The Medium
When The C-Suite Are Not Digital Natives
Happy New Year!
A reminder I wrote three essays before the holidays:
- Revisiting PARQOR’s Predictions for 2022
- Insights from PARQOR's Four Trends for Q4 2022, and
- Key trends I’m considering for Q1 2023.
I also offered five predictions for 2023 in this month’s opinion essay for The Information “2023 Will Be Another Difficult Year for Traditional Media”.
Some housekeeping:
- I will publish PARQOR's three to four trends for Q1 2023 next Monday.
- I will be traveling the latter half of next week (January 9th), and plan on mailing on Monday and Wednesday.
- Friday mailings will be no longer be weekly in 2023. I will published them on an as needed basis to respond to any newsworthy stories.
Two follow-up thoughts “clicked” into place yesterday about one of my predictions for the media marketplace in 2023: “Investors will remain disappointed in corporate leadership. Disney’s Bob Iger and Warner Bros. Discovery’s David Zaslav will bear the brunt.”
The first thought “clicked” after Warner Bros. Discovery CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels spoke at Citi's 2023 Communications, Media & Entertainment Brokers Conference. Citigroup Managing Director Jason Bazinet spent part of the discussion highlighting the execution risk of Warner Bros. Discovery’s plans to merge HBO Max and discovery+ into a single app, and “rebuild the whole thing.” He described the initiative to Wiedenfels as “something that sounds easy to do, but actually seems pretty complicated when you think about it.” In doing so, he’s effectively asking, “are you sure this is a risk you want to take with shareholder dollars?”
Wiedenfels’ responded with an argument for a single app built upon the premise that“the experience [with HBO Max] is not where it needs to be”. Bazinet asked him to clarify this answer: “Sorry, when you say the experience is not where it needs to be, is that just in terms of the user interface, is it in terms of sort of software flexibility that the consumer has within the… ?”
Key Takeaway
As seismic shifts continue in media's business model paradigm, there is a growing question of whether the C-Suite needs to be digital natives.
Total words: 1,400
Total time reading: 6 minutes
Bazinet is asking about product development, and Wiedenfels answered, in part:
“I don't want to go too deeply into the sausage making, but it’s both sides. It's also I think the product team as well. Let's just say it's not – it's not manageable as efficiently as you would like a modern day ...