The voice behind the curtain has a question.
He’s anxious to hear what the speaker at the podium, a sleep expert, has to say, the questioner says, because he went to bed at 3 a.m. and was up around 7. That’s just part of his lifestyle, he adds, since he spends time with celebrities and rock musicians. Several mature heads turn, eyebrows raised, expressions bemused. In the row ahead, a silver-haired gentleman turns to the woman beside him and shrugs.
The boast gets such a reaction because, after all, the topic at hand is Being Old. This is the beginning of the Aspirin∏81mg CARP conference—“On a New Vision of Aging.” The guest speakers include a surgeon forecasting the future of hip replacements and an expert reporting on glaucoma and cataract treatments. The audience looks predominantly 60-plus—the name CARP, after all, is derived from Canadian Association of Retired Persons.
When the sleep expert, Michael Breus, is finished with his presentation, the man behind the disembodied voice, the host of today’s event, emerges from behind the curtain. And there is Moses Znaimer, smiling his knowing smile. Somehow, the least retiring man in Canada has got his hands on a retiree lobby group. The onetime youth-culture maven, credited with revolutionizing television with CITY-TV and its offshoots, has, as he puts it, followed the boomers into middle age. His chosen vehicle is CARP, which is yoked to Znaimer’s Zoomer brand (that’s “boomers with zip!”) and the public company ZoomerMedia Ltd. The binding idea is that aging ain’t what it used to be.
For Znaimer, 67, the venture seems to represent a Hefneresque quest for eternal mojo—the magical, sexy power he’s famous for: media visionary, wheeler-dealer. The Zoomer empire is still aborning, with a distinct crazy-quilt facet, but it does have its believers. Most notably, Prem Watsa’s Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. bought a 28% stake in ZoomerMedia for $17.6 million last summer. That injection allowed Znaimer to add the personal touchstone of TV stations to his eccentric conglomerate: He bought the spiritual specialty-channel VisionTV. Fairfax legal counsel Paul Rivett said of the deal: “We believe in the model but we also believe it’s a good opportunity to partner with a guy who still has a few good ideas left in him.”
That backhanded compliment is of a piece with many aspects of the Zoomer brand. As a business concept, everything almost, but not quite, adds up—just as, on a personal level, it seems odd for Znaimer to seek the fountain of youth in the market for aging. Is Moses looking for his mojo because, like Austin Powers, he’s lost it?
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Even before Znaimer helped reinvent youth-oriented TV with CITY, MuchMusic and Fashion Television, he earned wunderkind laurels at the CBC, co-creating Canada’s first national phone-in radio show, Cross Country Checkup, and working on TV talk show Take 30 with Adrienne Clarkson. But not even Znaimer could stay on the cutting edge forever: His long reign at CITY came to an end in 2003 after he found himself on the wrong side of a generational changing of the guard at CITY’s parent company, CHUM.
Znaimer had done well selling his share of CITY years before and, at the time of his departure, he was CHUM’s highest-paid executive. In 2002, he earned nearly $1.6 million, including about $800,000 in fees paid to Olympus Management Ltd., his private company. The actual details of his departure, including the financial ones, have remained obscure. But between share sales and severance, Znaimer found himself capitalized in a way he’d never been before. With a non-compete agreement preventing him from working in broadcasting for several years, he turned to a novel line of work: In 2004, he and fashion retailer Joseph Mimran became investors in Cannasat Therapeutics Inc., a medical marijuana specialist.
Side businesses were nothing new to Znaimer. Over the years, he’d put his stamp on a unique and well-travelled play (Tamara), an unusual ride at the CN Tower (Tour of the Universe), and the still-thriving annual ideaCity conference. Among these and other activities, there have been some critical successes, but nothing to retire on. Once the non-compete expired in 2006, Znaimer was bound to return to his first love. “I’m rather an artiste of media,” Znaimer once said. “I take a little offence when people call me a businessman. The businessmen think I’m an artist and the artists think I’m a businessman. You live in that crack and you bind those worlds together. ...It’s pretty risky, but the rewards can be very lucrative.”
