But Les Moonves intervened. “Look at all the new people we can introduce to 60 Minutes,” Moonves remembers saying. “And since we don’t syndicate 60 Minutes, we are not cannibalizing it. There is no downside for us.” That was the decision, and soon 150 million Yahoo visitors would view 60 Minutes clips each year on Yahoo, far more than the 10 million streamed on CBS.com. (Of course, one day 60 Minutes video streams might produce big bucks, but not yet; the experiment was cancelled in 2008, after producing only one million dollars, to be split annually with Yahoo!)
Moonves also announced another partnership, with YouTube, in the fall of 2006. CBS would allow the video service to air short-form clips, usually none longer than three minutes, from its entertainment, news, and sports divisions, with CBS and YouTube sharing any advertising revenues. CBS would also become the first network to agree to test a new YouTube technology that would identify its pirated content on YouTube. “We’re pleased to be the first network to strike a major content deal with what is clearly one of the fastest growing new media platforms out there,” Moonves declared in the joint press release. Redstone blessed the deal, said a CBS executive, because showing clips of CBS long-form shows was a promotional platform to enhance their value, while showing clips of short riffs from such Viacom programs as The Daily Show With Jon Stewart would rob them of value. In the not too distant future, CBS would follow Murdoch’s lead with a major digital acquisition, CNET.
CBS’s switch to playing offense coincided with the appointment in 2006 of Quincy Smith as president of CBS Interactive. “I think Quincy is one of the most advanced thinkers in this space,” said David Eun, who was a Time Warner executive before becoming Google’s vice president for strategic partnerships; he now works out of Google’s New York office as their principal negotiator with traditional media companies. Smith’s task, in part, he continued, “is to go back and educate his very smart colleagues that this will not kill their business,” because YouTube is not “a destination” that competes with CBS, but rather another platform. The challenge to media companies is to get “their content to where the audience is.” Eun credits Moonves: “What he’s decided is that he has to change. He needed someone and he empowered him.” Of the geekspeak that gushes from Smith’s mouth, Moonves said, “I understand half of what he’s saying, on a good day! But the important thing is, he understands everything.”
SMITH IS PROUD to be called a geek, though this was not what was expected of him when he entered the world. He was born in December 1970 on Manhattan ’s Upper East Side. His father, Jonathan Leslie Smith, became the youngest partner at Lehman Brothers; his mother, Elinor Doolit tle Johnston, was a Bennington College graduate and the editor of Art + Auction Magazine. A computer was Quincy ’s childhood pet.
He enjoyed a privileged childhood-Collegiate, Phillips Exeter, Yale philosophy major-that suggested a life on Wall Street, or the CIA. His ponytail did not. He cut it, though, for his first job as an analyst for Morgan Stanley’s Capital Markets group, in 1994. But computers and technology were what really inspired him. He moved the next year to the technology group in Menlo Park, under Frank Quattrone. He worked on the 1995 Netscape IPO, going on the road with cofounders Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark, and with CEO James Barksdale. In October 1995, he joined Netscape as their chief deal maker and Wall Street liaison. He helplessly watched as Microsoft bundled the free Internet Explorer browser in with its dominant operating system, weakening Netscape.
Andreessen’s company was profitable, but Netscape was sold to AOL for $4.2 billion in 1999, where the browser lives as the open-source Firefox. Smith left and joined the Barksdale Group to invest in Internet start-ups.
It took just part of his time, and Omid Kordestani, whom he had worked with at Netscape, tried to lure Smith to Google in 1999. He had several interviews, including one with Page and Brin, but was rejected. “I didn’t graduate with a Ph.D.! I didn’t even go to business school,” he said. “The coach”-Bill Campbell-“wanted me to join a couple” of the companies he was advising, but Smith stayed with the Barksdale Group until early 2003, when he joined Allen amp; Company. “The day I joined,” remembers Smith, “the coach stopped talking to me. He said, ‘I have no respect for investment bankers.’”
For the next three and a half years Smith labored on a number of big deals, including the Google IPO. He was introduced by Andreessen to his future wife, Kat Hantas, who coowned a small Hollywood production company with the woman who was then dating Andreessen. In the summer of 2006, Les Moonves called and Smith began to do advisory work for CBS. Moonves said he wanted to hire a new digital executive to move more au daciously into the digital space. Smith funneled people in to see Moonves. After each interview, he said, “I felt the harpoon.” Moonves wasn’t satisfied with the candidates. He entreated Smith to take the job. The clinching argument came, Smith said, when Moonves told him: “You know, I used to be an actor. One night I was going to a premiere and my agent called and said, ‘Good luck. We’re all in this together.’”
“No we’re not!” Moonves told the agent.
“That’s the line that got me,” said Smith. This was an opportunity to be an actor, not an adviser. “The day I joined CBS,” Smith said, “I got an e-mail from Bill Campbelclass="underline" ‘Welcome back to work. Now don’t fuck up the quarter!”’
In a sedate company partial to charcoal suits or blazers, Smith called people dude, wore his wavy black hair long and his sideburns down to the bottom of his earlobes, favored loud purple shirts and chinos and shiny Adidas JAM’s that were popular in the hip-hop world. He wanted to move fast, yet knew he had to help bring traditional CBS along gradually, Sumner Redstone included. When CBS budget executives questioned him about how much his proposed digital schemes would cost, he tried to instruct them that they should refer to these not as costs but as “investments.” He recognized the differences between his old friends in the Valley and his new friends at CBS. He said, “Every win in my external world is a loss inside.” He wanted to quarterback a digital offense, yet knew he also had to play defense for the network. “When you’re Google or Facebook you’re all offense,” he said. But he understood that traditional companies have legacies to protect. “In our world you have sixteen reasons not to move too fast.” He credits Moonves for pushing change. “They are letting me do a lot. Are there certain things I’d like to do more? Yes.” He won’t identify these, but he was acutely aware that he had to persuade, not just act.
When he acted he would do so based on a bedrock belief that “the Web is not simply a more efficient video distribution system. The bigger opportunity for the Web is as a new media.” He didn’t believe CBS would ever make “a material amount of our broadcasting dollars from rebroadcasting full episodes” of its programs online. He believed the Web would require CBS to devise fresh forms of programming, to create new and shorter ways of telling stories. He could proudly point to the fact that in its first month as a channel on YouTube, CBS clips got twenty-nine million views, making it the single most watched content on the site. It offered, he thought, great promotional value.
He described his job by recalling a conversation he had with a friend before accepting Moonves’s offer. He repeated the friend’s analysis as if it were his own: “‘Your problem is that traditional media is sitting in a castle. If you ask them to run outside in the middle of the rain of arrows and go down a river and cross a bog to go up a hill to get to what we don’t know is over there, we can’t assure them it is out of arrow range. No promises. Facing that option, traditional media is going to stay in the castle. And what’s going to happen to the castle? Those arrows are going to turn into catapults. You have to do something to escape.’” Smith adds his own coda, a kind of halftime talk to stir his new team: “You can be good in television and radio. But you’re a media guy. Don’t you want to be good online? It’s a new medium. And aren’t you better than those geeks in Mountain View? Right now they’re kicking your ass!”