Future Plans for NBC's New Duo

This morning, the dust is clearing from the recent overhaul at NBC Universal, which hired 36-year-old production talent Ben Silverman as co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and NBC Universal Television Studio. He'll share the newly created top job with Marc Graboff, 51, a lawyer and NBC's top exec on the West Coast.

NBC/Uni's chief executive Jeff Zucker said he modeled the team, with Silverman mostly handling the creative side and Graboff taking care of the business/administration, after the old Warner Bros. team of Bob Daly and Terry Semel and the NBC Universal duo of Marc Shmuger and David Linde, who run Uni Pictures together.

The overall plan for the Silverman-Graboff team, Zucker said in the NY Times, is to "redefine out programming, our relationship with advertisers and our ongoing commitment to the digital frontier." For NBC, there's a of pressure for this team to succeed. Back the days of Friends and Seinfeld, the Peacock was a formidable force. But it has finished fourth in prime-time ratings in the past three season, and during that time, its prime-time ad sales fell about $1 billion.

As the LA Times suggests, restructuring top management weeks after the upfronts has many questioning the network's faith in its fall schedule, which many industry observers criticized for being too conservative. "This is definitely going to change how people think about NBC," Laura Caraccioli-Davis, executive vice president at the ad agency Starcom, told the LAT. "Is this a lame duck schedule or what?" But one exec quoted in the Hollywood Reporter didn't believe the executive shuffle would have much short-term effect on ad dollars. "I don't think any of this will have any impact on the upfront at all," one executive said. "Are dollars going to be re-allocated because of this? Probably not, unless the schedule changes."

However, others on Madison Avenue are applauding Silverman's appointment, the Wall Street Journal reports today. Silverman, a former William Morris talent agent whose company Reveille is behind such hits as NBC's The Office and ABC's Ugly Betty, has been a proponent of product integration in TV shows. This ad strategy has become increasingly important in the age of DVR, which allows viewers to skip over commercials. In fact, most media buyers are now demanding the so-called product placement deals be tied up in adverstising.

The good news for both NBC and advertisers is that Silverman had been an advocate for embedding products in story lines (for example, Chili's restaurants and Apple's iPods have both been featured on The Office). But he is primarily known for building brands into reality shows, as he did with his 2003 series The Restaurant, which ran on NBC. The WSJ calls that show "a watershed in the ad industry because it included overt integration of everything from American Express cards to Mitsubisho cars to Coors beer."

Per NBC's digital intiatives, Silverman has also shown his ability to embrace online programming, creating stand-alone Webisodes for The Office.