NBCU’s Digital VP Kanaujia Leaving For Entrepreneurial Life; Digital Strategy Going Ahead?
NBC Universal (NYSE: GE), which is in the midst of talks to combine with the content assets of Comcast (NSDQ: CMCSA), may need to do a serious rethink of its digital talent at the corp level. They haven’t replaced George Kliavkoff, the chief digital officer who left the company in October last year and joined Hearst. Recently, NBCU CTO Darren Feher left to join startup Conviva. The company didn’t replace Kliavkoff and Feher’s role, including digital consumer experience, has been split among others.we have a query in about Feher, although we do not believe there are plans to replace him. And now, Sab Kanaujia, the VP of Digital Product Strategy & Development at the company, is leaving, according to an internal e-mail he sent out to his team (posted after the jump). Kanaujia’s move is part of the decentralization of digital at NBCU; among the only corp digital senior execs left are Salil Mehta, who has digital as part of his corp dev/M&A responsibilities, though these days he is knee deep in the Comcast deal talks; then biz dev support on digital through JB Perette, president of Digital & Affiliate Distribution and Content Distribution Strategy
and tech for each business unit through John Eck, president, NBC TV Network and Media Works (where Feher reported). Others have digital responsibilities; for instance, Salil Dalvi for mobile and some other paid content initiatives. From January of next year, no corporate-wide digital initiatives are planned at NBCU, according to a couple of sources, as part of the cost cutting the company started last year.
Kanaujia, meanwhile, is moving onto entrepreneurial life, though it seems from the e-mail that he doesn’t have anything specific decided yet.
He joined NBCU in 2006, and worked on digital product strategy & dev across all NBCU digital businesses. He was part of the business incubation team Hulu responsible for putting the business structure around the JV. Prior to that he was at AOL (NYSE: TWX) heading AOL Video. He also recently launched TenSports.com in India, a JV site for live sports streaming, though remains to be seen what happens to the venture after he leaves.
Back to NBCU, now that the respective brands control their own digital destiny — with the exception being iVillage, which is part of Women @ NBCU and part of Lauren Zalaznick’s empire — some hard thinking needs to be done on how to manage the mid-sized digital properties that a Comcast-NBCU combine would have. Will Amy Banse and her team at Comcast Interactive take over everything digital at the combined company, if the deal goes through? It seem that they may need more firepower than that if they want to scale the biz beyond a guesstimated combined value of about $500 million or so.
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From: Kanaujia, Sab (NBC Universal)
Date: Tue, Oct 6, 2009
Subject: Moving on…
All,
As some of you know, I
Truth. The entire department led by Sab, Darren and George wasn't producing anything but failed projects. I suspect all three were pushed out.
Agree. You just listed three guys who did very little to help NBC. At least Darren worked hard and George was a strong spokesperson. Sab was absolutely useless until the day he was canned. This wasn't about de-emphasizing digital. It was about getting rid of loose end.
Also, Sab had absolutely ZERO to do with Hulu.
Sab lies when he says he is moving on..the truth of the matter is that he is being laid-off.
He brought absolutely nothing to the table, total waste of time. He has an ego bigger then himself, will not spare a thought when it comes to "name dropping".
You fellas are all on the money, Sab was riding the tails of other people from day 1.
However, Marshall working hard and working smart are two different things, Darren never had an original idea and always took credit for other people's ideas. He was a fraud like the rest of that crew. Their bullshit can only float for so long before the world catches up with them.
Well, I agree that NBCU's digital strategy is in question. You listed 3 folks who, if given the mandate they were supposed to have, could have made a big difference. Sab had the most digital experience of the three, but George and Darren also tried very hard. In fact, due to internal politics and credit-grabbing by those who didn't deserve it, digital experts are gone and those who don't have a clue are in charge. I'll be shocked to see any major new digital initiative coming out of this company any time soon.
Agree with the last post. Sab never got the right mandate, or resources. Instead of engineers with digital experience, he was forced to work with IT folks who had been rotated into NBCU from other GE businesses – another failed policy of the company. Seems some of the same pissed off IT folks are venting out here.
George was a great guy, he had great ideas and was very innovative. Darren and Sab were hacks a pair of used car salesmen.
Darren couldn't get rid of his GE shared services mentality and his hiring skills were horrible. He was known for putting square pegs in round holes.
His SNAS social Networking BS experiment was a total joke which he touted as a major achievement, the engineers he had on that project could barely architect and write a stand alone web page.
Feher embraced the idiots and ultimately he paid the price for it.
Good for Sab that he's out of that place. He was a misfit from the start in that "old style" traditional media world. Remember when they forced him to bring down his blog post about NBC's social networking strategy – Techcrunch archived the post anyway (www.techcrunch.com/2007/01/14/what-does-a-deleted-blog-post-tell-us-about-nbcs-social-networking-strategy/). Big media just doesn't get it.
Jack, you sound like a disgruntled IT engineer from GE who somehow moved to NBC but couldn't get any interesting digital project. I know there are many like you out there.