Sarangel
<font color=red><font color=navy>Rumor has it ...<
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2000
Here's the link to a Business Week Article about Disney's attempts to turn ABC around this fall. Iger seems to be the one being eyed by the board to take the fall if ABC doesn't get its ratings up. Here are a couple of interesting quotes:
Sarangel
Disney's board of directors has called Chairman Michael Eisner on the carpet and told him they expect ABC to shape up -- and soon.
Even before the board gave Eisner its directive, he and Iger were hard at work trying to right their listing ship, reading scripts and taking meetings with just about anyone who might have had a promising premise for a show.
Looking ahead, the Disney high command is eager to give its shows every chance to turn around the network. Eisner and Iger, say Braun, have ordered the rest of the Disney Empire -- its theme parks, ESPN, and Disney Stores -- to pitch in. Each will help promote ABC's prime-time line up this year, he says.
Little wonder Iger and Eisner are calling in the heavy artillery. ABC last year represented 23% of Disney's $25.3 in revenues. And with advertisers fleeing, the network lost $87 million in the last six months, down from operating earnings of $454 million for a comparable period last year. That made ABC one of the biggest drags on Disney's earnings for the six months ended Mar. 31, when overall earnings fell by 29%, to $692 million, on revenues of nearly $13 billion.
And it's not clear yet those advertisers are betting along with Iger and Eisner. In May, after watching pilots for the new shows, advertisers bellied up with $1.5 billion in ad sales for the so-called up-front market for shows that will air in September. That's an 8.3% decline from last year's emaciated ad sales, according to Advertising Age. And ABC was the only one of the six networks to see a decline from last year's already abysmal sales in the upfront season.
Dare we hope that the Board takes Eisner's head instead?The problem is that not many folks are left to fire, says one Disney insider. And with the board demanding changes, that might point the finger at someone like Iger, a former ABC president before the 1996 merger.
That would be a shame. He's known at Disney headquarters as -- with apologies to soul singer James Brown -- "the hardest-working man in show business." He routinely arrives at Disney at 6 a.m. and works past dinner, e-mailing from home after that. But Iger, much like Bob Pittman at AOL Time Warner, may end up taking the rap for the parent company's inability to make an acquisition work.
Sarangel