Kevin MacLellan

World Screen Weekly, January 24, 2088

President

Comcast International Media Group

On the heels of its MIPCOM 2007 launch, Comcast International Media Group (CIMG) is ramping up for continued growth in 2008. The division of U.S. cable giant Comcast Corporation is looking to build on the global success of the E! brand with a host of other assets, including The Style Network and The Golf Channel, and has put in place a new management team, reporting to Kevin MacLellan, the president of CIMG.

“We’ve grown so quickly,” says MacLellan, an E! Networks veteran who was upped to oversee all of Comcast’s international assets in January of last year. “I think we’ve doubled our staff in a year. We’re up over 150 people now and last year we were at 75. In order to manage the size of the staff, it really requires another level of senior management. I’ve chosen three standout, stellar employees that had a lot to do with the launch of E! International and its success and I’m asking them to do the same thing with all of our networks, our new media, our home video and DVD and our mobile.”

The new senior management team includes Duccio Donati as senior VP of CIMG, where he is charged with overseeing all sales and licensing for content from the CIMG brands, as well as all worldwide home video, new-media content and brand licensing. He will also manage the new international websites for E! Online. “That’s a huge undertaking,” MacLellan says. “Six websites in local languages with local columns and local information and local ad sales. Just the IT buildup to that has been massive.”

Cheryl McDermott, as senior VP of business operations, is now responsible for all joint ventures and business operations, in addition to E! Canada. Gracia Waverly is responsible for programming, on-air and marketing operations for E!’s seven international networks and for The Style Network, which she has launched into three territories: South Africa, the Middle East and Poland, with more deals expected soon.

Next up for CIMG will be expansion of The Golf Channel. “We’re hoping to roll it out at the end of this year, if not the first quarter of 2009,” MacLellan notes. “The response has been phenomenal. After MIPCOM, every operator has come back and said, ‘What can you do for me with The Golf Channel?’ Its [viewers have the] highest median income of all channels in the U.S. Golf fans are fanatical and it’s one of the very few sports that is global.”

As MacLellan’s team devises the strategies for The Golf Channel and The Style Network, he will refer back to lessons learned from building the E! channel brand since he joined the company in 2001. “When I came in, E! had always taken the licensed brand and programming approach. In the past, E! just let everybody do whatever they wanted to; the E! in Poland and the E! in the Philippines and E! in Latin America looked nothing alike, felt nothing alike. Today, brands are global. That’s not just a sound-bite, it’s actual fact, particularly when you’re dealing with a young brand, like E!, that’s appealing to 18- to 34-year-old females who are very Internet savvy and have a passion for the category and search it out on the Internet. People are traveling so much more. That same audience is traveling from the U.S. to the U.K. to Hong Kong to wherever they may be going. They shouldn’t turn on their TV in France and see a completely different E!”

In markets that limit foreign ownership of channels, or have strong local entertainment industries, however, a 100-percent owned-and-operated channel may not be feasible, MacLellan explains. “There are markets like Japan, India and Korea where the culture is so different from ours, where [the launch of E! would] require joint-venture partners. Even though there’s a glut of distribution possibilities in India, I don’t think it makes sense to launch a 24-hour E! network about Hollywood without having a local partner and [content about] Bollywood.”

E! also opted for a joint-venture partner for its Latin American expansion, working with HBO and Ole Communications in the region. “That’s a true 50-50 joint venture and we’re very happy with that.”

In Canada, meanwhile, a foreign ownership cap led CIMG to partner with CanWest, which has licensed the E! brand and content for the launch of the free-to-air network E! Canada. “When you find a partner like that, then you can say, I’m willing to trust you with my brand. Every day, we’re agreeing to [marketing and branding decisions] together.”

While MacLellan has been a driving force in the expansion of E! worldwide, he cites his greatest achievement at the company as being the creation of CIMG. “Comcast is a massive $60-billion company that was completely focused on the U.S. market and I’ve spent six years convincing them that there’s a lot of money to be had internationally and that their assets are extremely valuable outside the United States. The creation of Comcast International Media Group is just the first step towards Comcast taking out what I consider to be one of the most unrecognized asset libraries and making it available around the world.”