TEACHING & LEARNING
Cheaper-Better-Faster
OUTREACH
A
Brand Called Donny
PLUS: Video Interview with Donny Deutsch
Faces of Wharton Entrepreneurship
RESEARCH
Risk-free
Reward?
Experimental Entrepreneurship: Removing the 'Tin Cup Dependencies'
A Brand Called Donny
Wharton
Alum Donny Deutsch's Chutzpah Launches Second Career in TV.
Donny Deutsch doesn't care if you hate him. Depending who you are, he might even welcome it.
When Deutsch, who earned his bachelor's degree at Wharton in 1979, appeared on The O'Reilly Factor, he and the conservative talk-show host ended up yelling at each other. When Bernard Goldberg went on Deutsch's CNBC show, The Big Idea, Deutsch and several of the other guests blasted the right-leaning writer.
Afterwards, Goldberg turned around and appeared on O'Reilly's show, and they both denounced Deutsch. He loved it.
"That was the greatest thing in the world," he says, with a big grin. "I'm the new kid, and the 800-pound gorilla was referencing me. He has nothing to gain and everything to lose." Being the anti-O'Reilly, he says, is perfect positioning for his new talk show.
Deutsch knows about positioning. Until The Big Idea, he'd spent his career in advertising. Under his leadership, Deutsch Inc., which his dad started, grew from 30 employees to 1,000. When he sold it in 2000 to advertising giant Interpublic, it had annual billings of about $3 billion.
By then, Deutsch had become an informal spokesman for the ad industry. His quotes appeared frequently in newspaper and magazine articles and TV and radio broadcasts. And his firm's culture mirrored his personality. "My brand has always been aggressive, truthful, in-your-face, fun, a little boisterous, a risk taker," he says. It made him a natural for TV when he decided to try a new field.
He says The Big Idea gives him the same sort of thrill that he felt in the early years of building Deutsch Inc. "The irony of success is that we get to a place where we're cocooned from the very thing we love the most — the fight," he explains. "That's one of the reasons I sold the business. Most successful people just stay in their comfort zone."
Still, he sees links between running an ad firm and hosting a TV program. Both depend on his personality — his brand — and both require finding a message that connects with an audience.
Building a brand, of course, can help any entrepreneurial venture. A strong one depends on having and adhering to a clear set of values, he says. "When you buy into Nike, you know they stand for self-empowerment, 'Just Do It,' and being the best you can be. You say to yourself, 'I line up with that.'"
Nike knows, too, that it shouldn't tone down its brashness to try to attract even more consumers, he adds. If anything, that might dilute its appeal. "You don't have to be all things to all people, and the great brands aren't."
A Deutsch Inc. client who understood this was the importer of Tanqueray gin. Deutsch's firm researched an ad campaign for the importer that employed a martini-swilling cartoon character called Mr. Jenkins. "We did focus groups, and 55 percent of the people hated it, but 45 percent of the people loved it. A lot of clients would've been like, 'Half the people hate it. We can't do it.' But this client was like, 'If we have 45 percent of the gin-drinking universe, that's great.'"
Deutsch's agency wasn't afraid to be polarizing in any of its dealings; the boss figured that was better than being dull. "We were arguably the most successful ad agency in the '90s, and a lot of people didn't like us. But 30 or 40 percent thought we were the greatest. That's a successful model, compared with 100 percent of the people saying, 'Yeah, they're OK.'"
Deutsch doesn't mind inciting strong reactions with his show, either. In fact, he tries to. He flaunts his brashness and highlights his personal politics. He's as likely to interview a porn star as a politician. He aims to be an alternative to O'Reilly and what he calls "hate television."
"I'm a purple state guy — conservative on fiscal issues, moderate on social issues and choice issues. People like [comedians] Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, the people out in front of the blue-state agenda in the media, they're great but I don't think the majority of America can relate to them. That's what allows the right wing to say, 'Look at these crazy liberals.' I say, 'I'm a capitalist, and I'm strong on defense. But guess what? Women should be able to choose, and gays should be able to marry. I'd like my show to embody that voice.'"
When it comes to business, Deutsch likes to downplay his savvy, calling it "basic human common sense" and saying he learned most of his management tenets while growing up in Queens. (He, however, did publish a book last year that lays out his thinking called Often Wrong, Never in Doubt: Unleash the Business Rebel Within.)
"A lot of it is understanding that people are different," he explains. "You've got to be able to read them. Some are more sensitive, and some are more aggressive. Some need a kick in the butt, and some need re-enforcement."
Just as important as assessing people is celebrating their successes, he says. "If you show people that you care about their wins as much as your own, they'll walk through fire for you."
He also believes that every business needs a clear sense of its niche — its reason for existence — and occasionally has to take risks that defy conventional wisdom. "If the world's going here, go there," he says. "Reality TV was so successful, even though most of it sucked, because it was different. People were like, 'Hmm, let's check it out.'"
"I guarantee you that 50 percent of [people today are] saying, 'Real estate, real estate.' Wrong! It's hot now, but five years from now, something else is going to be hot.
It's easy to get sucked into where the world is, rather than to try to think about where it's going."
In five years, Deutsch
could be in a very different place, too. His show might fail,
and that possibility
heightens
the thrill. "It's a very public
high wire act — the success and the failure are
very evident," he says.
Regardless of the outcome, he says he'll probably follow in the footsteps
of another New York entrepreneur, Mike Bloomberg, and run for mayor.
"Hopefully, I didn't do too many stupid things when I was here at Penn that will come back to haunt me. But if I did, that's OK because I'd even approach politics differently. The first day, I'll go, 'Here's my stuff. Here are the women, the drugs. Here's it all. Now let's talk about what I want to do for the city.' I did a lot of crazy stuff that youthful entrepreneurial people do."
Then he cracks his big grin again and says, "But what the [expletive] do I know."
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs