colleague, Shelly Hirsch died this morning. He fought a brave and courageous battle against melonoma and I was fortunate to spend some precious time with him in his last days.
I didn’t spend any recent time with Hirsch myself, but there was a period where we were kindred spirit and would often be part of convention gatherings where we’d often be dumbfounded that nerdy New York geeks could be part of such ostentatious and star-driven worlds. We were both veterans of ad agencies and the niggly world of media buying, and in Hirsch’s case he was particularly expert in the even more cutthroat world of kids’ television. And if you’re a child of the 80s or 90s and grew up watching and loving your favorite toys come to life, even with the flimiest plots, it’s people like Hirsch and Kahn that you actually owe your childhood memories to.
Whenever I try to explain the business side of show business to folks who are merely consumers of it, they’re often both fascinated and confused. In the world of children’s TV, it was an even more exaggerated process. Once the exclusive haven of networks on Saturday mornings, the growth of independent TV stations opened up opportunities for blocks of programming targeted to kids and the advertisers who wanted to reach them in mornings and afternoons just before and just after school. Many of these stations had difficulty obtaining quality programming to appeal to adults and often lacked true success when they’d be competing with newscasts (yes, people used to watch them) and popular game shows. But in the more controlled environment of looking to reach a small sliver of people, defined by buyers as kids 2-11 but de facto seeking kids 6-11, it was far more possible for these stations to make a dent if they were able to have even a modest overall audience. As anyone who has seen their kids and grandkids figure out how to work an IPad quicker than they can, such was the case with them when they were the first to discover UHF.
More importantly, those advertisers were willing to place a disproportionate amount of their considerable budgets on such a station’s air if it was capable of cultivating a larger audience for their commercials. A better time slot, a longer commitment and more guaranteed promotional time would directly translate to dollars that often determined if these stations made any money at all.
Hirsch was among the best at connecting people from all over the world, from the toy manufacturers in Asia to the negotiators in New York to the station managers in the flyover states, and could make sense of even the flimiest bits of data to make the best deals possible for those wise enough to employ him.
Consider this: The livelihoods of those employed in all of those areas were often determined by the results of a handful of diaries where elementary school age kids would record what they thought they watched (in many cases, it was actually their parents). There were often inexplicable and wild fluctuations in these ratings trajectories. I was often tasked with having to try and explain these phenomena to my often disbelieving superiors and colleagues at FOX Kids, none more dubious than the guy who ran it and my ultimate boss, the mercurial Haim Saban. When one would drill down to the realities of how many viewers were estimated off of a single sample point, the difference between profit and loss was often due to how one or two respondents reported. I’d half-jokingly attribute as much as a twenty-point week-to-week shift in share of boys 6-11 to “detention”. When I later shared that anecdote with Hirsch, he added “And the kind of kids that would watch your shows were that much more likely to serve it”.
As Kahn explained in his eulogy, Hirsch’s skills peaked at a later date with one of the unlikeliest success stories of any generation:
When I left Coleco and started 4Kids, Shelley joined me as president of Sum(m)it Media running our syndication and advertising company. When we introduced Pokemon no network wanted it. But Shelly syndicated the show in 200 markets at 4 to 5 am which literally started the Pokémon phenomen which made the brand the number one entertainment IP of all time to this day.
And as Hirsch’s own LinkedIn page reminds, that may have been his career zenith, but it was hardly an outlier:
Over 50 years experience in developing media strategies for some of the most successful products targeted to Children: Colecovision, The Cabbage Patch Kids, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Furby, Pokemon, Care Bears, Hanna(h) Montana, Air Hogs, Bakagun, YuGiOh, Ring Pops, Baby Bottle Pops, Zhu Zhu Pets, are just a few of the many products that I have developed media strategies for and then stewarded them to success.
I c0uld tell you a lot more war stories and try to give it justice, but fortunately there’s a podcast run by former executives and fans of 4Kids Entertainment, the umbrella company responsible for so many of those brands, and they conducted a lengthy and revealing interview with Hirsch that was dropped less than two months ago. I listened to it while composing this musing, and it is a de facto master class in explaining the nuances and complexities of marketing to children, and not in an exploitative way. I can’t more strongly encourage you to give it a listen while you’re dashing through the snow (or the smog) in the coming days. It brought back so many warm memories of an exceptionally smart and genuinely meschy person equally comfortable with pastrami on rye as he was with scotch and soda.
Shelly jokingly referenced his career status on his LinkedIn as “kind of retired”. Through reflections like this, and the memories they evoked, I’m kind of hoping we’ll be able to consider him only “kind of gone”. The next time you or a loved one picks up a toy or clicks on a classic episode of kids’ TV, you’ll prove my point.
Until next time…