Zoomer-in-chief CityTV founder is anything but retiring
William Hanley, Financial Post Published: Saturday, July 05, 2008
Moses Znaimer has plans. Lots of them. Big ones. "It's good that I'm retired," he says with a chuckle over a very dry Manhattan in the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel in downtown Toronto. "If I weren't, I wouldn't have had the time to pull together two major radio stations, a national magazine, a suite of Web sites and a takeover of a national advocacy group with 340,000 members, which is what I've done in the past year and a half."
Some retirement. Indeed, no one would ever call Moses Znaimer shy or retiring.
At 65, officially a senior citizen and self-professed "youngest man in Canada," the co-founder of CityTV, MuchMusic and other enterprises that revolutionized television in the 1970s when the Boomer generation was growing up, is once again staying ahead of that vast demographic cohort, which he has rebranded as "Zoomers."
Early this year, Znaimer took over Canada's Association for the 50Plus, its advocacy group and its CARP magazine, which he will relaunch in October as Zoomer. He did that after buying two Toronto-area radio stations generally serving Boomers and their parents -- AM 740 All Time Favourites Radio and The New Classical 96.3 FM.
At some point he plans to acquire a television channel, which he says is the missing piece in his fast-growing business. "I've got radio. I've got print. I've got Web. Me, of all people, I don't have TV," Znaimer says.
He has also entered the online dating scene through a partnership with LavalifePRIME, a social dating site for singles ages 45-plus. Member of 50Plus.com will have automatic access to the social networking site.
"I've got a lot on the go," he says, just a few days after hosting his annual ideaCity conference in Toronto, a three-day think-in featuring 50 speakers offering big ideas on a wide range of subjects. This year, not surprisingly given his latest endeavours, the last session of ideaCity focused on ageing and on how Zoomers are going to live longer, perhaps a lot longer.
Surprisingly, Znaimer does not adhere to the strict health regime one might expect of the man charging himself with leading Zoomers to the promised land of vibrant and longer older age.
"I've always been rather heedless about my health," he concedes. "And health is the kind of thing you don't notice till you don't have it."
Although he doesn't watch his diet closely, does nothing more strenuous than walk two kilometres most days and gets by on 3½ to five hours sleep a night, Znaimer still has his health. He is still physically recognizable as the wunderkind Montreal CBC producer/ reporter who came up with the big idea of CityTV in 1972.
"I do associate health with the definition of age. I think most people who talk negatively about age are really talking negatively about health. If you're healthy, you're as young in your mind as when you first became conscious of who you were. And that's where you stay until something bad happens."
That Znaimer is the Zoomer-in-chief today is because something bad did happen, to his mind, at CityTV, when the Waters family sold CHUM Ltd., which owned the station and related properties, to Bell Globemedia. "I was violently opposed to the sale of CHUM," he says forcefully.
Today he says he enjoys "absolute autonomy" in orchestrating his media businesses, which centres on all things Zoomer. It's a term he didn't coin, but one he has embraced and popularized to the extent that it has quickly become part of the lexicon in defining Boomers with zip.
Zoomer, edited by former Flare editor Suzanne Boyd, will be the "evolution" of CARP magazine and put a "new inflection on ageing," Znaimer says. "CARP is a seniors' magazine with all the usual emphasis on the downside of ageing. I'd say 'bland' would be a polite word for it and I want to put some of the zip back in."
Zip will cost money. He is looking to raise the annual membership fee for Canada's Association for the 50Plus to $30 from $20, while aiming to take the membership from 340,000 to one million. He also expects the new, improved Zoomer magazine will generate newsstand sales.
All this, Znaimer hopes, will help change the attitude of the advertising community, which he says basically -- and stupidly -- ignores the older market. For him, this is no pet peeve. It's a raging beast of a peeve because a third of the population with 80% of the wealth gets only 4% to 5% of the advertising spending. Ad men, he says, are still stuck in the 1970s thinking that youth is everything.
"As far as the advertising business is concerned, Moses Znaimer died at 55," he says. "And he died at 55 only about two or three years ago. Previously, he died at 50. Their idea of Moses Znaimer is that I am at home in my rocking chair chewing on my gums and waiting for the pension cheque so I can go out and buy dog food."
Znaimer in a rocking chair? There's a thought. At 65, he has problems with banged-up knees and he says he could lose five to 10 pounds. But he's essentially the same driven specimen he was 36 years ago when he launched CityTV.
Besides, he says he has the advantage of disadvantage, of being hardened by a tough immigrant childhood, the son of Eastern European Jews who made it to Montreal from Tajikistan when he was very young.
And he has a secret weapon in hand. He says tests have determined that he has a "marker" for long life. "It's called the immortality gene and appears in fewer than 1% of the population."
At the ideaCity conference, some speakers made the case that advances in bioscience and diet, among other things, could see people living well beyond 100, even beyond 200, with immortality a possibility.
First the Boomer market. Now the Zoomer market. Will a centenarian Moses Znaimer be arguing with the advertising industry decades hence that it thinks Moses Znaimer died when he was 85, that it is ignoring what might be called, say, the "late bloomer market?"
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