Running Nickelodeon With a 12-Year-Old Sidekick

When Jeffrey D. Dunn ’77 needs advice about how to run a major television network, he turns to his 12 year old.

A few weeks ago, Nickelodeon, the children’s cable network where Dunn is the Chief Operating Officer and deals with strategy and finances, aired a much-hyped half-hour episode of its “SpongeBob” show.

His son Rob watched the show alongside Dunn. When it was finished, he turned to his father and said, “You oversold that.”

“He was right,” says Dunn, who is 47. “Kids are incredibly savvy media consumers.”

When Dunn was about to become a father, he realized that having a full-time job would be a difficult commitment to balance with the responsibilities of family life. So he did the only logical thing he could think of and turned his career into one that would involve frequent interaction with children.

“If you’ve got to work, there are few things better to do than work in a kid’s business,” he says.

Where Credit Is Due

As an undergraduate, Dunn worked at Harvard Student Agencies (HSA), which he says helped him conclude that business was a better career for him than his previous interests—journalism and law.

“The intellectual challenge was there,” he says, “but it was also an opportunity to work with people in a way that I thought probably wasn’t present in those other two professions. I came to believe that you…could probably impact more people in a company than you could in a lot of other professions.”

Dunn attributes to Harvard both his interest in business and much of his success.

At HSA, he managed the custodial divisions, which he calls an “amazing experience.”

And so after graduating from Harvard in 1977, Dunn applied to Harvard Business School.

But before beginning his studies, Dunn took two years working at Time Magazine in the marketing department. There he began to notice the strong influence television was having on the print media market.

“People thought magazines were really on their last legs,” he says.

But in his two years at Time, he was able to develop an agressive marketing department that increased subscriptions and revenue, which he says “changed totally the economics of the publishing business.”

After business school, Dunn worked briefly in the banking industry at Bank of Boston but he says he became “tired of laying off people” in the wake of the depression of the late ’80s.

In 1993, when he was working for the management consulting firm Arthur D. Little, a fledgling cable network called Dunn for an interview.

Nickelodeon was still small at the time, with a revenue in 1993 of about $150 million. This past year, according to Dunn, revenue is over 10 times that at $1.6 billion.

You Can’t Do That On Television

Dunn says he saw the TV network as a golden opportunity to work in a new media, fusing his interests in journalism, business and children, and he says he saw potential for the combination of movies, books, television and computers.

“It just seemed logical that the computer would facilitate media all coming together,” Dunn says.

He also says he wanted to have a job that would have a positive effect on youth.

“It will change my life, but what it’s really going to do is change my kids’ life,” Dunn says. “If you want to have an impact, working with kids is really how you change the world.”

Dunn married his high school sweetheart, and together they have two sons.

“I think the biggest moment of my life was the birth of my first-born,” he says.

Nickelodeon, he asserts, was the first television network to treat children with the maturity they deserve.

“Nickelodeon said that we’re going to research what kids what to see,” he says.

Dunn says he believes Nickelodeon also helped improve the quality of television available.

“There is more high-quality TV today for kids than at any point in our history,” he says. “We’ve actually done studies that show kids learn by watching some of the shows; they approve their cognitive abilities.”

Television, he says, is “so much broader in its impact and more immediate in its feedback” than print media. He points to the daily ratings that cable executives receive.

“Television has the opportunity to be emotional in a way that is quite extraordinary,” Dunn says. “More than anything else I think television sets the culture of the country—everybody sees the same thing at the same time.”

And Sept. 11, he says, has cemented the role of television in daily life.

“Sept. 11 was in a horrific way almost made for TV,” he says. “Our collective unconscious will forever be seared because we saw it on TV… It became a national event because of television.”

—Staff writer J. Hale Russell can be reached at jrussell@fas.harvard.edu.