Sales guru to Discovery
CBS ad exec Abruzzese defecting
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Abruzzese spent the past 11 years as head of sales for CBS, and one ad maven, Bob Flood, senior VP and director of national TV for Optimedia Intl., said it's the highest-visibility defection ever of a broadcast salesman to cable. A CBS spokesman said the network will name a replacement for Abruzzese shortly.
Billy Campbell, president of Discovery Networks U.S., said one of Abruzzese's goals will be to try to pull cable closer to parity with broadcast in advertiser dollars to reflect the fact that more TV viewers have gravitated to cable over the past two decades and fewer people are watching the broadcast networks.
Despite that trend, "the gap is actually getting worse" between broadcast and cable in advertising rates, Abruzzese said.
One strategy Abruzzese plans to employ, he said, is giving advertisers the opportunity to cross-platform their spots across a group of Discovery's networks in a one-stop-shopping transaction.
These were the kinds of deals he was engineering at CBS, most notably the $300 million cross-platform arrangement he drew up with Procter & Gamble to get its product ads on CBS, UPN, cable networks, radio stations, billboards and other platforms owned by CBS's parent company Viacom Inc.
Abruzzese's responsibilities will encompass Discovery Channel, TLC, Animal Planet and 11 other cable networks plus discovery.com, promotional and licensing deals and retail tie-ins.
Spending his first 10 years at NBC in sports sales, planning and business affairs, Abruzzese joined CBS in 1980. He rose through the ranks at CBS, finally taking over the top sales job in 1991.
