Columbia TriStar Television Distribution President Steve Mosko revamped CTTD's sales division last week, promoting Russ Krasnoff to the newly created president of programming position.
One order of business that needed to get settled was finding someone who could lead the studio's sales team, the position last held by Mosko. But since "it's a different business environment from when I had the job," Mosko explains, he has found three people to handle his old workload.
John Weiser, John Rohrs and Joe Kissick have all been promoted to executive vice president of sales. Mosko has assigned separate responsibilities to each.
Kissick, previously senior vice president of the department, will oversee daily operations of the studios' regional offices, facilitating program sales to individual broadcast stations. Weiser, last senior vice president, TV and feature film sales, will also focus on broadcast syndication, but specialize in maintaining CTTD's relationships with station groups. He will also manage CTTD's content library and steer movie sales to networks.
Rohrs, formerly senior vice president, Northeast, will supervise CTTD's first-run and off-net programming sales to cable networks.
"We're looking at the business and there has been a lot of consolidation on the station side.so we need to have someone who can focus on the station groups," explains Mosko of Weiser's duties. Regarding Kissick, he says, "We're also ramping up relations with individual stations."
Since CTTD is sans
a station-group partner, which can simplify distribution efforts, "we have to work harder and smarter as a company," meaning finessing group executives as well as separately paying attention to general managers to succeed as a "station-friendly distribution group." Having Rohrs keep watch over cable sales is crucial, says Mosko, especially after CTTD's recent rack-up of more than $500,000 per repeat episode of V.I.P.
from TNN.
Besides selling repeat runs of shows to cable, Mosko is also pressing to produce more original programming for cable. That's where the promotion of Krasnoff, last CTTD's executive vice president of programming and production, comes in.
"Russ spearheaded our entry into production for the cable networks," says Mosko, of TBS' Ripley's Believe It Or Not
and Lifetime's Strong Medicine. "And that has quickly become a vital marketplace for us."
