Television management software company SintecMedia, looking to evolve from a linear broadcast focus to the convergent media era, named Lorne Brown as CEO, effective immediately.
Brown, who had been president of SintecMedia, joined the company earlier this year when it acquired Operative Inc. He succeeds SintecMedia founder Amotz Yarden.
Yarden will remain a member of SintecMedia’s board of directors.
Brown wants to succeed by helping its clients take advantage of the opportunities presented by digital technology.
“We’re going to take the best of what Sintec did in the market around linear TV and bring in digital, bring in advanced TV, and really try to stay one step ahead of what these guys are trying to do with their businesses,” he says.
SintecMedia has already been selling its convergence story to some of the companies it works with, including NBCUniversal, Comcast and Charter Communications.
Brown sees the TV companies winning the battle with the digital giants who are moving into the video and advertising markets.
“It comes down [to] content and data and targeting capabilities and I think the TV companies are going to be able to tool up in the data arena and I think the digital giants, who are good at data and targeting, are going to have a much tougher time tooling up in the content area,” Brown said.
“A lot of people talk about what Facebook and Google are doing in TV and in content but no one really talks about what the TV companies are doing to innovate, all the reorgs taking place," he said.
But Brown warns that what could stop the TV companies is if the software companies that serve the TV business don’t step up as the business changes.
“The worst thing that can happen is that TV is successful expanding their audiences, going into precision targeting and mastering measurement beyond Nielsen, and cross-screen and M&A, and they fail because they can’t execute as easy as Facebook and Google,” he said. “They can’t deliver and guarantee their commitments because it goes across multiple screens, which historically have different work flow and processes that govern them.
SintecMedia was acquired in April 2016 by Francisco Partners for $400 million.
“We have something no one else has, which is this ability to organize really complex things. That’s what made Sintec successful, that’s what made Operative successful,” Brown said.
“We don’t compete with our customers, we just organize stuff that’s really hard to organize to give media companies the flexibility to sell things the way they want. And so if you think about how content is across screens with different creative experiences or precision targeting across screens with a single data segment,” he said.
Brown says a major cable company recently put out an RFP and Sintec took four weeks to put together what it thought was a good response. “We won the business because no one else was even able to respond to it,” he said.”
