Levy, Heller Rise in Ranks at Turner
Ad Sales, Sports Chief Levy Adds Affiliate Business; Heller Gets 'TV Everywhere'
by John Eggerton & Kent Gibbons -- Multichannel News, 5/11/2009 11:20:00 AM
David Levy, president of Turner's advertising sales and Turner Sports, is adding responsibility for the company's distribution sales unit Turner Network Sales upon Andrew Heller's promotion to Turner Broadcasting System vice chairman.
"This new model consolidating oversight of our company's domestic revenue reflects the increasing convergence of the aims, interests and activity of advertisers and distributors, and the importance of sports to both," Turner chairman Phil Kent, to whom Levy reports, said in a statement. "David Levy's long track record of innovation and execution in both advertising sales and sports makes him the ideal executive to provide new strategic leadership to a terrific management team."
Concurrent with Levy's promotion to president of sales, distribution and sports at TBS, Coleman Breland, who had been executive VP of the distribution unit, will become COO, overseeing day-to-day operations and reporting to Levy.
Heller, who had been distribution chief as head of Turner Network Sales, has been named vice chairman of Turner Broadcasting System, reporting directly to Kent.
In a conference call with reporters, Kent said the U.S. distribution and ad-sales businesses increasingly cross over. For one thing, major distributors, such as Comcast or DirecTV, are often advertisers, he said. Levy also oversees Turner's sports businesses, and sports programming acquisition decisions increasingly have to be done with a mind to the impact on distribution, advertising and sports rights, Kent said.
"It's just a much cleaner, more accountable management setup to do this," Kent said, saying he had wanted to have one person overseeing all domestic revenue for some time.
Kent has said in a memo that Heller would be transitioning over the next few weeks from president of domestic distribution to the new post, in which he will "pioneer a next-generation business model for our company and industry."
That new model is to put content in front of people wherever they are, provided they already have a customer relationship as a multichannel video subscriber, which will mean Heller will coordinate Turner's participation in Time Warner Inc. and Time Warner Cable's TV Everywhere initiative.
According to Kent, Heller has been responsible for delivering "fully half our company's revenue," saying those credentials demonstrate how important the cross-platform initiative is to the company's future.
On the media call, Kent said Heller was uniquely qualified to take on the task of developing systems that work for distributors and programmers in terms of making content available online to multichannel video subscribers. Time Warner Inc.'s HBO unit is rolling out such a service currently, called HBO Go.
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