Episode 93: Larry MacInnis

Announcer: The Producers, featuring the most respected international talent in the world of audio production and voiceover. Radio, TV, film, and online.

Announcer: In-depth interviews and industry insights, putting you on the inside. This is The Producers Podcast with Ryan Dreen.

Ryan: Hello there.

Ryan: Podcast time, yes. I appreciate you listening. I will always thank you. I had, well, some interesting episodes leading up to this one. Some great feedback. Jeff Schmidt, Alien Imaging. I'll remind you that there is an exclusive little offer from Alien Imaging on the website. If you haven't already headed over there, heh, English good, you can click the link and get a free 100 FX sampler pack. Oh, nice. a special alien imaging link on my website there, ryanontheradio.com. I think I'm just gonna really— making it official right now, we're gonna say ryandreen.com. It all goes to the same place, it's shorter. So from now on, ryandreen.com. Go there, you'll see everything, it's all the same. also the guys at the Arabian Radio Network, some great feedback on the 3 of the guys from the 9-person team there in Dubai. That episode's also available. But today I'm not gonna waste any time sort of setting up the future. There's still a lot of great people to talk to, but I did wanna take a moment before I brought Larry on for the interview to say, wow, I just, I love commercial creative. I haven't spent enough time on this podcast discussing it. And at its core, at his core, Larry is a commercial creative. You know, he's been a writer. You know, he conceptualizes, he works with clients, he's done it at the highest levels, and he was the creative director at Chum, For in the ballpark of 35 years. I didn't actually do the math, but we get into that. Currently, he consults for radio stations and groups and clients. He's a writer, he's a professor, he does pro bono work. He's doing a lot. We get his contact information in the episode. But finally, before we get to that, I wanted to play some samples of his work, but then I started to think that's really difficult. So I'm gonna play a few things here. I wanna stress that you need to get to the website, ryandreen.com, and see the Larry McGinnis show notes page. Everything that he's done, sent me— he was so generous— everything that he sent me, I've posted on that page in full so you can listen to every piece in its entirety, including a Chum FM TV ad, which I thought was very creative. Very simple, but it just displays how you can be very creative with one thought, one idea. And actually, you know, the production on it was, was simple as well, but just a really nice spot. It's all good. So again, I just can't stress enough that I hope if you want to hear some great stuff that spans 30-plus years, go to ryandreen.com and find the Larry McGinnis show notes page. Okay, here's some sample work, then we dive into the interview with Larry McGinnis. White wine, please. Thanks. Where'd you come from? Everywhere. I see you're drinking water. No, it's wine. Are you sure? Of course. Hey, what'd you do to this? Turned your wine into water. But this isn't ordinary water. It's a Spree. helpalzheimerontario.ca provide practical and emotional support. helpalzheimerontario.ca provide practical. Help Alzheimer Ontario dot C. Help. Okay, we've got time for two more questions. One over here. Hi, Brad Parker from Canada Morning News. How are you, Madonna? Okay. Welcome to Toronto. Thank you. So do you enjoy this sort of thing? You know, talking to the press. I think press conferences and talking to journalists can be very stimulating. I mean, it depends on what you get asked. You're a huge fan of CHUM FM, right? Yes, very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Ryan: A storied career in radio in Canada, on the creative side of our business, a brilliant writer. Well, you know what? A lot of things to get into. Before I start going on and on, Larry, let me just say thank you for giving me the time.

Larry Macinnis: My pleasure, Ryan. Nice to talk to you.

Ryan: Absolutely. You know, I usually forget this right out of the gate, but are you an active Twitter guy, Larry? Because I can give your Twitter name out there to people if you care.

Larry Macinnis: Yes, I am on Twitter. It's Caper2Guy.

Ryan: Yep.

Larry Macinnis: That is my handle.

Ryan: Well, cool. Great. So we've got that. There's your Twitter. Website? Yeah, I've actually noticed you don't have one kind of promoted too much. I don't know that you even need to, but—

Larry Macinnis: I do not have a website.

Ryan: Okay, yeah, because I was gonna say, I've talked to a number of people like you that have been in the business a long time, so many different clients, you know, so many different opportunities, and it's like, website? I don't need one of those.

Larry Macinnis: Why?

Ryan: You know, it's like, okay, well, good for you.

Larry Macinnis: I'm not bragging about that. I just haven't gotten around to it, to tell you the truth.

Ryan: I'm with you for sure. Okay, so let's roadmap this a bit because there's some people that will be like, wow, Larry McInnis, awesome. There's some people will be like, wait, I haven't heard of this guy yet. So, we're going to be talking about a career at Chum for a little bit, because boy, did you have a long, storied career there. We'll talk about even your very beginnings as well. But I do want to devote quite a bit of this interview into the writing process. It's something that I don't talk about enough on this podcast. And boy, if it's not the most important thing when it comes to doing creative production and/or imaging in radio, and I focus a heck of a lot of this podcast on that. So why don't we start— we were talking, you know, off air, quote unquote, a little bit about this. Give us a rundown on your beginnings, you know, how you got into this wacky industry.

Larry Macinnis: Well, I have always wanted to be in radio as long as I can remember. And it goes back to the fact that I was born in a very small town in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. We had one radio station until I was like 18 or 19 years old and one TV station. And the TV and radio stations were owned by the same company. And so many of the people who were on the radio were also on TV. And that was our Hollywood in our small little community. And regardless of that, I wanted to be on radio anyway, just because it was always on in our home. And I love all kinds of genres of music because of that. I listened to— that radio station I'm talking about was block-formatted, so we had easy listening in the morning.

Ryan: Oh, okay.

Larry Macinnis: We had country in the afternoon. We had hits at night. And so I love all kinds of music and all kinds of style of radio. And so I always wanted to be in radio. And when I was in grade 8, our local high school had a career day where they invited professionals in. They invited the local dentist, the local pharmacist, the local doctor, the local— you know, and they invited the sportscaster from CJCB, which is the radio station I'm talking about. And I sat in on that. It was about 40 minutes. And, you know, he came in, he was very good. His name was Donny Mackayziek, and he gave a speech about radio, and he talked about it. And it even sounded more glamorous to me then than I had imagined it. And it was almost over, at almost the very end of the session, and a friend of mine sitting at the back of the class— I still remember his name, Billy Merritt was his name— he raised his hand and he said, Mr. Mackayziek, is it true there's a radio station in Toronto that plays hit music, rock and roll music, 24 hours a day?

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And Mr. McKissock said, yes, there is. It's the great— that was his word— the great 1050 Chum. And bang! As soon as he said that, I said to myself, I'm gonna work there someday.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And of course, not knowing how to get into the business or anything. I was only in grade 8. But I spent my— you know, I was the disc jockey at dances in high school, and my guidance counsellor, much to his discredit when I look back on it, knew I wanted to be in radio but gave me no help. He didn't tell me where to go or how to get into the business or anything. So I decided I would take— I would go to Acadia University in the Annapolis Valley of Nova Scotia, which is a very famous university in Canada. Beautiful, beautiful university.

Ryan: Absolutely.

Larry Macinnis: And an interesting thing about— and so I go to take an English major thinking, well, maybe I'll teach, who knows. So I'm there a couple of weeks, I'm sitting in the dining hall with my new college girlfriend and we're having lunch, and I hear I Don't Need No Doctor by Humble Pie on the radio. Now I know that the local radio station is always doing farm reports and hog futures and things like that because it's very local. And I know that they're not playing I Don't Need No Doctor by Humble Pie. And I turned to my girlfriend and I say, what radio station is this? And she says, well, that's Radio Acadia, the local radio station. I said, what's that? She said, well, anybody who wants to be on the radio there can be on the radio. I didn't even finish my lunch, Ryan. I just took my tray back, deposited my tray, went down to the student union building, signed up, and basically spent every day for the rest of my school year there and decided at the end of April I wasn't gonna go back to university. I was gonna get into a job in radio no matter what.

Ryan: Yep.

Larry Macinnis: So I spent the entire summer hanging around CJCB. I made friends with the disc jockeys, and almost every night all summer long, I would take the bus over to Sydney, which was about, you know, an hour bus ride away. The nighttime jock would let me in. I would spend the entire all-night show with another— he and another jock making tapes, and I sent tapes out to every radio station in the Maritimes, and I mean everyone in Newfoundland, New Brunswick, PEI, Nova Scotia, and everybody turned me down. But just before Labour Day, this is 1972, just before Labour Day, I get a call from CKEC in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, the program director. He says, we don't have an opening for an announcer, but would you be interested in writing?

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: Now, I had spent my whole life at that point listening to the radio, but believe it or not, I had no idea that there was such a thing at a radio station as writers. I thought everybody just made it up. And— but I was smart enough to know that if I can get my foot in the door as a writer, perhaps they'll put me on the air and my dream will come true. So I said, yes, of course, I'd love to be a writer. And he said, well, I can't hire you without hearing what you've written, so would you— this is snail mail in those days. I had to mail him some samples. My mother was a stenographer. There's a typewriter at home. I ripped a couple of ads out of the newspaper. one for a furniture store and one for a restaurant, turned them into radio commercial scripts that I thought were scripts, sent them away, and a week later he called me back and hired me. And I started the day after Labour Day in 1972 in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, with a population of about 9,000 people. And they had never had a writer before. It was always the sales guy had written it.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: Or the announcers had written it, or the client had written it. So I had the advantage of having total freedom, because anything I did there was going to be better than what they had.

Ryan: If I can jump in just so I can get little extra bits of the story here. This is '72, you say, so FM is starting at this point, really just starting to figure out what it is, right?

Larry Macinnis: Yeah, and there was no FM in Sydney.

Ryan: So there wasn't an FM?

Larry Macinnis: None in New Glasgow. These were AM stations I'm talking about.

Ryan: So I'm just curious if this also is going to be a factor of expansion. You're about to— the radio is going to really hit a new peak level here pretty soon, right?

Larry Macinnis: Oh yeah, when I came to Toronto, and I'll get to that, Chum FM was a huge factor in Toronto radio.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: But that was something I was not aware of. All I knew was 1050 Chum, the AM station.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: So I was at CKEC in New Glasgow for 9 months, and I had no— I'd never been taught any systems, but I had, you know, I was born with some talent. And they loved what I was doing because they had never had— I was better than what they had. Better than the sales guy. Better than nothing, right? So I'm there 9 months, and on my 20th birthday, on June 8th, 1953— 1973. June 8th, 1973, the phone rings, and I'm working reception. That's how small the radio station is. I'm working reception because the receptionist is at lunch. And I pick up the phone, the guy says, hi, can I speak to Larry McGinnis, please? I said, speaking. He says, my name is Mike Kornfeld. I'm calling from Chum, Toronto. And we're wondering if you'd like to work for us.

Ryan: Wow.

Larry Macinnis: And I go, it's my birthday. All my friends, all of my friends know that my obsession is to work at Chum. And because it's my birthday, I figure it's a joke and I say something I can't say in a podcast.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And I hang up.

Ryan: Blank off. Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: I hang— yeah, exactly. I hang up and he calls back and he says, I don't know what just happened there, but did you send a tape to St. Catharines? Which is another town in Ontario. I said I had. And he said, well, we've heard that tape through a friend of ours. We're friends. And we heard your stuff and we think it's fantastic and we'd like to hire you. And I go, wow, this is unbelievable. I haven't applied there. I didn't— nothing, you know. So 2 weeks later, I'm in Toronto. I'm in Toronto at the biggest radio stations, 2 biggest radio stations in the country, 1050 CHUM, the AM monster.

Ryan: Yep.

Larry Macinnis: And CHUM FM, which was in that time basically an underground radio station.

Ryan: Okay.

Larry Macinnis: It was playing Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake Palmer and stuff like that. And it was 2 very different radio stations in the same building. We had the one station playing Tie a Yellow Ribbon and the other station playing Dark Side of the Moon. And we had tremendous creative talent on both sides of that hallway, both on air and behind the scenes. And I just learned through osmosis from everybody.

Ryan: So when you got to CHUM, now you're finally going to start to get an education as well.

Larry Macinnis: Exactly. Exactly. What I tell my students when I teach broadcast writing at community colleges now, I said I came to Toronto with tons of talent and no skills. But for the Chum people, that was fantastic because they could form me then.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: They could form me and shape me knowing that I had— the talent was taken care of. They could teach me systems and ways to write and ways to deal with clients. And they— my education that I didn't get by completing university, I got by osmosis and by people. A really tough boss. Man, I had a tough boss. The guy that hired me was really a tyrant. And honestly, today he wouldn't be able to behave that way. But I look back now and I think, Well, thank God I had somebody tough who made me a better writer and disciplined as a writer in almost every respect.

Ryan: I'm not breezing through your time at Chum, but I do want to make a point here that you were— so, you got there in the ballpark of '73, is that true?

Larry Macinnis: I started in June of '73 at Chum.

Ryan: And you were made creative director somewhere in the ballpark of '76?

Larry Macinnis: Yes, what happened was, my boss was hired to go to an ad agency in '76, And his first day on the job, he called me and hired me. And because I thought I wanted to do TV and I wanted to do— I was working in the copy department. I wanted to do TV, I wanted to do billboards, I wanted to do all this stuff. I said yes. And I went in and I resigned. And it was very gracious and everything. I went to the agency and I absolutely hated the agency.

Ryan: Oh, I get it. So you actually went to the— Yeah, we were gonna get to that. But so you went to the agency before you became creative director at Chum.

Larry Macinnis: Yes, yes.

Ryan: Okay, continue.

Larry Macinnis: So I hated the agency business, A, because it wasn't a radio station. It could have been an insurance business. You go in, there are no lunatics wandering the hallway, everybody's door is shut.

Ryan: It wasn't Mad Men? It wasn't exactly like Donald Draper? No, no, no, it was very serious.

Larry Macinnis: And the other thing is many of their accounts were, and one of the reasons I was hired, many of the accounts were record labels and concert promoters and stuff. And so as a young guy, I'm only 23 years old then. As a young guy, my job was basically to— it's more like Vinyl than it was like Mad Men. I'd show up at work at 10:30 in the morning, go out and party and drink all day, wander off home. I wasn't doing— I was doing very little writing. It was a lot of client relations, and I hated it because it wasn't a radio station.

Ryan: And you have to have a certain personality to be good in that world, you know?

Larry Macinnis: Yeah, and I was too young. If I had to stay there, I would have been You know, I might be dead now.

Ryan: Yeah, I was gonna say.

Larry Macinnis: It was one of those things. So I was unhappy, but you'd never know it because, you know, it was party time all the time. But so I get a call 5 months into that from the general manager at Chum and says, Larry, are you ready to come back? And I said, absolutely, but I don't want to work in the copy department anymore. And he said, well, let's meet for lunch. We met for lunch and he said, make a list of everything you want to do and what you want to be paid for it, and I'll sign it. That's what he said to me. Now I'm 23 years old. So I go home to my new wife, I'd just been married, and I said, this is what Bob said to me. J. Robert Wood, who's very famous around the world as one of the great radio minds, selected by Billboard magazine as one of the top 12 radio programmers of all time. And he said, make a list of what you want to do and I'll sign it. And so I go home and I make the list. I say, I want to— I don't want to work in the copy department. I don't want to work for anybody, but I want to work with everybody. I want to do TV. I want to do comedy. I want to make movies.

Ryan: I want to write.

Larry Macinnis: I want to do advertising. I want to dream up contests, blah, blah, blah. I'm 23 years old. I didn't know any better that you could even ask for this stuff.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: Meet again for lunch. I ask for 3 times what I'd been making 5 months ago. Meet for lunch. He looks at it. He says, sure, start in 2 weeks. And they kept their word on everything. Within a year, I'm making a video history of rock, which we took out to high schools every day for years. It was our entrée into high schools where we'd get a whole school period of kids in a gymnasium watching our film every day of the week for years.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And so we had generations of students. I did all the— I said I wanted to write comedy, so he put me on the morning show with a legendary morning guy named Jay Nelson, who was in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, recognized there. So I wrote jokes for him, and I didn't— I had never written jokes before. And my boss, Bob, said, well, you'll learn. Jay is a great teacher. So I learned from Jay, and then before you know it, I'm I'm writing for the morning show on FM for 35 years, which is the number one morning show in the country here, Roger, Rick, and Marilyn.

Ryan: I wanted to put an exclamation mark on that. You were at CHUM, well, really more than this, but let's call it '76 to 2013.

Larry Macinnis: Yes, as creative director.

Ryan: How many other humans on planet Earth do you think had a job with that title doing what you did at a station that legendary, that long?

Larry Macinnis: Well, the title in radio didn't really even exist when I got it in '76.

Ryan: That's a good point, right? The creative director title would have been an agency title. No, it didn't.

Larry Macinnis: And to this day in American radio, to my knowledge, it doesn't always exist. I was quite different from the copy manager now. I was the creative director, which meant that I made decisions and actually executed creative in all aspects of the radio station, behind the scenes and on the air. I was an on-air performer, kind of a second banana on morning shows, and I did a lot of performing on commercials. I wrote commercials for a living and still do that for a living.

Ryan: Yeah?

Larry Macinnis: I did image— I did all the station imaging for both radio stations. And I wrote for people like Wolfman Jack. We, at the height of American Graffiti's fame, we'd fly Wolfman Jack in every month and he'd record 3 shows for Sunday nights, 3 shows, and then do the one show live. So we had Wolfman Jack on every day of— every Sunday. in Toronto for a couple of years. And I'll tell you a funny story about that. This is in 1976, shortly after I've come back. Wolfman Jack is doing Sunday Night Graffiti, we called it, with Wolfman Jack.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And my program director, Bob Wood, the genius, said, well, it's not enough to have Wolfman come in and just do Wolfman's shtick. We need Wolfman to come in and sound like he actually knows the city. So you write the local stuff for Wolfman. So Wolfman comes in the first week, and he's got a guy with him, Had a suitcase full of material, walked around everywhere Wolfman did. Wolfman, Bob Smith, was just a regular guy when you're sitting down talking to him across the table or in the hallway. Just a regular guy talking to you like I'm talking to you now. But when he's on the air, of course, he's the Wolfman. So, I would sit down when I knew Wolfman was coming into town for a couple of days and just write Wolfman material. But to write for the Wolfman, you had to assume the persona of the Wolfman.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: So, I remember sitting in my apartment one day, one night, My wife was out shopping. We were just married. Just married a couple of months. And I'm sitting in front of a mirror in our bedroom, looking in the mirror, because I had to assume the Wolfman's personality. And I don't do voices very well, but I'm gonna burden you with this. I'm sitting there going, yeah, baby, this is the Wolfman in Toronto! And doing all that kind of, you know, dog roll that the Wolfman did. And I turn around, and there's my wife standing in the doorway with shopping bags, with her jaw dropping.

Ryan: And—

Larry Macinnis: I go, oh, no, no, no, no, this is work. This is work. I work to do this. Yeah.

Ryan: And she's like, I've made a horrible mistake. Who is this man?

Larry Macinnis: Wolfman offered me a job. A couple of months in, Wolfman said, I'd like to hire you to come to Los Angeles and write my stuff and stuff. But, you know, I was so passionate about Chum and the opportunity they had given me, that they had just given me, like, less than a year ago, that I had no interest in going to the States. But, the Wolfman was a fantastic guy, and it's a funny thing, he died on the same day that my dad passed away.

Ryan: Oh, wow.

Larry Macinnis: It's just kind of a weird coincidence.

Ryan: Yeah, wow.

Larry Macinnis: But a lovely guy, a really lovely, lovely guy, and it was just thrilling to have him in the building. And, so that's kind of the kind of experience— like, I did— we did TV commercials for CHUM FM in the '90s. I had George Carlin come in and write TV commercials for George Carlin to perform. Those are the kind of opportunities I had. Rick Moranis, of Bob and Doug and SCTV and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

Ryan: Oh yeah.

Larry Macinnis: Rick Moranis was a disc jockey on CHUM FM in the '70s, and so I got to work with him on a whole lot of stuff.

Ryan: Now, while it seems like basically anything you wanted to do was possible there, it's one of those few stations in the world that, you know, really budgets aren't quite an issue, you know, people aren't gonna say no because of the size and scope of your brand, but—

Larry Macinnis: No, no.

Ryan: There's gotta be a time where you wanted to do something and finally you hit your wall, they had to say no.

Larry Macinnis: Well, there's— I'm going to tell you the truth, Ryan. Chum Company was founded as a radio company, and it eventually expanded to have TV stations and other— we had— Chum owns kind of the Canadian version of MTV, which was MuchMusic. And that was owned, family-owned until 2006 by the Waters family. And the Waters family, Mr. Waters showed up to work in the building I was in.

Ryan: Oh, wow.

Larry Macinnis: every day, walk a couple kilometers from home, knew everybody in the building by name. I would run into his wife on the street and she would ask about my wife and children by name. And they had like 5,000, 10,000 employees across the country. It was— and everything was based on loyalty and creativity and having fun. Mr. Waters signed all of his memos, have fun. And they kept their word on everything they ever promised me. And so the loyalty— You said earlier, it's unheard of that somebody would work for a company for that many years. Well, I wasn't the only one. Roger Ashby, who now currently has the number one morning show in Toronto on CHUM FM, which almost by definition makes it the number one morning show in the country, has been working for CHUM since 1969.

Ryan: Wow.

Larry Macinnis: He started on CHUM, and by the way, Roger is somebody else you should talk to on a podcast. He started at CHUM the weekend before Woodstock. And he's still there and he's still operating at the top of his game because they gave, like, Like they gave me, they gave him opportunities to do what they wanted to do passionately.

Ryan: So, are you telling me that you never heard no then?

Larry Macinnis: I very seldom heard no. I very seldom had— you know, never has heard a discouraging word? I very, very seldom. I made mistakes. Look, everybody makes mistakes. But at Chum, you were never punished for a mistake as long as you learned. There was never any blame. If we had a— we never really had bad ratings, but if we had a book that was down, there was no blame. There was no panic in the hallways. We just knew that our management, who we loved and respected, and who loved and respected us, would find a way to figure it out and fix it. And there was never any blame fixed. You could be fired, of course, if you were dishonest or you did something egregious. But generally speaking, they hired only the best people. And they did— they had a great— all the managers there seemed to have a great bullshit detector when they were interviewing people.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: Sure, you make mistakes occasionally when you make the wrong hire, but very seldom. And the staff knew when There's such a thing, in quotation marks, as a Chum person. Well, the staff knew when somebody was hired who wasn't a Chum person, and you could tell pretty early on that they were going to not last there. But generally speaking, people spent long careers there, very successful ones.

Ryan: I bet we could talk at least an hour on Chum stories, right? And people know the big, you know, the monster brand it is. But I do, you know, if it's all right with you, I'll move on and we'll talk about other things that you have done and you are doing, unless you want—

Larry Macinnis: Maybe another time we can do the Chum thing.

Ryan: We can do the Chum show. Okay, great. Maybe we'll get a— maybe we'll get like the legends of Chum together.

Larry Macinnis: There's a lot of them.

Ryan: Yeah, oh, I— yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's talk more, you know, about radio in general and really the creative side of radio in general. First, as it comes— as it relates to what you, you know, did at Chum starting in '76 and for 35 whatever years. You know, what are the— what are the 3 major differences from the day you started to the day you left in 2013? Or I mean, maybe not 3, but what are some major differences?

Larry Macinnis: Well, there are different opportunities to get into the business now than there were then. In those days, Chum had operator/producers for every jock shift. Jock shifts were 3 hours long. Now everything, of course, is computerized. Yeah, but at And when I started there, you could have an entry-level position at CHUM running a board for one of the announcers. And they had the morning show till all-night show. They had operators on the all-night show in those days. They don't exist anymore, of course, because of computer technology.

Ryan: Sure.

Larry Macinnis: Of course, when I started in the business, my producers all cut tape with razor blades. And now, of course, there's Pro Tools and all those other— Adobe Audition and all those other great systems that make it much faster to do stuff. But I still listen to the stuff we did with my great producers who cut tape. And it's like George Martin, the late George Martin. You know, there's a thing going around on Twitter today, and it said he did more with 4-tracks than most people do with Pro Tools.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And I listen to some stuff now that was cut with razor blades, and I hear it, and it still holds up, and it still is good or better than much of the stuff that I hear being produced today. What is so great today is that there's still the same kind of passion that kids— I teach at 2 community colleges. I teach at Humber University, Humber Guelph University. I teach a broadcast writing course and I teach at Seneca College broadcast writing course. Just a couple of days, an afternoon at one and a day at the other.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: And I tell the kids the same thing that I tell my own kids when they were looking for careers. I said, you really have to— I don't think I was an exception in the radio business, somebody who wanted to be in radio for as long as they can remember. And if you're passionate in radio, passionate about anything you do, and you want it badly enough, you'll find a way to get it. And the other thing is that I teach my kids— some of my students are taking my course because they have to take it as a credit to get— they all want to be a sportscaster, or they want to be an interviewer, or they want to do— you know, they want to have a show, a disc jockey show like I wanted to have. But I tell them all something that's very true. I said, you have to be able to write in every one of those disciplines. If you're the program director, you have to be able to write memos.

Ryan: Right.

Larry Macinnis: clear memos to your staff. If you're the promotion director, you have to be able to write concise, clear, passionate memos and notes to your clients. If you're an on-air announcer, you have to be able to do show prep. If you're writing news, you have to write news. If you're in sales, you have to write sales presentations. So writing is never going to go away in radio. It's always going to be important. And they still to this day, to my knowledge, have not figured out an algorithm that'll enable a computer to do it. And so I think that the most important thing, and where the education system I think is failing a lot of kids, and I find this in my own students, is that there's a lot of inattention given to grammar, to spelling, to punctuation, to clarity of thought. And of course a lot of that is—

Ryan: Devices.

Larry Macinnis: The fault of Twitter and stuff like that, where you're typing with your thumbs and using abbreviations and stuff. But it's important. Writing is important, every discipline in radio, and especially production. Like, I work with I have great producers here and at other stations I work with who understand what a great script is when they see it and understand how to improve a script even when the writer is not around. And so it's important in all facets.

Ryan: It's pretty crazy. I've said this before. I don't like to beat dead horses, but how wildly bad communicators are at communicating. You know, the communication industry is at literally communicating.

Larry Macinnis: Well, it's— and a lot of it is people are really busy, like, especially with the amalgamation. The Clear Channel kind of phenomenon that happened in the States happened a little later here, but it's now in full bore here. Yeah, I've heard about that. I'm lucky enough, I work for a company here called MZ Media as a consultant in the company. I work with their producers and their writers and their salespeople. It's basically still a family-run business by Moses Naimer, who is an entrepreneur and who created MuchMusic in this country, the offshoot of MTV. But many of the radio stations in this country now are owned by 3 or 4 companies, and it's all Very corporate shareholder value. And it's not the way it— certainly, you asked me what's different, I think that's the main thing that's different.

Ryan: Can creativity be as good in the climate today as it was back when it was a family who owned the big brand? I mean—

Larry Macinnis: Oh, of course it can be.

Ryan: It is.

Larry Macinnis: I'm working at the MZ Media Zoomer Radio, for those who are listening to this podcast. They have, in this building, they have a really great kind of old-style block format almost radio station called AM 740, and they have a classical music station in the same building with tremendous talent on both sides of the glass, both sides of the hall, and they're doing great work because as I said earlier about passion, and I think everybody in this business who kind of is drawn to communications and has a talent for it.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: It's performance art, no matter whether you're on the air or behind the scenes. And everybody in this company that I'm doing this— working with them right now is as passionate in their own way as the people at Chum were when I was working there. I think that it all comes down to passion and management who will forgive mistakes, because mistakes made out of good intentions and just trying something new are mistakes worth making.

Ryan: Right. Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And if you can have— if you find management that can allow that, and in fact, at CHUM, it was encouraged to take risks. It was encouraged to take risks. Sure, if you did something that was just truly awful, your manager would come in and say, you know, I would've done it a different way, and blah, blah. But it was never, like I said, there was never any— nobody ever had to walk the plank for trying something.

Ryan: You've already kind of dove into some of the industry-related stuff. Move more into the writing side of the business. Get a little specific here. And again, you also teach this, so you're gonna have great perspective from having done it, still doing it, and then teaching it. But starting a project, I think a lot of times that can be where a good creative is killed from the outset. When you sit down to start a project, I'm just curious, what's in your mind? Do you have certain goals you always have, certain directions? Are you looking at the client, the target demos? What's in front of you when you start something new?

Larry Macinnis: Let me talk about doing commercials, 'cause I love to do commercials and I've done them my whole life. I always think of a commercial as a problem that has to be solved. And so if you can figure out what the problem is for the consumer— advertising is never about the advertiser. It's always about the consumer.

Ryan: Right.

Larry Macinnis: It's always about the consumer saying, what's in it for me? And you finding a way to satisfy that. I say to my students just the other day, I was teaching yesterday and we were talking a little bit about this and I was saying, you're not selling grass seed. You're not selling grass seed, you're selling self-esteem. By self-esteem, I mean you're selling the nicest lawn in the neighborhood. So you're always looking for an emotional payoff in advertising and in imaging.

Ryan: Mm-hmm. When you're—

Larry Macinnis: you have to think of imaging on a radio station as advertising for the radio station. But it's the same things that make great advertising make great imaging. You're fulfilling a need in the consumer, or in the case of a radio station, the listener. So I think great advertising is always simple. It's always truthful, obviously. It always tries to hit an emotional— can make an emotional connection. There's an old saying, you know, you get them in their heart and the head will follow.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: Simplicity, truth, emotional connection, answer the customer's question, which is always— or the listener's question, which is always, what's in it for me? So I always start trying to figure— I'm gonna tell you something. I'm working on a campaign right now for a company that has a platform for people who are divorced or thinking about getting divorced. And the platform is, it's a site where people can go if they're thinking about getting divorced for legal advice and for financial advice and for housing advice and for a dating site. And I told the client after I sat and talked to them and went away and thought about it for a while and I come back and I said, you know, the obvious thing to do here to go on the air and kind of list the features of your website, that you have financial advice and housing advice and all the things we talked about. And the other— and that would be a mistake in my opinion. And the other mistake you would make is you go on there and you sell pity or you sell anger. I'll associate it with divorce. I say— I said to them, why do people get divorced? And I think it's because aside from the fact that it's maybe infidelity or incompatibility or financial pressure, People get divorced because they're unhappy. The bottom line. The infidelity and the financial pressures and all the other stuff is a cause of the unhappiness, but the bottom line is they're unhappy. And if you flip that on its head, you say, well, people get divorced because they want to be happy again. And so when I do the commercials for this platform that I'm talking about, I'm selling happiness. I'm not selling pity or anger. So there's always— you have to dig and dig and dig. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes it isn't.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: But you have to dig and dig and dig to try to get to an emotional response that you can trigger that's going to make people react.

Ryan: And I've definitely employed that. It definitely sounds like one key takeaway here also is a base emotion. Let's really peel back layers and let's get down to the most basic of emotions and then sell that.

Larry Macinnis: Yes, exactly.

Ryan: Exactly. You brought up the client relationship there, not that your client you discussed there was unruly, but as writers or creatives or people who manage creative accounts, You have to deal with sort of problem clients, unruly clients, clients that are really gonna be self-destructive if what they want happens. Do you have a process for dealing with that?

Larry Macinnis: Well, one of my favorite expressions is one of my early mentors said to me, a client gets the advertising they deserve, which means that clients— everybody thinks— now there's another thing he said to me. He said, everybody thinks they can write because they can type. And so you sit down with a client. These clients who I'm talking about on the divorce end, they were fantastic clients because they were smart. Smart clients, even though they'll come into a meeting with an opinion, and you can learn from clients. I learn from clients all the time because I don't know their business as well as they know their business. And I have to learn about— my first thing is, you want to tell me about your business. And when you're finished with that, what I really want to find out about is your customer.

Ryan: Right.

Larry Macinnis: I find, for instance, that when I go to interview a new client, I'll try to talk to the receptionist. And because the client, the boss, the president, the general manager, the CEO can tell me all about the business, but I find that the receptionist can tell me all about the customer. So I really want to find out about the customer. I've walked away maybe 5 times in my whole career from a client that I couldn't persuade to do the right thing. Sometimes I will take a chance when a client disagrees on creative for me and I'll say, well, why not? If I can't bring him or her around to what I want to do, maybe they're right. Sometimes they have been, sometimes they haven't been. Generally speaking, clients get the advertising they deserve.

Ryan: If you know what you're saying is correct, especially through experience, and you want to go a direction with a campaign, but let's face it, you got a guy who's a salesman by nature, whatever, he owns a car dealership, whatever it is, he needs to see numbers. How do we prove that creative will work?

Larry Macinnis: You get it on the air. I'm gonna tell you, since you brought it up, I'm gonna tell you a story about one of my— the campaign that I'm probably most famous for is the campaign I'm gonna tell you about right now.

Ryan: Well, I think I was gonna bring it up. Okay, go ahead.

Larry Macinnis: Okay. It was a car dealership. I was sitting in my office early on after I came back from Tichum, from the ad agency business. And I was scheduled to leave town that night to work on the Video History of Rock that we talked about earlier. I was working on that project at the time, and a salesperson came into the office and he said, I have this client I'm trying to get on the air. Would you do a spec commercial for them? I said, sure, I'll try to put something together. And he left me a sheet of paper. And he— but after he left, I found out that there was no phone number on it. So I called directory assistance. 411, and I said, could I have the number for Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury, please? And she said, sure. And she came back and she gives me the phone number, and I call the phone number, and the receptionist answers the phone and says, good evening, Pine View Pontiac Buick. What happened was Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury is on one side of the street, and Pine View Pontiac Buick is on the other side of the street. Now, I wasn't very old in those days. I didn't have much experience, but I knew that something would have to be done. to separate those 2 clients. And I looked down the sheet, I think, well, maybe I'm gonna call the— now that I have the— I actually, actually got the right phone number eventually from their operator, and I said, I'm gonna call them. So I looked down the sheet of paper and I find out that the client's name is Al Palladini. And as soon as I say the word Al Palladini in my head, any Palladini is a pal of mine just felt like manna from heaven.

Ryan: Mm-hmm.

Larry Macinnis: So I knew that was my campaign. I knew I was gonna make the commercials all about Al Palladini, and I was gonna end them with any Palladini is a pal of mine. And Rick Moranis was working on Afternoon Drive at CHUM-FM in those days. Believe me, he was just as talented then as he is now.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And he did the voice of Al Palladini. He did the voice of his mother, his brother, his sister. The campaign was all revolved around the Palladini family. And I— we— Rick loved the scripts, and I loved what he did with the scripts. And we sent— on a cassette in those days— we sent the salesperson out with the commercials. He came back 2 days later and said, Mr. Palladini doesn't want to run the ads. And I go, why? Why? These are fantastic ads. He said, well, He wouldn't give me a reason, but he doesn't want to run them. Okay, I break the news to Rick, and he's as surprised as I am. And 9 months later, we have a new salesperson start at the station, a guy named Doug Thorne. I give Doug another cassette, and I don't tell him that we've already tried to sell these. And I say, we just did these commercials for Pine Tree Liquor Mercury. How about taking them out, see if we can sell them? He didn't know that we'd already sent somebody out, so he says, sure, why not? And he goes out, and he comes back the next day, and he says 2 things. A, He doesn't want to run the commercials. And B, he says, stop sending people out. So I figure it's done. 4 years later, I'm— it's so much later that it's— I'm in a different office in a different part of the building. The phone rings one day. Can I speak to Larry McGinnis? Speaking Larry, my name is Vince Giamblanco and I own Communicat Advertising. And we do the Italian language newspaper advertising for Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury.

Ryan: Okay.

Larry Macinnis: Mercury. I go, oh. He goes, we've been trying to get Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury on the air for years, on the air doing radio commercials. And last night I was out speaking to Mr. Palladini with my creative director. And we're talking about an hour trying to get him to do radio commercials. And finally my creative director says, Al, have you ever run radio anywhere? He goes, no, but there's this kid at Chum who keeps sending people out with commercials for me. And the creative director says, well, do you have them around? And there were 2 cassettes, remember, I'd sent out. So he digs around, he finds the cassette, and he puts it in, and he plays the commercials. And the way Vince, the president of the company, explained it to me on the phone, he says, when the commercials are finished, I look over at my creative director, and he's looking at the ceiling. He's not looking at Al. He's looking at the ceiling. And he says, Al, please tell me you haven't been sitting on these commercials for 4 years. And Al says, Yes, I have actually. And he says, why? They're fantastic commercials. He said, well, I like them. I liked them right from the beginning and everybody here likes them, but my wife hates them. And they go, why? He says, well, she thinks they're making fun of our family.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: And the creative director says, they're not making fun of your family, Al. They're going to make your family famous. And this has always bugged me, Ryan. I had sent 2 different radio salespeople out with those commercials, and he wanted nothing to do with them. But when his advertising agency recommended them, he put them on the air.

Ryan: Yeah.

Larry Macinnis: Within 6 months, he went from the 11th biggest car dealer in Southern Ontario to the 2nd biggest car dealer in Southern Ontario. He was elected a member of the provincial legislature based on the notoriety that he had because of his radio advertising. He was made Minister of Transportation in that government. because of those commercials. He told me himself that when he was campaigning for elective office the first time, he would knock on doors in the community where he was campaigning, and people would be willing to shut the door on him because they just figured it was another guy campaigning. And then he would introduce himself as Al Palladini, and they would invite him in and offer him dinner. And Rick Moranis did all the— like I said, he did all the voices, all the announcer parts in those commercials. We did over 50 of those commercials for him. A couple of times we flew Rick in from wherever he was in the world making movies. We flew him in from Hollywood. We flew him in from London when he was doing Little Shop of Horrors over there. And the commercials were a phenomenon, voted by the Canadian Radio Marketing Bureau here as one of the top 5 local radio campaigns of all time. And I still get work based on it, and the commercials haven't run in almost 30 years.

Ryan: I was gonna— okay, that was worth it.

Larry Macinnis: But what I'm saying is that sometimes you never know how you're going to get a campaign on the air because I thought this was a lost cause. And there was no way he was going to admit to anybody that he wasn't gonna run those ads because his wife didn't like them. So sometimes, just like you have to figure out a problem in the creative end, sometimes you just have to kind of dig to find out what the problem is with the client.

Ryan: Man.

Larry Macinnis: By the way, he divorced his wife. He divorced his wife. I don't know whether it was over the ads or not.

Ryan: Now he's going to your other client that you're working on now for the divorce platform. No. Okay, I'm gonna ask it. Do you have at least one of those, the audio, that you can send me?

Larry Macinnis: Yes, absolutely.

Ryan: And I want to play it right now. At Al Palladini's Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury, you can lease all makes and models.

Larry Macinnis: Don't tell my wife about the models part.

Ryan: Al Palladini has become a household word. Uh-oh, we better call a plumber. I think I plugged up the Al Palladini. And in the words of Al Palladini's mother, Al Palladini's Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury is the best Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury ever owned by a son of mine, who I still call Albert. I don't care what he says. Visit Al Palladini's Pine Tree Lincoln Mercury at Weston Road and Highway 7, because any Palladini is a pal of mine. You know what, Larry? I can't think of a better spot, though I want to keep talking to you for at least another hour, but you're taking up a studio. I know that you've got Things to do. What a great chat. I knew it would be great. I recognized your work. I knew your story was great. You're just so good at telling these stories. What a good time. What else can I say but thank you so much, Larry? I appreciate it.

Larry Macinnis: And thank my engineer, Andre.

Ryan: Andre. Yeah, yeah, I talked to Andre for a minute before this. So, you know, I don't know him, but he sounds like a heck of a guy.

Larry Macinnis: He does great work too.

Ryan: All right, so let's see here. On Twitter, @Caper2Guy. Caper number 2 guy. Doesn't need a website, everybody. Larry McGinnis, just one of the greats in the world of creative, and he had one of the legendary jobs and now does legendary work, continues to do so. He teaches. Oh, you know what? I didn't even get to it. You do charitable work as well.

Larry Macinnis: 3 writer friends of mine have formed a collective called the Pro Bono Group, and every year we choose at least one charitable cause and do pro bono work for that cause and get it and go and work behind the scenes to get those PSAs aired on radio stations at no charge.

Ryan: That's great. You have some big-time clients that you're doing pro bono work for as well.

Larry Macinnis: Yes. Amnesty International, Red Cross, several charities that are near and dear to my heart that I've served on boards of, and we continue to do that. I enjoy it immensely.

Ryan: Can I hand out your email here and phone number maybe, or put them on my website?

Larry Macinnis: How about my email would be great.

Ryan: Yeah, dlarrymack@gmail.com.

Larry Macinnis: @gmail.com.

Ryan: Great, so dlarrymack@gmail.com. That's how you reach out to him, everybody. If you want some epic creative, or you just want to ask the guy a question, I'm sure, you know, it'd be—

Larry Macinnis: I'm available 24/7 for new challenges.

Ryan: Excellent. All right, Larry McGinnis. Larry, again, with finality and graciousness, I say thank you, thank you so much for being on the show.

Larry Macinnis: Thank you, Ryan. It was a pleasure.

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