Both Hearst and News Corp have recently hired new heads of digital. Jon Miller will be the new Chief Digital Officer at News Corp – formerly an AOL executive and more recently with Velocity Interactive Group. Miller will need to guide Hulu and Myspace through to profits and to a winning advertising business model. We wish him well.
George Kliavkoff, a former NBC Universal leader who helped launch Hulu and a guy Ive got a lot of time for (heard him speak on a couple of occasions and he is firmly planted in today but keeps his visionary glasses on and is not afraid to fail – as long he does it fast – I seem to remember him saying at one conference) joins Hearst to manage the company’s ownership in cable companies and to look for new investment and alliances presumably to bring the media giant into the new media world with a leading strategy for new businesses and applications to generate more revenues from current businesses and content.
Great to see traditional media looking to drive new media but having been part of one of Honeywell’s drive to ram marketing down the throat of an engineering oriented company, I continue to doubt that these appointments can be truly effective – its like saying we know the bus driver can no longer handle driving the bus so we have brought on this new guy who will try to drive the bus without access to the steering wheel…. hope Im wrong but if I was heading up these giants I would be doing it differently. We wish them both well and continue to be on stand-by should either feel our advice and experience may be of use.
