Beth Comstock, President, Digital Media and Market Development, NBC Universal
Beth was named president of Digital Media and Market Development in December 2005. She's accountable for driving NBC Universal's digital strategy and leading the company's content and distribution efforts to capitalize on new and emerging digital platforms. Her responsibilities also include strategic marketing, research, communications, and advertising and promotion. She reports directly to Bob Wright, vice chairman of GE and chairman and CEO of NBC Universal.
Comstock had served since 2003 as corporate VP and chief marketing officer of General Electric. Comstock has been a GE company officer since 1998, at which time she was named GE's VP/Corporate Communications. Previously, Comstock served as senior vice president of Communications at NBC (1996-98), and as VP/NBC News Communications (1993-96).
Before that, she held a succession of communications and publicity positions at NBC, Turner Broadcasting and CBS Entertainment, beginning in 1986. She started her career for a television news service and in local cable programming in Virginia.
Tell us about your role at NBC Uni.
My role is to help the company define the future, to get our digital businesses up and running to go from the experimental to the money making. Part of what the digital media groups' responsibility is to help find new opportunities that digital brings in, to incubate businesses and to grow them. A good example of that is iVillage. We were attracted to iVillage for many reasons. Obviously it is an Internet survivor, but we also liked their profitability and really liked the strong base of community that they have built up over a decade. We see a multitude of opportunities with to connect our TV and film content with their users. Especially on the TV side, we want to create that connection point where maybe TV gets the conversation started and iVillage keeps the conversation going within its community. We also see the thriving iVillage communities as a launching pad for other new digital consumer offerings that we hope to introduce within the next year or so.
How will you integrate iVillage with your digital strategy?
We talk about our strategy revolving around three key things - content, context and community. Clearly we have great content, but we are also focused on context, and by that I mean understanding how you take that great content and put it in a form and in a method that consumers want to use it. So that gets into a lot of distribution platforms.
So you may say "I'm not going to watch a two-inch TV screen," but you're commuting home on your train at night and all of a sudden you love having that two-inch TV screen. The third leg the stool is community. iVillage, specifically, helps us get our skills in and get the capabilities around community. Today, it's not yet where it needs to be and that's where we plan to invest time, energy and technology into upgrading the tools that can make that community more robust.
You were the keynoter at the last TVB. Tell us about your speech and what you just touched on-The Three C's.
The fact is you have to have those Three C's, the content, the context and the community. It's not just taking television programming and repurposing it for the web or for wireless. It's a real pull from the consumer. It's understanding that sometimes it means creating new content exclusively for that platform or that application. For example, we have NBC Universal Digital Studios, which produces programming exclusively for wireless, exclusively for broadband applications. In some cases the programming has to be shorter. You have to understand how to match the content with the experience.
Another important tenet to this is building a strong sense of community. It's not like, "Hey let's just form a community just because we said so and just because we're NBC, we're going to have a natural community." That's not it. It's understanding how you engage people. How do you create more interactivity? How do you allow people to use your content and tools to create something different? That's what we mean by community. When you do those things, when you engage your users and you find new ways to bring/deliver your content to users, you'll be able to drive commerce. Increasingly, advertisers are looking for new ways to engage consumers around their brand. The other thing I talked about was the fact that, especially from a local station perspective, the arrival of digital technology should be great news to local TV stations because local is all about community. Community is local, it's what local television stands for and so that ability to deploy technology to make those local communities come alive is very exciting.
What about the content arrangement with Telemundo and Yahoo?
Yahoo is looking for quality content to make its destination richer. We're looking for more eyeballs and it was a perfect marriage from that perspective. We're combining together to create Yahoo Telemundo and taking some of the best content from Telemundo with the applications and the tools that Yahoo has to offer and combining them to come up with new content and new ways for a community to be rallied around what they can find there.
Who are your other partners in the digital space?
Well probably one of the more visible we've had has been Apple with iTunes, which has been a very good partnership. It's really helped us understand the whole consumer experience around downloading television programs. On the film side we work with Toshiba in HD/DVD, so understanding that technology has been critical. I would say in the wireless space we work with a host of partners-Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, T-Mobile, Amp'd, there is a whole host of them. Our partnership with Verizon is very strong. We're learning a lot from each other.
Do you agree that the networks should acquire as much digital media infrastructure as possible to keep future ad dollars in-house?
I think for us the game isn't just making acquisitions for the sake of acquisitions. You have to ask: what's your strategy? How does it make sense? iVillage for us was really a great way to extend our core-it's women focused, which is a big section of the viewing audience, and a space we know well. It's one that made great sense for us. I don't think you'll see us acquire pieces just to have digital assets unless they are part of our strategy or unless they can extend who we are. One of the things you're always confronted with in this space is you go through the make vs. buy analysis. Acquisitions give you scale quickly. With iVillage we
were able to very quickly get a user base of 16 million users. Which would have taken us a lot longer to grow on our own and to get that capability and ability to monetize it. The connection that iVillage has with their advertisers is incredible. It would have taken us much, much longer and frankly we might not have had all those skills. The acquisition got us scale, it got us impact very quickly and it made sense in that respect.
Tomorrow: What predictions does she have about traditional media and new media?
