-: So my name is Jim Gallagher, and my job title was
Vice President and General Manager of Comcast Spotlight
here in the Philadelphia market.
My job at Comcast was to build a premier television
sales and marketing organization here in Philadelphia.
The goal was, honestly, to rival any broadcast television
station in the market, to make it easier for advertisers
and their agencies to access us like a television station,
that just happened to have 32 television networks
instead of one..
My job really was to hire the very best people in the
business in sales, marketing, research, and traffic,
and put together a sales organization that would be able
to grow share in the market year after year,
and eventually build a place in the market that was
a premier position in the market,
make us as strong as any television station in Philadelphia.
If you think about revenue in the market like it's a pie,
our job was to, each year, get the biggest slice of the pie
that we could.
So imagine, when I got there, we were getting a very small
sliver of the pie.
So our goal was to have the biggest piece of the pie
by the end.
So market share was about revenue share of the market.
Advertisers every year spend a certain number of dollars
in television in Philadelphia,
and our job was to make sure that we got the maximum
amount of that.
There wasn't a year in the 14 years I managed
the Philadelphia market that we didn't grow market share.
I like to tell the store that when I got there,
it felt like, especially at holiday time,
when we'd thank our clients at the Ritz Carlton
over in New York at a restaurant,
that we had been the kiddie table in the market,
like at Thanksgiving, you're asked to sit
at the other table, and what had happened over the 14 years
that we were there, we not only gotten off the kiddie table
to the main table, we watched us all year after year
grow up the table to a place where we were finally
at the head of the table, and had finally taken
the top market share with our regional, national, and
local sales, so it was really very gratifying.
It was really about assembling the best people in the market
to accomplish that.
It was great, we had great success.