Mark Lazarus, chairman of NBCUniversal Media Group, sat for an interview at a Paley Media Council event in New York December 5. It was a friendly face conducting the interview, as Hoda Kotb, co-anchor of Today and co-host of Today with Hoda & Jenna, sat next to him.
Lazarus spoke about managing broadcast, cable and streaming platforms, and mentioned “one big content budget” for sports, news and entertainment. Some executives are tasked with finding the best content and others with deciding which platform it runs on.
“What’s the best content and where can it be successful in our portfolio?” he said. “It’s a combination of art and commerce.”
He called NBC “our flagship” and “the way we reach the most people.” The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade did huge numbers, Lazarus said, and Sunday Night Football is averaging 22 million viewers.
Broadcast numbers are not nearly what they used to be, but Lazarus made the case that they are still substantial. “We reach massive amounts of people, we have reach and scale,” he said during the event at the Paley Center for Media’s Paley Museum in New York. “That’s great for our distribution partners and that’s great for our advertising partners and it’s really important for our audience.”
NBCU has some 65-70 million pay TV subscribers and 30 million more on Peacock. “We have roughly 95-100 million homes paying us a subscription fee for the value we provide,” he said. “That’s a big number.”
The relationship between programmers and distributors, he said, is “complicated.”
Lazarus added, “It’s more complicated than it’s ever been because there is stress on all of us, stress on our systems.”
Sports rights fees, he said, are no longer defying gravity. “For 30 years everyone said, the sports [rights] bubble is gonna burst, it’s gonna burst. You’re starting to see rights fees growth moderate.”
Kotb, referring to Lazarus as “Laz,” asked to what degree awards shows still command a mass audience. Lazarus responded, “Over the last four or five years, as the awards shows became platforms for people to put out their own views on topics, some of the Middle America audience that clamored for that celebrity maybe got tired of the preachiness of it.”
He called the ratings slide unfortunate. “It was one of those great celebratory moments that people gathered around,” he added.
Kotb noted that the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris might be another TV event people gather around for. Lazarus agreed. “I think Paris has a real chance,” said Lazarus, citing the “outstanding” setting and some new approaches from the organizers, such as an opening ceremony that will see the athletes on boats, floating down the Seine, with hundreds of thousands of spectators on land, watching and cheering. “It should be an extraordinary scene,” he said.
Lazarus shared about ducking out of school as a teen to attend the 1980 Games in Lake Placid. “That’s really what put me in love with the Olympic Games,” he said.
Kotb asked about Taylor Swift turning up at NFL games, and Lazarus said the pop star was likely a ratings catalyst early on, but not so much these days. “I do believe the first one, she helped drive the ratings,” he said. “I think that’s good for the league. For the first couple weeks she was the most popular player in the league, and she did not have to play a down.”
Asked about role models, Lazarus mentioned his father, and shared about how he began at NBCUniversal on the day Comcast closed on its acquisition of it. “The mentality chairman/CEO Brian Roberts and former NBC CEO Steve Burke brought to the place was, ‘We want everybody to act like owners, not renters,” ” Lazarus said. “Respect the place, respect each other.”
On a personal note, Lazarus said he loves watching Bravo’s Below Deck and new NBC drama Found, which just got a second season order. “It’s a little creepy but it’s really good,” he said of the drama.
He also plugged Jon Cryer comedy Extended Family, which debuts December 23.
He referred to working in television as working in “the toy department of the world.”
Lazarus continued, “All my friends who don’t work in this business, what they talk about mostly is what we do in this business.”
