Zynga even temporarily renamed the game Gagaville for the promotion. And that’s how we premiered a Lady Gaga song inside of a web social game, Farmville," Grover laughed. All we knew at iHeart is we wanted to do stuff no one had done before.
"We were flying back and forth to San Francisco to Zynga and LA, and we were flying without a net on this. Working with Jimmy Iovine's team (Gaga's label), they had a crazy idea: What if they launched the song inside of Farmville, Zynga's popular Facebook game? When Pittman heard through his friends at Universal that Lady Gaga wanted to do something big to launch her next song, they saw a chance.
They talked to Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Electronic Arts, and more. That meant flying around in Pittman's private jet (Pittman is a pilot) and holding meetings in Silicon Valley and LA. Grover was asked to help build partnerships with Silicon Valley. "I spent 6 months on road with him," Grover said of Pittman. It was something in their lives, it stood for great music, for community," Grover said. "We wanted to get it into peoples minds that iHeart was bigger than a digital streaming thing. With a new CEO and a new name, iHeart's Tom Poleman, president of national programming, and John Sykes, president of entertainment enterprises, rolled up their sleeves to create music events and festivals drawing in the biggest names in the music world. Six months on Pittman's jet chasing crazy partnerships Pittman would soon change the company's name to iHeartMedia and set out to build a digital consumer brand, with Grover in tow. "He was wearing a Tom Ford suit, I'll never forget it," Grover recalled. In that meeting, Pittman "peppered us with questions." Like that was the moonshot CEO of the digital guys."īut in November, Pittman did indeed join as an investor and senior advisor (he would become CEO the next year) and he immediately pow-wowed with the existing digital team. "We joked wouldn’t it be great if they hired a guy a like Bob Pittman? He was the CEO we had in our wildest dreams. "We knew the private equity guys, especially TH Lee, were going to bring in a new CEO," Grover said. Grover remembers fantasizing about the new leadership with his teammates. "It was additive, in no way was it cannibalizing," he said.īy 2010, with the economy in collapse and streaming on the rise, it was clear the investors were going to hire a new CEO. Grover's job in those days was helping Clear Channel and its stations figure out the new world of websites and apps, going "hat in hand" to radio stations and convincing them the iHeart app would grow broadcasting. He joined before the company hired its current, famous CEO Bob Pittman, best known for creating MTV - as well as leading AOL Networks, Six Flags, and other media companies over the decades. Grover spent over a decade at iHeart, starting while it was still known as Clear Channel. And now its most powerful players are looking to Grover to help them gain an edge on companies like Apple and Spotify. Public radio has unquestionably mastered the world of podcast shows. You're not going to find someone who is the greater believer in the medium and what it stands for." "But I’ve been a user of radio, and I understand the use cases. "I'm the digital guy, the one who is supposed to be the sky-is-falling guy," he said. In April, Grover left his jet-setting lifestyle as an iHeart exec, and in May, he announced he'd been hired to lead an unusual new effort to help public radio get more control over the internet streaming game. Grover is the new CEO of Pocket Casts, an Australian-born podcasting app bought by a consortium of public radio stations (and show producers) who create the nation's most popular podcasts: NPR, WNYC Studios, WBEZ Chicago, and This American Life. Owen Grover wants to help public radio take back power from tech giants like Apple and Spotify. Now he's trying a new thing: helping public radio turn its podcasting success into a much bigger, grander scheme.
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