NBC Entertainment Co-chairman Ben Silverman said his contemporaries in Hollywood understand intuitively the symbiotic relationship between advertisers and programmers.
“There’s a new generation of creative forces inside Hollywood who I’ve grown up with and helped accelerate the careers of many of them, and they all have been marketed to everywhere they live,” Mr. Silverman said at the TelevisionWeek-Advertising Age Upfront Summit last week in New York. “They understand what’s enabling them to get the $50 million that NBC invests in their first 13 episodes is the fact that advertisers are working with us and that we have a comfort level that the advertisers we are partnering with are behind what we’re doing as well.”

Television creative executives and brand marketers share both interests and tactics when trying to reach a target audience, he said. For exclusive video of Mr. Silverman’s comments as well as his other comments on the TV industry, visit TVWeek.com’s Upfront Navigator destination.
Networks are the crucible where the two groups pursue their parallel goals. That means putting creative executives and advertisers together without letting their functions blur, he said.
“You don’t want to go so far as to kind of basically convert the whole West Coast creative force into an ad agency,” Mr. Silverman said. “And you don’t want to go so far within the ad agency to have every copy writer pitching TV shows. But you do kind of need to find a way to meet in the middle.”