• by Wayne Friedman , April 19, 2019

Former Discovery senior advertising executive Ben Price has been named executive vice president, sales and client partnerships, national offices for NBCUniversal.

In this new NBCU ad post, Price will oversee agency and client relationships in all national offices, as well as work closely with NBC's client partnership team. He will report to Mark Marshall, president, ad sales and partnerships at NBCU.

Marshall stated that the new role was created because of growing client service demands nationally and globally.

Most recently, Price was president of national advertising sales at Discovery Communications, where he oversaw all ad sales for Discovery’s U.S. networks and digital platforms. He originally joined the company in 1989.

Before that, he was executive vice president, national advertising sales, overseeing Discovery’s Los Angeles and three other regional offices. He began his advertising career at Turner Broadcasting in 1986.

In 2018, NBCU took in rising major advertising business from airing both the Super Bowl and the Winter Olympics. NBCUniversal pulled in $7 billion in total ad revenue from its broadcast businesses -- up 24% over 2017.

Leaving out the Super Bowl/Olympics, broadcast advertising grew 5% from the year before to $5.9 billion.

Cable TV network ad revenue saw a 7% growth in ad revenue to $3.6 billion in 2018. Excluding the Olympics, NBCU’s cable ad revenues grew 2.6% to $3.4 billion.