Ted Turner Had No Money to Buy the TV Station. So He Bartered With Billboards

With the news that Ted Turner passed away this week, every obituary you’ll read will lead with his creation of CNN. And rightly so. But the move that made all of it possible came twenty years earlier, when Ted was a small-time billboard guy in Atlanta who didn't know the first thing about television.

But that didn’t stop him.

In 1970, Ted Turner was 31 years old and running a dinky outfit called Turner Advertising, the billboard company he'd inherited after his father's suicide.

The business was sorta profitable. It was also under siege.

The federal Highway Beautification Act was tightening rules every year. New billboards were harder to put up and old ones were forced to come down. Ted could see exactly where the road ended and so could everyone else in the industry.

Most billboard guys would have squeezed the lemon harder. They would have cut costs. Held on. Ted did something else.

The Station Nobody Wanted

Ted noticed a tiny UHF station in Atlanta, Channel 17, that was bleeding money so badly the owners were almost giving it away. UHF in 1970 was the runt of the TV world. Most homes didn't even have the dial that picked it up. The station broadcast reruns of Leave It to Beaver and old wrestling matches to a few hundred viewers.

Nobody in their right mind wanted Channel 17.

Nobody except, of course, the young, brash, ambitious Ted Turner.

Playing poker with a lousy hand

Here is the move that nobody talks about.

Ted didn’t have a pile of cash for the deal. Not even close. But what he did have was billboards. So he offered the owners this crazy deal: He would barter for the station using stock from his billboard company.

No cash.

They agreed.

But that’s not even the craziest part.

The craziest part is that Captain Outrageous then chose to risk millions of dollars worth of his own billboard inventory into promoting the station no one received and that no one even had heard of.

Free advertising space.

For the first time in UHF history, a struggling station had a citywide ad campaign behind it. Bus stops all over Atlanta boomed about Channel 17. Highway billboards trumpeted the station. Downtown billboards too.

Channel 17 was suddenly impossible to miss.

And yep, audiences came. And then advertisers came. And then the cable operators came knocking.

Turner then renamed the station WTBS (Turner Broadcasting System, natch!)

And then

Six years later, Ted figured out how to bounce that signal off a satellite and beam Channel 17 into every cable home in America and WTBS became the world’s first SuperStation.

Then he bought the Atlanta Braves. For baseball? Nope, to fill the schedule on WTBS.

Then he created CNN.

But it all started with a small-time billboard guy in Atlanta who realized that the asset other people thought was dying was actually the perfect currency for the asset nobody else wanted.

The Takeaway

Most of us, when we look at our businesses, see the low inventory, or the product that is slowing down. Ted Turner looked at the same thing and saw an underutilized asset.

Whatever you've got that feels like it's losing value, do a double take. Sometimes the asset that’s fading is a blessing in disguise. Maybe you too can trade what you've got for what you want.

Steal This Strategy

📖 Book — Call Me Ted by Ted Turner Ted tells the whole story in his own (very Ted) voice. Worth every page.

🎙️ Podcast — Founders Podcast: Ted Turner Episodes David Senra's deep dives on Ted's playbook. Perfect companion to tonight's story.

🌐 Article — WTBS: From Channel 17 to SuperStation (Wikipedia) The full timeline of how a billboard guy's bet built a media empire.

📖 Book — The Small Business Bible: Steve’s bestselling book on how to start, run, and grow your own business.

You + Steve

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