Celebrating the Arts - Dwight-Englewood School

ALUMNIPROFILE
Dwight-Englewood School
4
Bob Bakish ’81: Entertaining a Global World
He’s the head of Viacom International Media Networks, and the evolving global media environment
is his business.
Bob Bakish ’81 began working
as an executive for the media
giant Viacom in 1997.
Coincidentally, that was the very
same year that DVDs became
available in the U.S. for the first time.
Over the next decade, DVDs would
rise in popularity and become an
important revenue stream for
studios and media corporations. Fast
forward to today: DVD sales have
significantly declined as consumers
increasingly choose less expensive
and more immediate digital and
streaming media. What will the next
big thing be? You can bet that Bakish,
who has steadily worked his way up
Viacom’s corporate ladder, is already
thinking about it. Earlier this year he
was appointed president and CEO of
Viacom International Media
Networks (VIMN). Keeping ahead of
trends in technology and evolving
consumer attitudes is just one of the
challenges he contends with in a
global, fast-paced industry.
Bakish, who will be Dwight-Englewood’s
Commencement speaker and a 2011
recipient of the Distinguished Alumni
Award, is a graduate who is truly engaged
with the increasingly inter-connected
“changing world” of the School’s mission
statement. His company owns many of
the world’s most popular premier
multimedia entertainment brands—
including MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy
Central, and BET—which are seen globally
in more than 600 million households in
160 countries and 34 languages. Bakish
is also chairman of the board of
Viacom18, the company’s joint venture in
India, and serves on the boards of the
company’s joint ventures with BSkyB, the
largest subscription-based television
broadcaster in the United Kingdom, and
Telecom Italia Media.
The Complexity of a
Global Business
Bakish grapples with a mind-boggling level
of detail on the one hand, and a lot of
strategic, big-picture thinking, and project
management on the other. “Because it’s
truly a global job, there’s an incredible
amount of complexity,” says Bakish. With
so many diverse markets, there are loads
of differences to address, from distribution
to regulation, local programming, and of
course cultural preferences. Says Bakish,
“The sheer breadth and scale of it is
fundamentally challenging.” At the
broader level, the challenge is getting a
global workforce to embrace common
strategies and work together on specific
opportunities, and also to develop
programming that can cross international
and cultural boundaries. Recently Bakish
worked on adapting and introducing the
telenovela TV format, which is typically
associated with Hispanic language
channels, to Nickelodeon and MTV. One
success story is Nickelodeon’s highly
rated House of Anubis teen mysterydrama
soap series. Based on a series from
Nickelodeon Holland, the new show
premiered this January in the United
States, and in February in the United
Kingdom. (There is a German version
as well.)
Not surprisingly, Bakish travels for business
a great deal—in fact, a little more than half
the year. His office is in New York City, but
in a single month he might spend a week
in Los Angeles, a week in Madrid, and a
week in Mumbai. In the world of
international business, notes Bakish,
“There’s no substitute for going places.”
And, when the business is
entertainment, there can be some
interesting perks—such as developing,
promoting, and attending special events
with rock stars and other celebrities. A
particularly memorable one for Bakish
was MTV’s 2009 Europe Music Awards in
Berlin. Bakish was there when, as part of
the show, the Irish rock band U2 gave a
free concert at the Brandenburg Gate to
commemorate the 20th anniversary of
the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bakish says
the visually stunning, historically
meaningful, and electrifying performance
was amazing and unforgettable.