Turner Broadcasting Takes On Network TV

Turner Broadcasting CEO Phil Kent focuses on TV offerings in a push for ad rate parity with ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC

By Tom Lowry

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Kent is the first person to run Turner without its founder looming Christopher T. Martin

You may not have heard of Phil Kent. After all, the CEO of Turner Broadcasting is a whole lot quieter than Ted Turner, the so-called Mouth of the South who remained front and center long after selling his cable empire to Time Warner (TWX) in the 1990s. But Kent has emerged from Turner's shadow and is fast becoming one of Time Warner's most important executives. If the media giant spins off its long-troubled AOL division as expected, the collection of channels that Kent oversees—including TNT, TBS, TCM, and CNN—will contribute nearly half of Time Warner's earnings.

In the past six years, Kent has taken on the broadcast networks with a smorgasbord of programming matched by few other cable outfits. As more ad dollars flow from broadcast to cable networks, he is on a mission to get advertisers to pay as much for time on Turner as they do the Big Four broadcasters. It's a campaign Kent plans to press in the coming weeks as advertisers gather in New York for the annual ad-buying ritual known as the upfronts.

Kent, 54, is the first person to run Turner without the looming presence of its mercurial founder, who stepped away from Time Warner in 2006. As such, Turner is a much changed place. "Under Ted," says Time Warner CEO Jeffrey L. Bewkes, "the top management was always Ted." Whereas Turner reveled in making his own news, Kent is the antithesis of the media executive. Although he learned the business working for legendary Hollywood power broker Michael Ovitz at Creative Artists Agency in the late 1980s, he finds Tinseltown self-promotion repellent and abhors the cult of the CEO. "He's definitely not a rock star chief executive," says Steven R. Koonin, one of Kent's top lieutenants.

At two key junctures of his career, Kent took himself out of the fray—both times when he wasn't having fun anymore. After working for Ovitz for six years, he bailed and embarked on an around-the-world trip, ignoring the blandishments of headhunters, who tracked him to a rooftop café in Marrakesh. In the 1990s, Kent worked at Turner, but he quit in 2001 after the AOL-Time Warner merger. "Not until you leave a job do you appreciate that the sun really will rise and fall without you," he explains. "This does make you more fearless in making tough decisions. After all, if you've fired yourself, you're much less afraid of being fired."

pump up the brands

Bewkes was looking for someone to make tough decisions when he lured Kent back to run Turner in 2003. At the time, the cable network was in a lull, and Bewkes, who turned HBO into a pop culture sensation, wanted Kent to pump up Turner's brands and create buzz around its channels.

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