Electronic Retailer - June 2011 - 43

media-buying firms that have targeted those sectors and done exceptionally well. You have no plans to buy television stations or other broadcasting properties? No, I want their air time, not their infrastructure. OK, if growing the TV business is part one of your strategy, what’s part two? Some ad agencies and direct marketers are saying, “We love what you do on TV. Can you provide the same scalable solution across platforms?” They’re talking about radio, online, mobile, print – all of it. So we’re starting to see some demand from the marketer side. And on the supply side, even content providers who have the ability to hire a sales force can’t achieve 100 percent sellthrough. With our model, they could. If we can capitalize on our 20 years of experience in doing this on TV, and aggregate everything with a national footprint, agnostic about platforms, we could become enormously successful. With the right analytics, we could put the same advertiser on TV, radio, the web and mobile devices, and place the ads in a way that optimizes revenue opportunities for everyone. But I can’t do it with the infrastructure I have today. I need it all fully integrated with analytics. So I’m looking to bring into the fold these cross-platform solutions. There are a number of firms out there with the right technology or platform, but they lack the access to marketers or some other piece of the puzzle that we could provide. Have you already identified the companies you want to acquire? I have a list of 40 firms that I have varying levels of interest in acquiring. About 15 of them are in our core television business and 25 are on the cross-platform side. We have asked [investment banking firm] RBC Capital Markets to reach out to their management teams and explain our interest. So your intention is that REVShare will grow … what, exponentially? It wouldn’t all necessarily be under the REVShare name. We have a holding company, Media Property Holdings, of which I am also CEO. Some firms we want to acquire have strong reputations and would keep operating under their own names. And while my first choice is to acquire, I’m also open to joint ventures or partnerships with some firms that don’t want to be acquired. What makes you think the whole cross-platform media world is ready for a pay-per-response model? As the media landscape becomes more fragmented, it keeps getting harder for marketers to decide where to put their media dollars. Remember [department store founder] John Wanamaker’s famous line? He said he knew that half the

money he spent on advertising was wasted; he just didn’t know which half. Well, now it’s more like maybe one-twentieth of your media dollars are actually producing results. With our model, we deal only with the stuff that works. We know where every dollar gets spent and what it produces. A lot of marketers and agencies look at mobile devices, and they look at all the online advertising options, like pre- and post-roll video, and they say, “I know I should throw some dollars there, but I’m not sure how.” I want to simplify that and make it turnkey, so if you’re a media buyer and you don’t really understand it all, here’s a way to pay only when it actually works. The key for us will be simplicity. Fine. But after you have conquered the entire cross-platform media market, what do you do for an encore? Well, this model can be replicated around the world. First we want to get both parts of the strategy fully executed in the United States – expand the core television business and establish the cross-platform business. Geographic expansion would come later. Each country has its own peculiarities. Coming from the world’s largest media organization, Time Warner, I want to be the guy who brings this to the forefront of the media community around the world.

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June 2011 | electronicRETAILER

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Electronic Retailer - June 2011

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