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Media Decoder Blog: NBC Universal Puts Cable Units Under One Executive

February 5, 2013 by Leave a Comment

NBCUniversal announced Monday that it was consolidating all of its cable entertainment properties under Bonnie Hammer, the longtime head of the USA network and other NBC cable channels. The move elevates Ms. Hammer to a position among the most prominent and powerful female executives in the television business.

Bonnie Hammer, who will now head all of NBCUniversal’s cable properties, and Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC.Larry Busacca/NBC Bonnie Hammer, who will now head all of NBCUniversal’s cable properties, and Steve Burke, the chief executive of NBC.

Chief among Ms. Hammer’s new responsibilities will be running the cable entertainment channels that had previously reported to another senior executive, Lauren Zalaznick. These include the highly successful Bravo channel.

NBC also announced a new role for Ms. Zalaznick, leading the company’s efforts to develop new digital properties and to find ways to make money in the area of emerging technologies.

Ms. Hammer and Ms. Zalaznick had long been considered friendly rivals within NBC because they each led rapidly growing — and financially successful — cable networks. But Ms. Hammer’s portfolio has always included more and bigger networks, and NBC’s chief executive, Stephen B. Burke, has pursued a strategy in recent years of consolidating separate operations under a single executive.

Most recently that has led to Pat Fili-Krushel gaining command of all of NBC’s operations in news. NBC Sports is led by Mark Lazarus and all of NBC’s sales operations are consolidated under Linda Yaccarino.

The elevation of Ms. Hammer means that NBCUniversal has three women in charge of important divisions within the company.

With the addition of the channels that had been under Ms. Zalaznick, which beyond Bravo also include Oxygen and Style, the portfolio Ms. Hammer controls is among the most extensive and lucrative in the television business. She already ran the operations of most of NBC’s successful cable entertainment channels, beginning with the most popular, USA, and including Syfy, the E channel and the G4 network. By adding the other channels, Ms. Hammer will supervise operations generating about half of the total cash flow of NBCUniversal.

In addition to her new duties, Ms. Zalaznick will continue to oversee two of NBC’s most successful current digital assets, the movie ticket sales site Fandango and Daily Candy, a food, fashion and travel site.

Mr. Burke also announced that Joe Uva, the former president of Univision Communications, would become the chairman of Hispanic Enterprises for NBCUniversal. The company’s chief Spanish-language asset is the network Telemundo.

Ms. Hammer’s elevation at NBC puts her alongside other top female executives in television, such as Anne M. Sweeney, who leads the television arm of the Walt Disney Company, and Abbe Raven, the top executive at the networks AE, History and Lifetime.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/04/hammer-given-authority-over-nbcs-cable-entertainment-channels/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Bonnie Hammer, the Woman Who Saves Cable Networks

December 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

But looking at the first day of shooting “Taken,” an alien abduction series with what then was the outrageous budget of $40 million, she knew the lead child actress was not strong enough. She pushed the show’s studio, Dreamworks, and its renowned producer, Steven Spielberg, for a different actress.

Her choice: the 10-year-old Dakota Fanning.

“Taken” vaulted the fledgling network to the No. 1 spot in cable ratings for two weeks, an early sign of Ms. Hammer’s astute programming instincts and of a quality her mentor, Barry Diller, called “a steely resolve.”

A decade later, Ms. Hammer has ridden that resolve and those instincts to a position of enormous influence and financial power in cable television. If cable is king, Ms. Hammer, chairwoman of NBCUniversal Cable Entertainment, is cable’s queen and, since the departure of Judy McGrath from Viacom last May, possibly its most important executive.

Her ever-expanding collection of assets, including USA Network, the renamed Syfy, the E Entertainment channel, and the G4 network, as well as a nascent but growing television production studio, were the linchpin of Comcast’s $30 billion takeover of NBC Universal in 2009.

Published reports have estimated the annual profit for those assets at close to $2 billion. Stephen B. Burke, the NBCUniversal chief executive, said the figure was slightly lower, but he acknowledged that Ms. Hammer’s portfolio supplied “the biggest part” of the company’s overall revenue — far bigger than the Universal movie studio and the faltering NBC broadcast network.

USA has been the flagship of Ms. Hammer’s success, having finished as the top-rated channel in cable for 22 consecutive quarters. Under her, Syfy has also become a top-10 cable channel. (Mr. Diller said Ms. Hammer had turned what was a $50 million to $70 million annual profit for Syfy into $500 million a year).

Mr. Diller, now the IAC/InterActiveCorp chairman, said in a telephone interview, “The only person in cable programming who has done a job almost as good as Bonnie has done is Roger Ailes at the Fox Network. They are the only two people who are actually responsible for the success of their ventures.”

Mr. Diller said that when Vivendi sold the assets of Universal to NBC in 2004, the value set for USA and Syfy was $12 billion. “I said at the time, we can’t get any more value out of it,” Mr. Diller said. “I was that wrong.” He said since then he had realized “we underpriced it by $7 billion, for sure.” The difference, Mr. Diller said “is all Bonnie.”

Ms. Hammer now is turning her attention to another cable property, hoping to move the 15th-ranked E, over which she gained control after Comcast acquired NBCUniversal, into the same rarefied ratings territory as USA and Syfy.

“E has the possibility of growing exponentially, and yes I believe it could be a top 10 network,” Ms. Hammer said in an interview in her office at 30 Rockefeller Center. It is a prediction the rest of the cable business should probably take seriously. “She is a very, very determined person,” Mr. Burke said. “She is one of the most competitive business people I have ever met.”

Ms. Hammer, 61, started as a producer for the public television station WGBH in Boston, where, in an edit room, she noticed that the host of a do-it-yourself show seemed far less charismatic than the owner of the house being profiled in the show — and that was the beginning of Bob Vila’s television career.

She hit her stride in the 1980s, initially at Lifetime and then at USA, where she made her first big impression wrangling Vince McMahon and his unruly wrestling franchise, the WWF (now WWE).

“She just came in and rolled up her sleeves,” Mr. McMahon said. “She taught us a lot about network quality writing, story arcs, character development. She really helped the overall brand.”

Ms. Hammer decided that the heavy sports emphasis of the wrestling program limited its audience. “I thought it should be male soap opera,” she said.

Comcast’s acquisition of NBCUniversal represented Ms. Hammer’s sixth management transition. Her retention was never in doubt. The old NBC regime, under General Electric, had long cited USA as NBCUniversal’s most prized asset, and tried to keep her happy — to a point.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=5211aab80e7282e51c0061b7a0eaef83

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Analysis: A Lost Chance at Redemption for Ebersol

May 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

It was a characteristic gesture. Ebersol exuded confidence at NBC Sports. He had been a star executive at NBC for almost 40 years; a masterful press agent for NBC and for himself; a story-telling executive who loved to produce big events; and the production monarch of the Olympic control room.

So in the late spring air of Lausanne, Switzerland, it was not surprising to see him puff to a victory not yet declared, but one that he had a strong hunch that he had won. “We came to play,” he said.

And when NBC did win, it was by an overwhelming margin: NBC had bid $2.2 billion; Fox, $1.3 billion; and ESPN’s offer had been to share advertising revenue with the Olympic committee. In defeat, Fox and ESPN executives cited their fiscal prudence; in triumph, Ebersol said the bid was not wild at all, but based on “conservative figures” and a knowledge of television economics that his competitors lacked.

He was wrong. He overbid dramatically, with the backing of NBC’s parent at the time, General Electric, and the recession hurt advertising. The 2010 Vancouver Winter Games lost $223 million, astonishing for a 17-day event. Next year’s London Summer Games, which cost a record Olympic rights fee of $1.18 billion, are expected to lose at least as much, and Comcast, NBC Universal’s new owner, will have to absorb it.

Ebersol will not get a chance to redeem himself or lead NBC back to Lausanne on June 6 to the negotiation for the 2014 and ’16 Olympics. He resigned on Thursday, losing a power play with Stephen B. Burke, his boss since earlier this year when Comcast took control of NBC Universal.

Comcast named Mark Lazarus as Ebersol’s successor as the chairman of the NBC Sports Group — an exchange of an above-the-title executive star (notice the size of the letters of Ebersol’s name in the credits for “Sunday Night Football”) for a low-key, accomplished executive from the business side of cable.

Instead of Ebersol playing the Olympic maestro in presenting NBC’s plan to the I.O.C. next month, it will be his protégé, Gary Zenkel, who disdains the public profile that Ebersol embraced.

NBC will face ESPN and Fox in what could be a fascinating game of financial chicken with the I.O.C. All are preaching financial sanity publicly and privately. Burke recently said: “We’re here to be disciplined. Our job is to increase value.” Sochi, Russia, the site of the 2014 Winter Games, is considered by all three media companies to be worth much less than Vancouver, which cost NBC a rights fee of $820 million.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the 2016 Summer Games will be held, is an exotic locale, and the first Olympics in South America. It is in a time zone well situated to show the majority of events live. But will any network operating rationally bid more than the $1.18 billion that NBC is paying for London?

The I.O.C. has delayed the auction to let the economy recover from the recession.

But in that time, NBC, its best friend in television, merged with Comcast, and Ebersol, a recipient of the I.O.C.’s Olympic Order medal and its closest ally at NBC, is gone. And Comcast — a cable company and programmer — does not have the industrial assets like those that compelled G.E. to buy an Olympic sponsorship for about $200 million to sweeten the oversized Vancouver-London bid; that sponsorship led to hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts around the 2008 Beijing Summer Games. The Walt Disney Company, which owns ESPN, is considering a sponsorship, Sports Business Journal has reported.

Ebersol’s departure was not altogether surprising, but the timing was. He was expected to lead the bidding in Lausanne and oversee all the production in London. He has a deep bench to replace him in the London control room. But while Comcast viewed him as an executive who had to learn its ways, G.E. treated him like show-business talent, as it had also treated Lorne Michaels, the producer of “Saturday Night Live.”

Ebersol was admired, followed and sometimes feared within NBC. He built a core group of loyal executives and producers. Comcast had no such loyalty to him and was unwilling or unprepared to accept his penchant for behaving like a corporate king with the sort of freewheeling portfolio he had had under G.E., where he advised on decisions in news, late night and entertainment. Last year, he famously leaped to the defense of Jay Leno, whom NBC returned to his previous role as the host of “The Tonight Show,” replacing Conan O’Brien. Ebersol said, “What this is really all about is an astounding failure by Conan.”

A person who has observed Ebersol’s interactions the last few months, but was not authorized to speak publicly, said he could be dismissive, difficult, meddlesome and patronizing, and acted as if he deserved to be treated in a special way. In a statement, Ebersol said: “There were no meaningful clashes whatsoever between me and any Comcast executive. I’m not interested in responding to fiction. I’ve moved on.”

Ebersol could not have predicted in 2003 how his NBC career would end. But as he basked in winning the rights to the 2010 and ’12 Olympics, he looked ahead and said, “This will be my last Olympic negotiation.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=05d7acabe15fe8111062bff6088506e3

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