"We will continue to invest in great and outstanding television"

Andreas Bartl, Executive Board member

Mr. Bartl, you have been Managing Director of German Free TV at Pro Sieben Sat 1 for four weeks now. Was it a big adjustment for you?

I still feel like Andreas Bartl – just with less time. In terms of content, it hasn’t been a huge change, since I’ve been responsible for German Free TV since May. Of course, the matters landing on my desk now are on a much larger scale. You do have to adjust to that. But I am a person who enjoys new challenges, and in the past, I’ve always done well in these situations. And naturally, I considered it a great honor to be named to the Executive Board.

The media and industry insiders welcomed your promotion with open arms. Do you feel a certain pressure to act as the company’s last great hope?

Oh, I just take that as a positive thing and hope that people haven’t overestimated me (laughs). Seriously, though, I don’t feel any overwhelming pressure. At Kabel Eins, I headed up a smaller broadcaster, then moved to a large broadcaster at Pro Sieben, and now I’m responsible for the entire German group of broadcasters. I consider the Executive Board position as the next logical step. I feel like I’ve been prepared very well for this role.

The conditions surrounding your new role, however, are less than ideal: the Group has a new CFO, is desperately looking for someone to succeed Peter Christmann, and the CEO is leaving at the end of the year. That sounds a lot like management-level chaos.

There is no management chaos. The Executive Board is functioning smoothly and has all of the strategic and operations-related issues under control. We’re in a transitional phase right now. That doesn’t have to be a bad thing. And about that vacant Executive Board position for marketing: assume that we’ll be announcing a successor to Peter Christmann before the summer is out.

Considering the weak economy, won’t you have to pursue a course of strident fiscal belt-tightening?

If that were the case, I wouldn’t have bought the rights for the Champions League and the UEFA Cup. That’s the largest soccer package purchase in company history. Guillaume de Posch and I both got 100upport from the shareholders for this deal. That kind of approval sends a clear message: we will continue to invest in great, outstanding television. You should assume that we will complete all of the projects that our stations develop. And it’s a given, not a contradiction, that we’re keeping an eye on costs in the process.

With your three new content managers, you’ve introduced a new level in the hierarchy between the Executive Board and the heads of each of the individual stations. How exactly are the responsibilities divided up?

I believe coordinating our individual stations is one of my most important responsibilities. We follow the idea of Best Practices so that we can profit even more from each other. In the past, we had very flat, horizontal structures; the content managers add a vertical level. Such matrix structures are very successful at modern companies like Google. We took a very close look at that and let ourselves be inspired by it.
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