• by Wayne Friedman , November 29, 2005

For media agencies, cable networks' one-stop shopping--having one sales executive call on a specific agency or client--seems an obvious advantage. But Discovery Networks now believes its maturing business means this tactic no longer works.

Discovery has announced that it is reorganizing its advertising sales team, giving executives a limited number of its 13 U.S. ad-supported networks to sell.

"Advertisers want more knowledge from our networks," says Joe Abruzzese, president of advertising sales for Discovery Networks U.S. "Our networks are now too deep. Our executives have been spread too thin."

To do this, Discovery promoted John Barry, Scott Felenstein, Lisa Fischer, and Harold Morgenstern from vice presidents to senior vice presidents of advertising sales--with each having a handful of networks to sell. Barry will head up TLC and Discovery Home Channel; Felenstein will head up the flagship Discovery Channel, The Science Channel, and Military Channel; Fischer will run Animal Planet, Discovery Health Channel, FitTV, and Discovery Kids; and Morgenstern will oversee Travel Channel, BBC AMERICA, Discovery Times Channel, and Discovery HD Theater.

These four executives will report to Evan Sternschein, senior vp of advertising sales and network strategies. Sternschein continues to report to Scott McGraw, executive vice president, advertising sales.

Many cable networks--such as ESPN--have sales executives who can sell any part of their media empire. Abruzzese says that works for sports and other more vertically designed content media groups. But Discovery now has many disparate viewers.

One-stop shopping also gives cable programmers the chance for bigger dollar ad packages--selling traditional networks, Internet, and other media extensions at the same time.

But increasingly, Abruzzese says, advertisers want more value--not more general ratings. "We are not trying to aggregate ratings points," he says. "In the past it was all about ratings as a commodity for advertisers. Now it's not about how cheap you can buy rating points."

With this restructuring, Discovery will be looking to make more advertising friends. Discovery's networks have had a rough time over the last year when it came to ratings' under-delivery for advertisers--with ratings down double-digit percentages on Discovery Channel and TLC.

Those networks are still seeing some rough ratings performances. But Abruzzese says the advertising inventory situation is now under control. "You don't want to over-promise," he said. "You'd like to be within 5 percent [of your target]."

Even with its make-good problem, Discovery has been active in the fourth-quarter scatter market--which, says Abruzzese, has been "good" for the company.