Fox Broadcasting president of sales Toby Byrne was promoted to president of advertising sales for Fox Networks Group. He will be responsible for both the broadcast network and its cable channels.
In the new setup, Byrne will report to president and chief operating officer Randy Freer and cable sales head Lou LaTorre will report to Byrne.
Fox has long kept it its broadcast and cable sales operations at arms length but Freer has established a pattern of consolidating operations
The timing is a bit askew because broadcast ad revenues have been failing while cable has been growing at Fox.
"Toby is an exceptional leader that has guided our successful effort to combine broadcast and national cable sales for Fox Sports, led the revenue launch of Fox Sports 1, and spearheaded our push for recognition of the C7 metric in the Upfront,” said Freer on a statement. “He is the right person to creatively lead the Fox sales team as they bring our terrific content to market, drive revenue, and create maximum benefit for our marketing partners across all platforms and devices.”
“The ad marketplace has changed dramatically in just the last few years,” said Byrne. “We no longer live in a linear, single-stream environment, and we need to structure our sales organization to thrive in the evolving media marketplace. By combining the best attributes of our broadcast, sports, cable and digital sales organizations, we will better serve our clients in developing impactful marketing solutions.”
