Interesting to see CBS Digital take a cue from Viacom and bring in a dealmaker? I guess if you thought 2005 was a year for digital mergers and acquisition deals (About/NYT, IGN/Fox etc.) the best is yet to come:
From PaidContent:
CBS is switching gears in digital, opting for someone with more of a rep for making deals than building companies. In: Quincy Smith as president of CBS Interactive. Out: Larry Kramer, the founder of CBS Marketwatch who joined CBS in 2005 to help create the digital foundation of a company that didn’t have one. Smith, 35, brings a reputation for the kind of aggressive behavior prized by CBS CEO Les Moonves. Most recently, Smith has been an investment banker at Allen & Co, where he worked on the Viacom-Neopets, Advertising.com-AOL and various Google deals; before that, he was at Netscape for five years and started a VC firm with James Barksdale. At CBS, Smith’s portfolio is company wide with the responsibility for bring together all elements of digital strategy—radio, outdoors, books, TV. Kramer focused primarily on TV, cable and CBS Sportsline.
Smith tells Reuters in an interview:“The important thing is that we get confidence internally on a set interactive strategy that will immediately change and be organic as we grow. From there we can think about how we can execute on this as a team.” On the making deals side, it sounds like he’s in sync with Moonves, who has said the company won’t be making major digital acquisitions. Smith says he wants to hear from all entrepreneurs as he searches for the next YouTube: “I’m looking for the next YouTube, only a year earlier, when they were 1/32nd of their size, without building out stuff that we would find duplicative like sales force. The core engineering team is always important. … I want to make sure that this is an appeal to every entrepreneur of every company size. This is a notion that CBS is reaching out to Silicon Valley and a little bit of New York with the Allen & Co. pedigree. But keep in mind most of my clients are out there. We want to see them all. We want to see everyone in there. And we want to learn.”
That is essentially/excatly what Viacom’s Philip Dauman said when he replaced Tom Freston.
Interesting to see how everything will unfold in 2006 and beyond.
Click here for Part 2.
Digg this Blog
Share on Facebook
WatchMojo on Twitter
WatchMojo on YouTube
Add to Favorites
WatchMojo Newsletter
