Brighton, a town on England’s south coast, is a pleasant though unremarkable place. But for Kevin MacLellan it will always be special. It was there, during a ride on a double-decker bus more than two decades ago, that the American decided his career had to take him beyond the US.
The young MacLellan had never been out of his native New York, save for a family trip to Orlando. On a six-month study programme in England, he found himself looking at the town’s residents from the bus’s top deck. “I was just watching the people,” he says. “They had been living their lives there all this time and I’d never thought about them. It was my international epiphany.”
The result is a TV career that has led him, at the age of 42, to the role of president of Comcast International Media Group (GIMG) and Comcast Entertainment Productions. Based in Los Angeles, he is the man in charge of expanding the US media giant’s overseas TV business.
In Asia, CIMG’s key properties are E! Entertainment, Style Network and Golf Channel. The Style Network is the most recent launch, rolling out in Australia and New Zealand at the end of last year. The Golf Channel’s base is in Japan and Korea, and it is launching in Taiwan, with each market having a separate feed. Celebrity-focused E! has the broadest footprint of CIMG’s portfolio, with distribution in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea via a single feed, plus a separate feed for Australasia.
CIMG’s Asian revenues have been based on carriage fees from pay-TV operators. But that is starting to change. Last year it tied up with Sony to sell advertising on E! in the region. The goal is to sell the channel as a way for brands to reach an upscale female demographic, a positioning that MacLellan believes gives it a high CPM in the US.
MacLellan declares himself pleased with ad sales so far, citing Malaysia and Indonesia as the most exciting markets. Asian ad sales are still much smaller than carriage fees (compared with Australasia where the two are much closer), but MacLellan believes they will continue to grow in the coming years “as advertisers get used to the idea”. He also expects product placement, a big part of E!’s Latin American business, to become a feature in the region.
A fresh focus on Asia also means more content specific to the region. CIMG recently tied up with Singapore’s Media Development Authority to produce a version of E! News from the city-state. It is also planning to launch an Asian version of its content-rich website - the roll-out was originally scheduled for 2011 but may be brought forward to the end of this year after the site for Australasia proved a success.
Fittingly for someone who makes his living out of Hollywood, his life reads like a movie script. He is a working class boy made good, succeeding through a combination of luck, talent and determination. The youngest of eight siblings in an Irish Catholic family from blue-collar Brooklyn, his big break came at a student New Year’s Eve party, when he intervened in a fight and one of the brawlers broke his nose. The attacker turned out to work for MTV Networks, and in a fit of remorse agreed to put in a call on behalf of MacLellan when he finished his course in TV production. He duly did so, and MacLellan ended up at Nickelodeon in New York.
International postings followed - including a last-minute move to Prague that only came about when the man lined up for the role dropped out - then a return to the US at E!. His portfolio broadened when Comcast bought out the channel in 2006.
The key to E!’s success, he says, is the fact that it films its own content and so is sat on a huge library of footage. What’s more, that footage relates to Hollywood, a subject with near-universal appeal. For this reason, it has found a willing audience across the world. “I could launch a channel in four weeks in any market in the world,” he says.
The big exception is India, a market with its own entertainment universe. E! desperately wants to crack India - MacLellan identifies India and Korea as Asia’s two big pay-TV ad markets - but has yet to find a way.
“It’s a very different business model, and needs to be localised significantly,” he says.
Two models are possible. “The first is to have boots on the ground - go in, hire locals, set up from scratch. It’s a huge job and very risky. The other one is to find the right partner, but finding a partner who will take the risk with you is hard. We don’t want to be another Western company that comes in, spends a lot of money and takes a lot of risk. Local companies have got into the habit of expecting Western companies to spend a lot of money.”
Then there’s China, a market that usually sets dollar signs flashing in the eyes of US TV executives. Not so for MacLellan, who recalls the frustration of meeting after meeting with regulators and with Chinese media companies.
“The frustration is working out where I get my money back. We could do a lot with the programming, but I can’t find the model that gives me enough security to recommend it to the board. ‘Boots on the ground’ is the only way to make it work in China - you can’t leave it to partners. A lot of people have found that and lost a lot of money.”
It’s clear MacLellan has plenty of other fish to fry. And with the pulling power of Hollywood behind him, he is confident E! still has plenty of growth to come in the region. “In Asia more than any other territory I go to, the women I meet are crazy for E!,” he adds. “It doesn’t matter whether I’m in Seoul, Hong Kong or Singapore, the women I meet say they are devoted to it.”
2006 President, Comcast International Media Group
2001 Senior vice president, E! Networks International
1997 Vice president, International Networks, Sony Pictures Television International
1991 Programme scheduler, programme scheduling manager, director of programming; HBO and HBO International
1989 Production coordinator, Nickelodeon
This article was originally published in the 11 February 2010 issue of Media.
The young MacLellan had never been out of his native New York, save for a family trip to Orlando. On a six-month study programme in England, he found himself looking at the town’s residents from the bus’s top deck. “I was just watching the people,” he says. “They had been living their lives there all this time and I’d never thought about them. It was my international epiphany.”
The result is a TV career that has led him, at the age of 42, to the role of president of Comcast International Media Group (GIMG) and Comcast Entertainment Productions. Based in Los Angeles, he is the man in charge of expanding the US media giant’s overseas TV business.
In Asia, CIMG’s key properties are E! Entertainment, Style Network and Golf Channel. The Style Network is the most recent launch, rolling out in Australia and New Zealand at the end of last year. The Golf Channel’s base is in Japan and Korea, and it is launching in Taiwan, with each market having a separate feed. Celebrity-focused E! has the broadest footprint of CIMG’s portfolio, with distribution in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Korea via a single feed, plus a separate feed for Australasia.
CIMG’s Asian revenues have been based on carriage fees from pay-TV operators. But that is starting to change. Last year it tied up with Sony to sell advertising on E! in the region. The goal is to sell the channel as a way for brands to reach an upscale female demographic, a positioning that MacLellan believes gives it a high CPM in the US.
MacLellan declares himself pleased with ad sales so far, citing Malaysia and Indonesia as the most exciting markets. Asian ad sales are still much smaller than carriage fees (compared with Australasia where the two are much closer), but MacLellan believes they will continue to grow in the coming years “as advertisers get used to the idea”. He also expects product placement, a big part of E!’s Latin American business, to become a feature in the region.
A fresh focus on Asia also means more content specific to the region. CIMG recently tied up with Singapore’s Media Development Authority to produce a version of E! News from the city-state. It is also planning to launch an Asian version of its content-rich website - the roll-out was originally scheduled for 2011 but may be brought forward to the end of this year after the site for Australasia proved a success.
Fittingly for someone who makes his living out of Hollywood, his life reads like a movie script. He is a working class boy made good, succeeding through a combination of luck, talent and determination. The youngest of eight siblings in an Irish Catholic family from blue-collar Brooklyn, his big break came at a student New Year’s Eve party, when he intervened in a fight and one of the brawlers broke his nose. The attacker turned out to work for MTV Networks, and in a fit of remorse agreed to put in a call on behalf of MacLellan when he finished his course in TV production. He duly did so, and MacLellan ended up at Nickelodeon in New York.
International postings followed - including a last-minute move to Prague that only came about when the man lined up for the role dropped out - then a return to the US at E!. His portfolio broadened when Comcast bought out the channel in 2006.
The key to E!’s success, he says, is the fact that it films its own content and so is sat on a huge library of footage. What’s more, that footage relates to Hollywood, a subject with near-universal appeal. For this reason, it has found a willing audience across the world. “I could launch a channel in four weeks in any market in the world,” he says.
The big exception is India, a market with its own entertainment universe. E! desperately wants to crack India - MacLellan identifies India and Korea as Asia’s two big pay-TV ad markets - but has yet to find a way.
“It’s a very different business model, and needs to be localised significantly,” he says.
Two models are possible. “The first is to have boots on the ground - go in, hire locals, set up from scratch. It’s a huge job and very risky. The other one is to find the right partner, but finding a partner who will take the risk with you is hard. We don’t want to be another Western company that comes in, spends a lot of money and takes a lot of risk. Local companies have got into the habit of expecting Western companies to spend a lot of money.”
Then there’s China, a market that usually sets dollar signs flashing in the eyes of US TV executives. Not so for MacLellan, who recalls the frustration of meeting after meeting with regulators and with Chinese media companies.
“The frustration is working out where I get my money back. We could do a lot with the programming, but I can’t find the model that gives me enough security to recommend it to the board. ‘Boots on the ground’ is the only way to make it work in China - you can’t leave it to partners. A lot of people have found that and lost a lot of money.”
It’s clear MacLellan has plenty of other fish to fry. And with the pulling power of Hollywood behind him, he is confident E! still has plenty of growth to come in the region. “In Asia more than any other territory I go to, the women I meet are crazy for E!,” he adds. “It doesn’t matter whether I’m in Seoul, Hong Kong or Singapore, the women I meet say they are devoted to it.”
Kevin MacLellan CV
2010 President, Comcast International Media Group & Comcast Entertainment Productions2006 President, Comcast International Media Group
2001 Senior vice president, E! Networks International
1997 Vice president, International Networks, Sony Pictures Television International
1991 Programme scheduler, programme scheduling manager, director of programming; HBO and HBO International
1989 Production coordinator, Nickelodeon
This article was originally published in the 11 February 2010 issue of Media.
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