Yahoo chief marketing officer Kathy Savitt spoke to THR about Yahoo’s decision to save cancelled NBC sitcom Community:
Yahoo has always been a place where people come every day to consume all kinds of content. This year we made a really significant and serious commitment to taking our large audience and becoming the platform for creators to find the audience that they want and need. It could be voices on Tumblr, or other young voices, or it could be brands — really connecting them with a who new level of audience. Recently we announced our deals with Paul Feig to do an original sitcom, with Mike Tollin. We said, “This is just the beginning of some of these very select projects.” Today marks the next one we’re announcing:Community, which is an incredible show. It’s certainly the greatest example that I’ve seen in a long time of a story that has not only connected with an audience but deserves to have a huge platform to introduce new audience members to the power of the show.
On the pitch to win Sony over:
We’ve been fans both personally and professionally of the show Community and Dan Harmon, who is a genius, but also we are really impressed and inspired by the Community fan base. This is a fan base that has used digital channels to show their passion and advocacy for a program that’s really important to them on so many levels. We’ve been looking at it for a while. I don’t know who came in first, last, etcetera, in terms of timing, but I think for us it was really about being that connective tissue between creators and audiences. We started speaking with Sony and I had a wonderful series of conversations with Dan Harmon about our passion for the show. To us, it’s about the content. How could we enable not just the existing audience to find it, but to grow that audience so that the show is able to flourish and prosper not just in season six but well beyond?
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