Jeff Zucker

April 2008

Jeff Zucker, today the president and CEO of NBC Universal, has spent more than 20 years at NBC. Since he joined NBC Sports in 1986 as a researcher for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, Zucker has had a hand in many of the network’s greatest successes.

At age 26, he became the youngest executive producer of the Today show. Under his leadership Today became the most-watched morning news program in the U.S. and the most profitable show on television. He also served as executive producer for the NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw and for several major events: election-night coverage in 2000, presidential inaugurations in 1993 and 1997 and the first Gulf War.

In 2000 he was named president of NBC Entertainment and from there began his steady ascent up the company’s ranks. In 2003 he was appointed president of the Entertainment, News and Cable Group, where he broadened his expertise from the broadcast world to the cable business. He gave the Bravo hit Queer Eye exposure on NBC, a cross-network scheduling tactic that has been repeated with shows like Monk and Psych. He came up with the “super-sized” episodes of the hit comedies Friends, Will & Grace and Scrubs—extending the traditional 30-minute sitcom to 40 minutes in an effort to keep viewers from switching to CBS’s Survivor or FOX’s American Idol.

When NBC combined with Vivendi Universal Entertainment in 2004, Zucker was appointed president of the NBC Universal Television Group. And finally, in February 2007, he was named president and CEO of NBC Universal.

Today, Zucker sits at the helm of a major media conglomerate that includes the broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, the Universal studio, a stable of cable channels in the U.S and around the world featuring such brands as USA Network, Bravo, SCI FI Channel, 13th Street, Studio Universal and CNBC, theme parks and several digital assets, including iVillage.com and Hulu.com, an online video joint venture with News Corporation.

Of the five operating imperatives he set for the company—original production, digital, international, diversity and lowering costs—international ranks high among Zucker’s priorities, as witnessed by the acquisition of Sparrowhawk Media and its bouquet of channels—which includes the Hallmark channels outside the U.S.—and of a stake in the NDTV Networks in India. Zucker also hired Ben Silverman as co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, in large part because of his expertise in adapting foreign shows, like The Office, for the U.S. market.

With technology constantly serving up new platforms and devices on which to enjoy movies and TV series, and viewers increasingly watching them whenever and wherever they can, Zucker is calling for fundamental changes in the cost structure of the media business. He announced that NBC Universal will be producing fewer pilots, preferring to greenlight ideas directly into series. And in an effort to develop and introduce new shows on a year-round basis so that they don’t compete with all the other network series premiering in the fall, NBC will unveil a full-year programming schedule in April. The presentation will be followed by a series of one-on-one advertising client meetings in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, and by a spotlight event on May 12 that will showcase the platforms and capabilities of the larger NBC Universal group.

Zucker spoke to World Screen in his office at Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan.

WS: You’ve been CEO for a little over a year. What have been the biggest surprises and the biggest challenges?

ZUCKER: I would say that the biggest challenge has been to improve the perception of NBC Universal after a few difficult years, to show people we were making real progress and that the company is actually in good shape and on a good trajectory. I think we’ve done that. The results have been very promising. I’d say the other big challenge continues to be transitioning through the new digital landscape and figuring out the economics of that, which are still very unclear to everyone.

I think the biggest surprise is just how vast and big the company is, which is something you don’t really realize until you are in this role. We have 16,000 employees around the world and I do feel that we are all rowing in the same boat and I feel we’ve done that by laying out what our operative imperatives are and what our strategy is and articulating that on a consistent basis. And that helps everyone rally around what we are trying to do.

WS: In your keynote at NATPE you mentioned “game-changing technological development and profound shifts in consumer behavior—a shift from habit to choice—individuals making choices for when and how to consume media.” Can you give some examples of how the cost structure of the business has to be changed to accommodate these shifts?

ZUCKER: I think the broadcast business has operated a certain way for 30 years, both on the news side and the entertainment side. Changing that is very difficult but it is something that we have to do, and so, particularly in news and entertainment, we are fundamentally looking at how we are structured. The way we cover and disseminate news is very different today than it was even five years ago, except we still have an infrastructure that is set up in the same way, so we have to adjust that, and I think we are doing it from a tremendous position of strength, so that makes it somewhat easier, but still tough.

On the entertainment side, I laid out at NATPE some of the things we are thinking about, including the way we develop programs, the number of programs that we will make as pilots, as opposed to going straight to air with them. So that’s one way we are affecting the cost structure and it’s that kind of thinking that we are trying to challenge people to do.

WS: If you can’t see the pilot, on what do you base the decision to greenlight?

ZUCKER: I guess my point about that is that we’ve greenlit a lot of shows based on seeing the pilot and that hasn’t really gotten us anywhere, except to waste a lot of money. The greenlight decision in many instances will have to be based on our gut, our knowledge of the writers and actors who are involved, and our belief in the concept. But frankly that’s no different than what we do on the film side. We don’t make a pilot of a film before we decide to make the film.

WS: Some people maintain that only projects from the more established writers and producers would be given a green light, and somebody who is brand new—

ZUCKER: It would be harder for them to break in.

WS: Is that correct?

ZUCKER: Well, I think that would be a fair point to raise. It’s something that we have to guard against.

WS: How do you do that?

ZUCKER: Going with the established producers and show runners has also been no guarantee of success. Most people only have one hit in them; some have two. But if you go back to the same well too often you’re not going to have much success. You have to be conscious of not veering too much toward someone you have already had success with.

WS: Some people say Seinfeld would never have happened without a pilot. Do you think that is correct?

ZUCKER: I don’t know if Seinfeld would have happened without a pilot. Listen, we did a pilot of The Office and it struggled very mightily in its first year and a half. And we stuck with it because we believed in it and now it’s doing incredibly well. So whether you make a pilot or not, you have to believe in the show. 30 Rock has struggled and we stuck with it. So making a pilot or not making a pilot is not what it’s really about. It’s about believing in the show, and the people behind the show and the concept.

WS: You’ve talked about year-round development and year-round premiering of shows.

ZUCKER: With all of these things there are no hard-and-fast rules. There are no absolutes. But I think that if we don’t change the way we develop our programs and stop rolling them out all at the same time, we are continuing on a downward spiral. So with regards to rolling our programs out year-round, it makes complete sense to do that.

WS: Younger viewers don’t watch the evening newscasts the way older viewers do. What is the role of news on a broadcast network?

ZUCKER: First of all, news is incredibly important and it remains a critical part of any broadcast network. It’s a signature part of this company, especially given the strength of network news at NBC—the Today show, NBC Nightly News, Meet the Press, are all institutions and all are programs that are dominant number ones in their time periods. Having said that, there is no question that younger viewers are not flocking to any of these programs in the way that they used to. So we have to continue to evolve those programs while they remain strong, vibrant, important and on top. The challenge for our news division today is to grow and evolve those programs in this different era.

WS: How do you evolve them?

ZUCKER: I think you evolve news by putting NBC Nightly News online. By having todayshow.com become such a central part of that show. You evolve it by adding a third and fourth hour of the Today show. And [NBC Nightly News anchor and managing editor] Brian Williams’s blog is another example. It’s not just about the television show anymore.

WS: How will the Internet impact coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and the fact that there’s going to be a 12-hour time difference? How does streaming video on the Internet, which brings in young viewers, work with the televised coverage?

ZUCKER: There are two things to keep in mind. These Olympics in large part will be covered live in prime time in the U.S. And secondly, the Internet provides us a great opportunity as a brand-new vehicle of distribution. We are going to have more than 3,600 hours of live coverage, including programming available on broadband, along with thousands of hours more of digital on-demand video, which has never been available before. So all of these forms of distribution are only going to enhance our coverage.

WS: USA Network made more in profits last year than NBC. What has driven USA’s success?

ZUCKER: USA Network is one of the crown jewels of the company. It has terrific leadership under Bonnie Hammer, who brought a real vision of programming and marketing to the network. She re-branded the network. “Characters Welcome” is its motto.

She’s brought wrestling back to USA. She’s brought new programming—programs like Psych, Burn Notice and The Starter Wife. They have a real sense of who they are and of what their vision is. There’s no question that the cable model of a dual revenue stream, of advertising and affiliate subscriptions, makes it a very good business proposition. And its importance within the company is manifest every day with the promotion we provide for it and in the publicity we get for it. USA is not just the number-one-rated cable network. We really see it as the fifth broadcast network alongside NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX.

WS: Is there something broadcast can learn from cable?

ZUCKER: I do think so. Because [many cable networks] have such strong focus of who they are and what their brand is, they have been much more targeted in their development in the sense of who they are and what they want. They haven’t relied on big-name directors and big-name stars very much. And they’ve brought a great discipline to the development process that broadcast networks could learn from.

WS: What about Bravo and Oxygen?

ZUCKER: Bravo and Oxygen are two incredible networks. Bravo came into the family about six years ago now. Oxygen came in [last year]. Both are targeted primarily at women. Bravo is a little older. Oxygen is a little younger. And Bravo has been a phenomenal success
story for us and we hope to do the same thing for Oxygen.

WS: What are your plans for international expansion?

ZUCKER: We are very committed to international expansion. Media is growing faster outside the U.S. than it is growing inside the U.S., so if you want to grow you have to grow outside of this country. Currently 20 percent of our revenue comes from outside the U.S., and by 2010 we’d like that to be 30 percent. We hope to do that in several ways. One is to continue to distribute our programming outside the U.S.; it’s something we’ve had great success with both on the film and TV side. We want to grow our international global network footprint, which is why we bought Sparrowhawk Media last year. At the beginning of 2007 we had about 14 international cable networks. By 2009 we will have close to 100 and we just invested in the NDTV suite of networks in India. We also intend to increase our international production both on the television and film side in local language so that it’s not just about exporting American content but it’s about making content in local languages around the world. We recently signed a deal on the TV side for Law & Order: London. And on the film side we’ve begun to really staff up and have made a number of deals with international filmmakers that we think will pay off in the next few years.

WS: You hired Ben Silverman, who has acquired a great deal of experience with international formats. How important is international programming?

ZUCKER: It’s critically important. When we develop programs we have to think about whether or not they will work not only in the U.S. but also around the world. And the international revenue from our programming is a really important part of what we do now, and Ben brings a real international sense to everything he does and that was one of the reasons I was attracted to [hiring] him.

WS: Telemundo has been doing very well, and its president, Don Browne, says he doesn’t mind being number two behind market leader Univision.

ZUCKER: Exactly, if there are only two in the marketplace, it’s a pretty good place to be. And the fact is, Telemundo is actually enjoying a nice run right now. In January they had their highest [prime-time] ratings in 23 months. It was a very good month and a very good start for 2008. The story of Telemundo is greater than just prime-time success. The Telemundo name around the world is incredibly strong and the export of our novelas is incredibly strong. And we expanded into Mexico, where we have opened a television studio. We are very active in Colombia as well. Digitally we have a deal with Yahoo! for Yahoo! Telemundo. And we’re making real progress on the digital side, too. We are the number two producer of [Spanish-language] original content in the world. Telemundo obviously is number two to a big goliath, but it is making real progress.

WS: How involved are you in the greenlighting of programming?

ZUCKER: I’m not that involved. I really leave that to each of the individual networks. I am aware of what they are doing. They keep me posted, but ultimately it’s the decision of each of the programmers of each of the networks.

WS: Was it hard to pull back?

ZUCKER: Sure. I’ve always been a hands-on producer my whole life, dating back to my days in sports and news and in the entertainment position. At some point you have to let them fly.

WS: What are your priorities for the film studio?

ZUCKER: For our film studio, which had an incredibly strong 2007, the key is running a good business. We are not about chasing market share. We don’t need to be the market leader, that’s never what we wanted to be. We want to run a smart business. That’s why we are not going to make extravagant out-of-control-budget pictures. We are going to make movies that make sense financially as well as creatively. That has been the hallmark of Ron Meyer’s leadership, and that paid off last year, and that is what we will continue to do going forward.

WS: Is your rivalry with Leslie Moonves still alive?

ZUCKER: We have an incredibly strong competitor, and I have an enormous amount of respect for Leslie.