It's minutes to airtime, and Jim Cramer is pacing the set like a caged beast. He scans the five screens on his desk, stops, punches some keys. "Hmm. The Chinese Google plays are up," he mumbles. He furrows his brows, pokes a few more keys. "Whoa. Wells Fargo gave up on the brokerage business." He's talking aloud to himself, which is fine, because this is just a warm-up for the barrage of instant analysis he is about to unleash. Cramer's knack for quick distillation enabled him to build a fortune as a fast-trading hedge-fund manager in the '90s. Now he's using the same reflexes to resuscitate ratings at the financial cable station CNBC, whose fortunes deflated with the Internet bubble.
Mad Money with Jim Cramer is a raucous investor show that features vertigo-inducing camera movement and the blustery, hyperkinetic Cramer bouncing around the set howling stock-market strategy. He punctuates his advice with a battery of noise effects: "Sell! Sell! Sell!" a voice booms through the studio after Cramer hits one of 15 large red buttons on the set; another one elicits a Hallelujah Chorus.
Gimmicky? You bet. But the program, in stark contrast to shows like the staid, departed Wall Street Week, is a clear success. Mad Money has boosted viewership in its 6 p.m. E.T., weekday slot 74%, to 176,000, and is on an upward trajectory. Cramer has the network's highest-rated program in a slot that had been home to its lowest. Pleads program developer Susan Krakower: "Find me another Cramer, please!"
CNBC has a long way to go to recapture the success of its bull-market heyday. Ad revenues last year were just $140 million, vs. $383 million in 2001, reports Kagan Research. Overall ratings remain depressed, even though onetime rival CNNfn went dark last year. And a new financial channel is expected at Fox next spring, so there is a sense of urgency in the place. CNBC, a division of GE's NBC Universal, has tried everything to reinvent itself, including going Hollywood. That failed experiment led to the cancellation of prime-time shows with hosts Dennis Miller, John McEnroe and Tina Brown. The network lost its way, says Bill Cella, CEO of Magna Global, an ad-buying firm. "They need to get back to their roots: solid business programming." Mad Money offers a template, because Cramer is well grounded in business yet just crazy enough to test old boundaries.
On air Cramer dishes up buy or sell advice for dozens of stocks every night. He occasionally contradicts himself, as he did with Citigroup, when he gushed over the stock's dividend a few weeks after saying the stock was "broke." "I find it, from a financial viewpoint, embarrassing," says John Markese, president of the American Association of Individual Investors. "He's the financial Jerry Springer."