CBS is switching gears in digital, opting for someone with more of a rep for making deals than building companies. In: Quincy Smith as president of CBS Interactive. Out: Larry Kramer, the founder of CBS Marketwatch who joined CBS in 2005 to help create the digital foundation of a company that didn’t have one. Smith, 35, brings a reputation for the kind of aggressive behavior prized by CBS CEO Les Moonves. Most recently, Smith has been an investment banker at Allen & Co, where he worked on the Viacom-Neopets, Advertising.com-AOL and various Google deals; before that, he was at Netscape for five years and started a VC firm with James Barksdale. At CBS, Smith’s portfolio is company wide with the responsibility for bring together all elements of digital strategy—radio, outdoors, books, TV. Kramer focused primarily on TV, cable and CBS Sportsline.
Smith tells Reuters in an interview: “The important thing is that we get confidence internally on a set interactive strategy that will immediately change and be organic as we grow. From there we can think about how we can execute on this as a team.” On the making deals side, it sounds like he’s in sync with Moonves, who has said the company won’t be making major digital acquisitions. Smith says he wants to hear from all entrepreneurs as he searches for the next YouTube: “I’m looking for the next YouTube, only a year earlier, when they were 1/32nd of their size, without building out stuff that we would find duplicative like sales force. The core engineering team is always important. ... I want to make sure that this is an appeal to every entrepreneur of every company size. This is a notion that CBS is reaching out to Silicon Valley and a little bit of New York with the Allen & Co. pedigree. But keep in mind most of my clients are out there. We want to see them all. We want to see everyone in there. And we want to learn.”
HR: Smith already has been working with CBS Corp. during the past nine months in an advisory capacity at Allen & Co. on deals including the company’s shortform content deployment on YouTube implemented last month.
Smith made the same pitch during an interview with the LAT.
Update: To be clear, the corporate-wide job Smith has now is one that didn’t exist—the blend of digital-specific M&A authority with operating responsibility. In an interview late Sunday, Larry Kramer, who is staying on as an adviser, explained it like this: “I think the game changed in the last year. It’s nice to have digital assets we’re proud of but we really need to be a presence in the M&A world and he is instantly going to make us a presence in the M&A world.” He spoke highly of Smith, who has been working with the company. Kramer said he was asked to stay with the same responsibilities but opted for an advisory role instead. (He had planned a break after selling MarketWatch to Dow Jones but wound up going straight into CBS, first as a consultant and then as the top digital executive reporting to Moonves.) Kramer: “I can honestly say I’m really happy with what we built. It’s time to go into the next stage. We did merge all of the sites into a strong and profitable digital division but that’s just the first step.”