The Hot Button by David Poland

The Hot Button by David Poland

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The Hot Button by David Poland
The Hot Button by David Poland
How To Fix Viacom
MCN Archives

How To Fix Viacom

David Poland
Mar 05, 2021
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The Hot Button by David Poland
The Hot Button by David Poland
How To Fix Viacom
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"Be aggressive. Be Be Aggressive."

It's really that simple. And that complicated.

Viacom has been stuck in Neutral for sixteen years. There has been a lot of great work by a lot of great people during those sixteen years. Please don't misunderstand. Lots and lots of sensational trees have grown in that Viacom forest in these last sixteen years. But the overriding and destructive philosophy that has reigned has been wheel-spinning of epic proportions.

CBS operated under a different energy than Viacom in this same period. It was split from Viacom (Paramount, Nickelodeon, MTV) in 2005. Les Moonves played CBS (which got Showtime and other TV ventures, including a very successful TV production business) aggressively throughout his tenure, which ended in testosterone. So there were serious problems there, too. But aggression was not one of them.

The first major deal in the Brad Grey Era, which started in 2005, was to do a "merger" with the financially problematic DreamWorks SKG that leaned heav…

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