The org chart is the strategy
One merger closed this week and another is racing the clock.
“You have this thing in the US where you have to personify the companies. We’ve been talking about Zaslav. We’ve been talking about Ellison. I’m in European media, and I don’t know if I can name the CEO of Sky or RTL.”
This week’s quote is my own for once. As Evan Shapiro and I welcomed Roben Farzad from NPR’s podcast Full Disclosure on the podcast, I couldn’t help but notice how in Europe, the operator is the organisation while in the US, the operator is the brand on the CEO.
RTL closed its 12.3 million subscriber combination with Sky Deutschland and rolled out a Management Board built from both companies: Stephan Schmitter leads the combined business; Sky’s Elke Walthelm comes in as CHRO; Sky’s Michael Radelsberger takes Chief Consumer Officer; Julia Kloke arrives from Riverty as CFO. Don’t know any of these names? That’s the point.
Compare notes with the other side of the Atlantic: Warner Bros Discovery and Paramount are racing the clock, the FCC and the calendar, with David Zaslav and David Ellison cast as the lead actors.
RTL plus Sky Germany makes sense because the two businesses are genuinely complementary, one free, one pay, with limited audience overlap and a clear plan to integrate streaming, free-to-air and pay-TV under a single management team. Paramount plus Warner? Two studios with the assets to claim a top 3 spot and a real opportunity to build something that neither could build alone, if the org design follows the ambition.
Let’s mark calendars. By June 2027, RTL will have a full year of Sky Deutschland on its books, will the €250 million synergy promise within 3 years be on track? Will Stephan Schmitter’s combined team be past third place in the DACH market and into Netflix and Amazon territory?
By then, the Paramount and Warner combination, if it closes on the timeline Ellison wants, will have its own nine to twelve months of receipts to compare against a very different operating model, with the same underlying question. Did the org produce an incremental and stronger business or simply a combined entity?
That’s the comparison worth running, not the deal announcements, the synergy slides or the CEO interviews. The actual operating results, the jobs kept or cut and the subscriber growth are what we’ll come back to in a year’s time.
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That’s it for today but before you go: