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“It must be a list
of people who’ve got problems,” is Ted Rogers’ wry response when he’s told
that Marketing is ranking him at the top of a list of Canadian media
executives. “But if you haven’t got problems, you haven’t lived right; you
haven’t tried enough.”
Toronto-based RCI
owns at least a piece of just about every means of transferring information
in this country. Its Rogers Multi-Media division includes CFMT, a
multilingual TV station in Toronto; the Canadian Home Shopping Club;
National Cable Network, a cable ad-sales division; a major radio chain that
includes stations in Toronto, London, Ont. and Vancouver; and dozens of
consumer and trade magazines that came with Maclean Hunter Ltd., which
Rogers bought two years ago and is still paying for (Maclean’s,
L’actualité, Chatelaine, Châtelaine and, well, this one).
As well, there’s
Rogers Cable, whose 2.2 million subscribers make it by far Canada’s largest
cable operator. It also runs a nationwide chain of video stores and The
Wave, an embryonic high-speed cable modem service currently running in
Newmarket, Ont. that’s slated for a wide rollout this month.
Besides this, RCI
has a 30% stake in Canoe, an online information service launched jointly
with Sun Media Corp. (called Toronto Sun Publishing Corp. before Rogers sold
it to a management-led group). And it’s a national cell-phone operator
through Rogers Cantel.
“He’s Ted Turner of
the north,” says David Cairns, president of David Cairns Media Management of
Toronto. “He’s taken what was a broadcast company and turned into a
multimedia company.” More important than the company’s reach and ambition is
its owner’s track record of being first out of the blocks to turn new
communications technology into major businesses.
Pundits squinting at
the world of tomorrow proclaim that “content is king,” but that’s been a
relatively recent initiative for RCI’s 63-year-old president with his
Maclean Hunter purchase. Ted Rogers’ principal aim seems always to have been
pioneering a new medium, delegating decisions about what it will carry and
trusting in technical superiority to draw consumers.
“We’ve tried to put
together a group that would reinforce and help each other so that in this
relatively tiny country we have a chance to hear our own voice,” says
Rogers. “The dream that I have is that we build up the Rogers
group as a co-operative where the different components are working together
increasingly with convergence. You need to have at least one or two
companies that are of a sufficient size to provide meaningful competition.”
And you need a
company with deep enough pockets to get huge numbers of consumers to adopt a
new technology. That’s what Rogers did in 1960 when he made Toronto’s CHFI
Canada’s first successful FM station. At the time, hardly anyone knew what
FM was. And if they did know, they didn’t see why it should supplant AM.
Rogers
recalls going to ad agencies in his native Toronto
where people would ask him where the station was based. He found a
manufacturer to build FM radios, sold them to consumers at cost and gave
them to agencies to place in their reception areas.
In 1966, he entered
the then-fledgling cable TV industry, using his technical knowledge, faith
in the medium and sheer force of will. Canada is now the most cabled nation
on the planet.
He got into
cell-phone technology in 1984, when pagers were still a novelty. And two
years ago he set up the prototype for The Wave, the high-speed cable modem
that now serves 5% of Rogers
subscribers in its Newmarket cablesystem.
Not that that’s
daunting: “We think that the high-speed computer service is going to be of
the same magnitude (as cable TV or cell phones). Rogers in the future will
have as much business from computers in the home as it does from TV sets
today.”
“I have tremendous
faith in Ted Rogers and his view of the future,” says Janet Callaghan,
national media director at J. Walter Thompson in Toronto. “Many of us look
to Ted Rogers -- where is he going, where is he taking the company? Much is
expected. He’s done much. I would like to see a multimedia company become
fully integrated.”
Other companies have
been content to let others take the risks and the heavy upfront investments,
then come in after all the mistakes have been made, when there’s less risk
and more profit. What’s made Ted Rogers such an inveterate early adopter?
“My dad was an
inventor,” he says. “He invented the AC tube, which meant that radios could
work on electric light current. That hadn’t been possible before. My mom
used to say he wasn’t a genius, he just worked very, very hard. He died at
38, when I was five. And I always had a dream of, putting it simply, making
him proud of me.” |
