IT'S NOT THE WAY IT USED TO BE. OR IS IT?

Viacom, that itsy bitsy media player, announced the inevitable, blowing away Gary Marenzi. and putting Armando Nunez Jr. in charge of their combined International Television operation.

Is Armando a bright, experienced, and capable sales executive? Yes he is.

Is Gary Marenzi a bright, experienced, and capable sales executive? Yes he is.

I have fallen in love with the comments of Les Moonves, Co-President and CO-COO of Viacom. There is almost something lyrical about his title. These are his remarks, and they are very "Corporate", but after all. what else could he say:

"The merger of CBS Broadcast International and Paramount International Television is intended to "form one great entity that will make Viacom's international television sales business even stronger," said Leslie Moonves, the co-president and co-COO of Viacom. "This restructuring will help maximize our programming resources, efficiently streamline our overseas distribution and establish a programming pipeline that can have a huge impact in the global marketplace.".

Now I suffer from the enormous disadvantage of having "been there, done that" as an operating executive. Although major parts of the distribution business has morphed into a "we are big and you will buy what we want to sell you", there continues to be a need for salespeople who know what they own and can discuss it properly with their customers. This may be arcane reasoning, but then again I am letting my experience cloud my thinking. Now where did I get the Ideas that I now have about the process? This is how I remember it starting.

About thirty years ago, my Columbia Pictures CFO returned from lunch with the Fox CFO, and asked me "Why do you have so many people on staff in Canada, and Fox has very few?

Much to his chagrin, and in a manner consistent with my ethnicity, I responded with a question: How much business does Fox do in Canada? He stared at me and responded, " What difference does that make?" To explain further would be useless, but this was among the many times I have been asked, "do you really need so many people?

The majority of my career has involved the selling of Television content throughout the world. In order to do so effectively I believed in having a sufficient number of people to "get the job done properly"

I knew that the world had changed, when in the late 70s at Columbia Pictures, following the departure of David Begalman, and Alan Hirschfield, a finance person announced to me "Norman, your kind of people used to run this Company, and now my kind of people are running it." I am not at all certain what he meant by that, but I can guess.

This is the stuff and attitude that today's media company's embrace. Points are scored by cutting overhead, and not by effectively increasing sales.

While this is an unsubstantiated opinion of CBS/Paramount, but in my view, the way things were set up before was the most effective, and combining staffs will reduce that effectiveness. Having worked at a couple of studios and a network, the volume of content to be sold is "ENORMOUS" and requires a significant, dedicated sales overhead.

While at Polygram, over 20 years ago, a very senior staff executive (who was a lawyer) asked me in a budget meeting "Norman, I don't understand why you need ANY salesmen, because if you have good product, the customers will find you?

What more is there to say?"

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