Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav brought out the big guns during his address to the new company at its first global town hall for employees Thursday.
The newly merged company brought out its most famous employee, Oprah Winfrey, to moderate the event and to help introduce Zaslav to Hollywood.
Winfrey is a longtime supporter of the media mogul, who has championed the Oprah Winfrey Network (OWN) — a cable channel jointly jointed by Warner Bros. Discovery and Harpo Studio — alongside her since its launch in 2011. The early days of OWN weren’t easy, but Zaslav helped Winfrey rally the troops and kick the Discovery brand into gear with its landmark Tyler Perry development deal in 2012.
Winfrey acknowledged that OWN’s rocky start was a blow ” coming after “25 years of succeeding,” which made “failing publicly” with OWN an “overwhelming” experience. Winfrey also noted that she had her own connection to the studio where she was (gently) grilling Zaslav. Her first film, “The Color Purple,” was made by Warner Bros. and the company is backing an upcoming musical version of the story, which Winfrey will produce.
Zaslav also evoked Warner Bros.’ nearly a century-long legacy. He grasped Steve Ross’ original padfolio that was gifted to him, telling employees that he plans to keep it on his desk as a way to pay homage to the history of the studio. Ross, a former Time Warner CEO, was a pioneer and innovator in the cable and video business and masterminded a merger between Warner and Time Inc.
Zaslav took employees through the company’s more recent history, bringing them back to his initial overtures to AT&T in which he encouraged the telecom giant to spinoff WarnerMedia and merge it with Discovery. Zaslav said that he told Stankey the pair could revisit their talks in the next six months. To which, Stankey acknowledged that AT&T burdened with debt, required a quicker turnaround. “I don’t think we have six months,” Stankey said.
Zaslav chalked the successful marriage of the companies to “karma” and evoked Franklin Delano Roosevelt by noting that the company had a “rendezvous with destiny.”
The event was held out of the iconic Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, with employees across the globe — of which WarnerMedia and Discovery each have plenty — attending virtually. Staff in Los Angeles began making their way to the event nearly an hour before things officially started.
The studio’s newly minted owner kicked things off with a sizzle reel with a booming movie trailer-style voiceover declaring “it’s a new chapter.”
Winfrey pressed Zaslav for specifics about what that next chapter could look like. What, she asked, was the “vision” for this union?
“The consumer wants easy,” Zaslav said. “Now, when you pull all of these assets together? That’s where we go…one platform that we take everywhere in the world and in every language”
But bringing the companies together comes with risks. Discovery Warner Bros. has billions in debt and Zaslav has pledged to find some $3 billion in synergies. That means that there will be layoffs and that’s causing a lot of anxiety across the Warner Bros. empire, which also includes HBO, CNN and TNT. Winfrey acknowledged that people feel unsettled and asked Zaslav what people can expect to happen next?
“Be patient with us… we are going to focus on less layers and be more entrepreneurial,” Zaslav said. “In some areas there will be less people…”
Winfrey pressed Zaslav on how he planned to make decisions about those cuts.
“There’s a process and a team from both sides who has been working hard on these plans,” Zaslav said. “In the area where Warner and Discovery have largely different business (i.e. sports, movies) there will be less change.”
Staffers in the room interpreted Zaslav’s remarks to mean that much of the pink-slipping will happen at the cable networks where there is the most overlap between what Discovery does and what Turner and others have historically focused on.
Zaslav is taking the helm as the media business is being upended by new players such as Netflix and Disney who are laser-focused on streaming as well as tech giants such as Amazon and Apple who are investing heavily in the content space. Getting bigger is seen as essential.
“We need to lay out ‘what is winning?’” Zaslav said.
The new media mogul pointed to CNN as one of the recent winners, citing its on-the-ground. coverage of the war in Ukraine as something that left it ahead of the cable news pack.
On Monday, the first day Warner Bros. Discovery begins trading on the Nasdaq under the “WBD” ticker, Zaslav visited Hudson Yards for a series of informal meet and greets with WarnerMedia employees before heading to Washington, D.C. for a meeting with senior executives and CNN anchors at roughly 6 p.m. On Tuesday, Zaslav went to the company’s Atlanta headquarters.
More to come…