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talking about Uncle Mel
Gossip has Viacom chief up to running everything
By Jeff Bercovici
In an era that is seeing so many respected media executives flame out, their reputations shattered after decades of successes -- Jerry Levin is just one who comes to mind -- one name seems only to grow in stature.
Mel Karmazin, Viacom's president and chief operating officer, might seem an unlikely name to be rumored as media's top fix-it manager. Karmazin is a salesman, not a finance man, and of humbler roots than most.
Yet Karmazin's name is all over the headlines.
The latest report has him being courted to serve as president of AOL Time Warner. In the past, he has been reported to have been approached to succeed Michael Eisner at Disney.
Why?
The answer is certainly Karmazin's success running Viacom, but perhaps more important, making the merged company actually work -- something legions of media executives seem to be failing at.
Steve Case of AOL was famously visionary, as was Levin of Time Warner, and the two combined their visions to create AOL Time Warner, the largest disaster in corporate merger history. Their shared vision, daubed over in snake oil, was before its time, which is no consolation to stockholders or all the Wall Street analysts who made fools of themselves promoting the company.
Karmazin is not a visionary, or if he is he keeps it to himself. He is a salesman and a manager and a strategist, often using his salesmanship and his managerial instincts to advance strategies that would be taken as visionary if they did not make so much practical sense on their face.
Much of what Karmazin has achieved has been through mau-mauing his opponents and weaker-willed allies into lining up behind his ideas, perhaps even without understanding them. Like every great salesperson, Karmazin sells himself.
The fact that Karmazin is so sought-after these days says much about the man but also much about the times and our changing perspectives on this media business. We are coming to remember, as are our regulators, that bigness simply for the sake of bigness seldom works, and that, akin to this, the bigger anything is the harder it is to make work.
Karmazin's great success has been in making Viacom -- an entity combining such diverse properties as CBS, UPN, MTV, a vast radio and outdoor enterprise -- work, and doing it while in a sour marriage with the eccentric and egocentric Sumner Redstone, its chairman. That alone would make him seem fit to run just about anything.
AOL Time Warner immediately, and perhaps a tad too vehemently, denied the report this week that it was courting Karmazin, insisting there was "not a shred of truth" in it, while Viacom limited itself to pointing out that he has another 10 months to go before his contract runs out.
The net effect of the episode was to remind people just how in demand are Karmazin's services as a manager par excellence.
Not that Media Life's readers need reminding. Last month, they picked Karmazin as the most admirable media executive of 2002 in a year-end poll.
Two years ago, BusinessWeek named Karmazin one of the top 25 managers of 2000 after a year in which he shepherded the $90 billion merger of CBS and Viacom and green-lighted the year's biggest hit, "Survivor."
In addition to ushering in the reality TV boom, "Survivor" played a key part in another of Karmazin's successes: reducing CBS's median viewer age from the low 50s to the mid-40s.
Last year Viacom's other most important property, MTV, caused a sensation with "The Osbournes," which became the most-watched basic cable TV series ever.
Meanwhile, CBS continues to thrive, the only one of the major networks to see an increase in its viewership so far this season thanks to hits including "CSI: Miami" and "Still Standing." This time, it was CBS president Les Moonves who made BusinessWeek's top 25 managers list.
It's not only in reality programming that Karmazin has shown himself unafraid to take risks. His decision in spring 2001 to hold back extra inventory during the network upfront sales was viewed as a major gamble, but it paid off when scatter prices stayed solid through that fall.
Now Viacom, which derives half of its income from ad revenues, is seen as the best-positioned of any media conglomerate to benefit from the inevitable recovery of the ad economy.
If AOL Time Warner truly isn’t talking to Karmazin about becoming its CEO, perhaps it should be. Pairing his business acumen and ability to finesse Wall Street with Parsons’ mastery of boardroom politics might well give the world’s biggest media conglomerate the world’s most formidable management duo.
January 16, 2003© 2003 Media Life
-Jeff Bercovici is a staff writer for Media Life.
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