Only Ben Silverman could parlay a two-year hitless streak as NBC’s chief programmer into a new gig that gives him total control and $100 million in development money.
That’s the amount of cash that Barry Diller’s IAC plans to use to seed Silverman’s unnamed new venture, according to two sources with knowledge of the funding plans. And more money may be on the way as Silverman — one of the entertainment industry’s slickest talkers — tries to persuade Wall Street banks and private-equity firms, many of which offered to back Silverman before he teamed up with IAC, to invest in the new company.
Silverman’s former employer, NBC Universal, is already considering an investment in the new enterprise, and sources said Diller is likely to call on deep-pocketed friends like former Viacom CEO Tom Freston or former Yahoo! boss Terry Semel to invest as well.
Taken together, Silverman, whose pending departure was first mentioned in Page Six, could have as much as $200 million in funding when he officially leaves NBC in a few weeks. He’ll be replaced by Jeff Gaspin.
Silverman’s new company is a redux of Reveille, the studio he founded and sold to Elisabeth Murdoch’s Shine Group for $120 million, netting Diller, an early Reveille investor, a handsome profit in the process.
Silverman is known lately more for his brand relationships than creative prowess, and his new company aims to connect “advertisers, distributors and content creators early on in the development process, enabling advertisers to be a partner in campaigns and content creation.”
In an interview with The Post, Silverman pointed to the campaign he developed for Microsoft’s Bing search engine as an example of what the new company aims to achieve.
In that effort, the travel component of NBC’s “The Philanthropist” was matched with Bing Maps to discover where characters were, and then commercials directed viewers to search for information about the locales featured on the show using Bing. The integration also included “The Late Show with Jimmy Fallon” airing quiz segments that used Bing, plus actors from other NBC shows appeared in an online video promoting the search engine.
Silverman approached Diller about the new venture after his contract with NBC expired two months ago.
While there was speculation Silverman and NBC Universal boss Jeff Zucker didn’t like each other, sources said the corporate culture fostered by parent company General Electric, which Zucker embraced and Silverman chafed under, is what came between them.
“It’s hard to put a guy like Ben in a corporate box,” said a friend of Silverman who asked to remain anonymous. “It probably wasn’t the best move for Zucker to bring him in and it probably wasn’t the best move for Ben to take the job. In the end, they both probably shouldn’t have engaged with each other.”
Said Silverman, “I got an MBA inside NBC. I learned so much about management, human resources and financial oversight. But I like to move really quickly. I found it was harder to capitalize on a vision and agenda inside a corporation. It was hard trying to change the culture.”