Brent Hansen
Media mogul, MTV Network International
MTV, Music Television: arbiter of fashion, shaper of contemporary global culture, and one of the biggest American brands worldwide influencing the youth market is controlled outside of the US by 50-year-old New Zealander Brent Hansen.
By Chanel Hughes
Based at the bustling
MTV Europe headquarters in the heart of Camden, London, Hansen
sits at the helm of a billion-dollar industry that shapes the tastes,
trends and desires of youth culture around the world, as Editor-in-Chief
and President of Creative for MTV International. With eight channels
alone in the UK , MTV Europe beams out to 132 million households,
and 1 billion households are connected worldwide. Hansen is responsible
for managing the brand and culture of the network outside of the
USA, covering the gamut from T-shirts to international programming
policy.
"I'm kind of like the philosopher of the company,” he says. “My job is to inspire people.” And it's not difficult to see how he came by that role. Easy-going, down-to-earth, charismatic and abundantly enthusiastic, he blends more than 20 years' experience in the music industry with a phenomenal knowledge of music and an enduring passion for the product.
It's a job that involves firing the creative energies of 2,500 staff worldwide (800 of them in Europe ), a considerable amount of travel, and a lot of music — “I go to at least two or three gigs a week."
And it just grew exponentially with the launch this year of MTV's first pan-African music channel, MTV base, a 24-hour channel that airs in Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, Angola, Senegal, Cameroon, Ghana and Tanzania.
It's difficult to imagine Hansen in a more perfect role. Music has been such a central part of his life. “I've been deeply interested in good music since the age of seven or eight,” he says. His precocious tastes for Jimi Hendrix and the Who followed him to university where he first completed a Bachelor of Arts in English and History at Otago University, and then a Master of Arts in History at the University of Canterbury (1978).
While at Canterbury, he wrote music reviews for student magazine CANTA and the Christchurch Press, worked on the student-run Radio U, booked the bands for the Students' Association's regular entertainment slots, and indulged himself with frequent browsing through the University Bookshop's “wonderful record collection".
"This whole experience set the tone for me in a way," he says.
A year at teacher's college followed, where he enjoyed the teaching but not so much the theory. Meanwhile his music reviews had attracted the attention of staff at South Pacific Television and they offered him a weekend job as a “runner”, assisting with arrangements for the programming.
Hansen took a job teaching at the end of his training, but shortly after was offered a full-time position at the TV station as an assistant floor manager, or “floor sweeper”. Excited by the new opportunity and eager to try something outside of academia for a while, Hansen set himself a three-year plan. It turned out to be a pivotal experience.
"I worked on lots of projects, had lots of training on the job, and ended up fairly quickly becoming a floor manager proper with much more responsibility. I worked on all sorts of programmes, including A Week of It and That's Country.
However New Zealanders might cringe retrospectively about That's Country, it featured some surprisingly big hitters in the international music industry — Emmylou Harris, for example. Through his involvement with this programme, Hansen undertook a considerable amount of music research, which he thrived on, and in 1982, he landed his dream job as the producer of Radio With Pictures in Wellington.
"It was the ultimate job,” he says, “and still is.” The three-year plan was now out the window. “It was completely where I wanted to be, because of my interest in music. I'd got myself into a whole different world."
Hansen says he sweated considerably over the one 45-minute programme a week (“At MTV they knock one of those off in the 10 minutes before they have a coffee break”) and it was a blow when the show was taken off air in 1986 because of video rights issues. When “True Colours”, the new show he created, was canned also, Hansen and wife Philippa Dann (a former Shazam presenter) decided to take a six-month break in Europe.
In a moment of surreal serendipity, Hansen wrote to MTV in America saying he would like to visit their offices during his travels, because what they were doing in the USA affected what he was doing in New Zealand. He sent his resume as proof of his credentials and the next minute was offered a job.
"They said they were just about to start up their Europe office and would I like a job. It wasn't part of my plan, but I thought, I'll test myself.
"I think they thought, ‘You're cheap, you work hard, you probably won't stay very long'.
"They don't take into account that [New Zealanders] are also very competitive and that we want to prove ourselves to the world."
In his first year, at the age of 30, Hansen found himself rising rapidly through the ranks, through four or five positions to programme director, planning the programme for MTV's pan-Europe operations. “The Americans hired lots of people for the Europe office who just left after a very short space of time."
By 1997, he was chief executive of MTV Europe. In this role, Hansen began with a philosophy that has ensured MTV Europe's pre-eminence in an increasingly cut-throat market.
"We had to find ways for small countries to feel like they were part of the club. In this sort of context you can be very neutral and irrelevant rather than exciting. We realised we had to be relevant to everywhere. So the idea was to keep a centre of excellence and maintain brand excellence but have 85% of the decisions being made locally."
It is this approach that deflects detractors who might see MTV as a cultural juggernaut, and where Hansen's depth and breadth of musical interest plays an important part. With the new African channel, for example, a major part of the agenda will be to encourage and develop grassroots African music talent. Hansen's ultimate goal is to have a 50% weighting of African sourced videos and music. “Africa is the root of all modern popular music, there is no doubt about that; it has influenced everything.”
Hansen concedes he does sometimes feel uncomfortable about working for a big corporation and about the current state of the music industry, which has become “more about making money than scaling the artistic heights”, with a market that is more frequently driven by 12-year-old girls.
"A lot of good artists are below the radar now, which is difficult, since MTV is a commercial network. In the ‘70s we had much better artists. The best artists now have to bring off a large commercial hit within six months, unlike previously when they might have had the luxury of three years. Even the big artists like Madonna and Brittany have to keep re-creating themselves, whereas the likes of Rod Stewart and Elton John became superstars for life.
"We're not just cookie-cutting music in the UK, though; we are bringing edgier, attitudinal music to the fore."
For all his international success, Hansen is still passionately attached to New Zealand, and proud of his antipodean origins. It still entertains him enormously that MTV hired someone from a country at the bottom of the world with no business acumen to run their European operation.
Sitting in his office beneath a huge mural that was painted spontaneously in a day for a Crowded House music video, Hansen talks animatedly about the landscape and the people. The boy who cycled regularly to the Robert McDougall Art Gallery has become an avid collector of New Zealand art — Hoteres, Hammonds, McCahons and Fomisons — and “lives and dies” on every All Black game, in spite of never previously being a rugby fan.
It is a proviso of his contract that he is allowed to travel back to New Zealand with his wife and two children once a year, but Hansen still misses home "terribly".
"I've been in London for 18 years now and I hope to retire soon. Now I feel like I should be able to make time for my relationship with New Zealand."
Source:
Canterbury
Magazine
2005
Vol 2 No 2 (PDF, 2.5MB)