JON DIAMENT EXECUTIVE VP, CHIEF REVENUE OFFICER, TURNER SPORTS Sports TV insider adjusts to a life without live games For a guy who grew up a Knicks fan in Bergen County, New Jersey, it seemed like Jon Diament has one of the best jobs in TV, selling commercials for Turner Sports. Then the coronavirus shut down the National Basketball Association, cancelled the NCAA men’s basketball tournament and delayed the start of the Major League Baseball season, snuffing out what had been shaping up as a fairly lucrative year in terms of ad revenue for Turner. Diament and his Turner colleagues helped live sports make a comeback in May via a charity golf event featuring a rematch of Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, with quarterbacks Tom Brady and Peyton Manning joining the fun. But like other sports fans, Diament is looking for activities to keep himself physically and mentally fit. “I find an half hour in the middle of the day to do a spin class or weight lift, anything to break up the monotony of being on the phone or a Zoom meeting,” he said. B+C business editor Jon Lafayette talked with Diament just before the charity golf event about life without sports. An edited transcript follows.
How did this golf match come about?
What was your reaction to the NBA and the NCAA basketball tournament being canceled? From a financial perspective, we’re super-disappointed. We sell the NCAA Tournament with CBS, and we claimed our sellout position months before the tournament. That never happened before. With the NBA, we were pacing way ahead of where we needed to be, and then all of a sudden we got the rug pulled out. It sounds like a small thing with how bad the pandemic’s been, but it did hurt us.
What do you have to sell now? We have some things going on, but we miss not having the tournament and the NBA in the second quarter, that’s for sure. We’ve got NBA TV, NBA.com. We also have Bleacher Report in our portfolio. We’re doing podcasting Continued on page 18 ❱
This is a rematch. We did the first one in Las Vegas and we’ve been thinking about a new format to make it more interesting. When COVID hit, we decided we’d be one of the first, maybe only, live sporting events. Bringing other celebrities was always in the works, and playing for charity felt like the right thing. Hopefully it will be an entertaining few hours of relief of being able to watch live sports again, during the coronavirus crisis.
TV TECHNOLOGY
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