Word: viacom
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...tinkered with the hallowed Yankee name). Or maybe the Angels faithful know that despite the garbled name, with Moreno they still have it good. In building Outdoor Systems, a small outfit based in Phoenix, Ariz., into the country's largest billboard-advertising company, which Infinity (now part of Viacom) swallowed for $8.3 billion in 1999, Moreno, 58, has been guided by a basic mantra: "When you take a risk, you're either thinking you're real smart or you're real dumb." Moreno is feeling pretty bright right now as he moves to expand the Angels brand throughout...
Sirius and its bigger satellite competitor XM are death stars to the broadcast-radio industry. Since 1996 companies such as Clear Channel and Infinity (part of Viacom) have taken advantage of deregulation to buy hundreds of stations with the idea of bringing scale--and higher ad prices--to the airwaves. For a while it worked, as industry revenues rose at a double-digit clip during the late '90s ad boom and stations racked up profits thanks to cost cutting. But for listeners, that consolidation brought homogeneity, as corporate playlists suffocated local jocks, and ever more ads were jammed into each...
...clearly has momentum, but broadcast, or terrestrial, radio still owns most of the market. Local radio may be clogged with ads and promos, banal chatter and the same 200 songs spun ad nauseam, but almost everyone tunes in at some point during the week, according to ratings firm Arbitron. Viacom recently wrote down the value of its Infinity radio business by $10.9 billion, but terrestrial radio still hauls in around $20 billion a year in revenues, mainly from local advertisers like car dealers and banks, rendering it an important marketing tool and generator of free cash flow. Sirius, in contrast...
...figure on Wall Street as a radio adman, the Infinity boss and a media consolidator focused on the bottom line. After selling Infinity to Westinghouse (which had swallowed CBS a year earlier) for $4.9 billion, he became head of CBS in 1999 and then sold the whole thing to Viacom for $40 billion. He found himself the No. 2 guy at Viacom, behind chief Sumner Redstone. The two clashed famously, in part over personalities and content--Redstone loving the superstar deal, Karmazin leery of it. According to a source close to Viacom, Karmazin referred to the creative folks...
...jury is out on whether or not it is good for anybody else." To the old guard at Sirius, Karmazin certainly seemed like a saboteur. "They thought my agenda was to hold back satellite radio," he says of talks he had with Sirius in 2003 about a link with Viacom. What changed his mind? Stern, for one thing, Sirius' deal with the NFL for another, and a lucrative contract to run a publicly traded company for an annual base pay of $1.25 million and 30 million stock options, worth at least $114 million, according to an estimate by Bloomberg...