Turner South general manager David Rudolph has been tapped with heading Turner Broadcasting System Inc.’s newly created new-products-development group.
Tom Karsch, executive vice president and GM of Turner Classic Movies, will also assume Rudolph’s oversight of Turner South. The regional entertainment and sports service, which bowed in 1999, now reaches some 7.4 million homes in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina and South Carolina.
In his new role, effective Jan. 3, Rudolph will direct a team charged with working across Turner divisions to identify and analyze market concepts and develop internal ideas leading to products of scale outside of the company's traditional network businesses.
He will be based in Atlanta at Turner headquarters, reporting to executive VP of operations and strategy Jim McCaffrey,
“David's appointment to lead a dedicated new-products group signals the depth of our company's commitment to innovation, exploration and an evolving business focus for the Turner Broadcasting of the future,” McCaffrey said in a prepared statement.
“We see significant growth opportunity in leveraging our brands’ strength and marketplace position to create new businesses and products for consumers around the world,” he added. “David's track record as an innovator and leader, his understanding of and experience with the wealth of Turner-branded assets at our disposal and his relationships across Turner and Time Warner [Inc.] make him the ideal executive to guide our efforts in this important new arena.”
