room and watched his weekly two-hour show The Vox . It took me less than five minutes to realize what my friend had meant when she said he could use a little help in the PR department.
Robert Maddock was young, around 30 years of age, very attractive, very charismatic, very likable. Until he opened his mouth. His communication skills were a complete and utter disaster. Here was a man who was so much in love with the sound of his own voice that whatever it was that he was trying to say became trifle and irrelevant. His language was a convoluted mess, interspersed with grotesque metaphors and clumsy, awkward humour. Cringe-worthy would be too kind a description. And yet there was something about this man, about his vision, that I found very intriguing. He had potential; a raw diamond that just needed to be cut and polished.
When I met him the next day, I asked him how many people usually watched his show.
“A quarter of a million,” he said, gloating like he was Johnny fucking Carson.
Maddock was living in a bubble, a bubble inhibited by a quarter of a million ultra-conservative, right wing Christians, and because he was at the very center of that bubble, surrounded on all sides by his own kind, he was oblivious of how big a world outside his bubble he was unable to reach. Convincing him to tone down his message, to make it less bat shit radical and more appealing to a wider audience would be a herculean task. But I was up for it.
“Give me two years,” I said, “and I’ll turn your quarter of a million viewers into two and a half million.”
My offer was met with roaring laughter as if I’d made a particularly hilarious joke, but when he saw that I wasn’t laughing back, he stopped and said, “Son of a bitch, you really mean it.”
We shook hands and never looked back.
To make a long story short, I didn’t meet that target of two and a half million viewers within two years. I exceeded it by more than a million. By 1981 The Vox was available on basic cable in 15 states in the South and Midwest, and we kept growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I was somewhat less successful in fine-tuning the voice that stood behind The Vox . Business strategies, branding, and marketing were one thing, but when it came to his message and the way he chose to convey it, Mr Maddock proved to be, shall we say, resistant to any form of advice. He would listen to me, he would listen to all the advice I gave him about what to say and how to say it, and he would nod emphatically and say, “All right, Ed. You got it.” And then the moment the red light on the camera came on it all went flying out the fucking window and he’d just blurt out his crude, unrefined ramblings about God and the world the same way he’d always done it. It was frustrating.
By the early to mid 1980s I was seriously considering to chuck it all in, to just pack my things and go back home to Montana, to leave Mr Maddock to it and move on with my life. But then I realized that I didn’t have a life. In the past few years I had been working for Mr Maddock 60, sometimes 70 hours a week. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any social life to speak of. All I had in terms of leisure time were my Saturday nights that I liked to spend listening to symphonies by Brahms and Mahler while emptying bottles of expensive red wine. And I had The Vox . After all the years of hard work that I had invested in it, I think it’s fair to say that The Vox was my child just as much as it was Mr Maddock’s, even if I was just its adoptive parent. Either way, I hated to think what Mr Maddock would do to The Vox if I just left him to it, how he would mess it up and ruin it until it would wither away and die. I wasn’t going to let that happen, and so I decided to stay. I stayed, but I started developing a new business strategy to take us to the next level.
I wanted to get Mr Maddock out of the spotlight, because if he stayed there, he was bound
Robert Maddock was young, around 30 years of age, very attractive, very charismatic, very likable. Until he opened his mouth. His communication skills were a complete and utter disaster. Here was a man who was so much in love with the sound of his own voice that whatever it was that he was trying to say became trifle and irrelevant. His language was a convoluted mess, interspersed with grotesque metaphors and clumsy, awkward humour. Cringe-worthy would be too kind a description. And yet there was something about this man, about his vision, that I found very intriguing. He had potential; a raw diamond that just needed to be cut and polished.
When I met him the next day, I asked him how many people usually watched his show.
“A quarter of a million,” he said, gloating like he was Johnny fucking Carson.
Maddock was living in a bubble, a bubble inhibited by a quarter of a million ultra-conservative, right wing Christians, and because he was at the very center of that bubble, surrounded on all sides by his own kind, he was oblivious of how big a world outside his bubble he was unable to reach. Convincing him to tone down his message, to make it less bat shit radical and more appealing to a wider audience would be a herculean task. But I was up for it.
“Give me two years,” I said, “and I’ll turn your quarter of a million viewers into two and a half million.”
My offer was met with roaring laughter as if I’d made a particularly hilarious joke, but when he saw that I wasn’t laughing back, he stopped and said, “Son of a bitch, you really mean it.”
We shook hands and never looked back.
To make a long story short, I didn’t meet that target of two and a half million viewers within two years. I exceeded it by more than a million. By 1981 The Vox was available on basic cable in 15 states in the South and Midwest, and we kept growing at an exponential rate. Unfortunately, I have to admit that I was somewhat less successful in fine-tuning the voice that stood behind The Vox . Business strategies, branding, and marketing were one thing, but when it came to his message and the way he chose to convey it, Mr Maddock proved to be, shall we say, resistant to any form of advice. He would listen to me, he would listen to all the advice I gave him about what to say and how to say it, and he would nod emphatically and say, “All right, Ed. You got it.” And then the moment the red light on the camera came on it all went flying out the fucking window and he’d just blurt out his crude, unrefined ramblings about God and the world the same way he’d always done it. It was frustrating.
By the early to mid 1980s I was seriously considering to chuck it all in, to just pack my things and go back home to Montana, to leave Mr Maddock to it and move on with my life. But then I realized that I didn’t have a life. In the past few years I had been working for Mr Maddock 60, sometimes 70 hours a week. I didn’t have any friends. I didn’t have any social life to speak of. All I had in terms of leisure time were my Saturday nights that I liked to spend listening to symphonies by Brahms and Mahler while emptying bottles of expensive red wine. And I had The Vox . After all the years of hard work that I had invested in it, I think it’s fair to say that The Vox was my child just as much as it was Mr Maddock’s, even if I was just its adoptive parent. Either way, I hated to think what Mr Maddock would do to The Vox if I just left him to it, how he would mess it up and ruin it until it would wither away and die. I wasn’t going to let that happen, and so I decided to stay. I stayed, but I started developing a new business strategy to take us to the next level.
I wanted to get Mr Maddock out of the spotlight, because if he stayed there, he was bound
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