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Tom De Martini
Health website Drkoop.com, listed in Barron's magazine in June as one of 227 Internet companies likely to go belly up, is now in critical condition and on life-support.
The Austin, Texas, company, founded by former U.S. Surgeon General C. Everett Koop to provide health information to other on-line services, told the Securities and Exchange Commission July 17 that its second-quarter loss would be between $1.15 and $1.18 per share - well above Wall Street's already-glum expectations of 30 cents per share.
That announcement was immediately followed by the resignations of COO Dennis Upah and CFO Sue Georgen-Saad. The company has already released 24% of its workforce since May 1.
Koop has cashed out several million shares of the stock, which is now trading at 1 1/4 on NASDAQ. The Drkoop.com site went public in June 1999, raising over $88 million in cash and spending $53 million of that within six months.
Ironically, it is the second most popular health-related Web site behind WebMD.
Chris Kager recently joined Rainbow Advertising Sales after a long tenure at Columbia TriStar Television Advertising.
Why make the change from barter/syndication to cable?
One of my responsibilities at CTAS was selling the commercial units for DirecTV, so I had the chance to measure the cable landscape and the opportunities out there. I also became familiar with the tremendous assets at Rainbow and their growth potential.
Will it be much different selling cable than syndication?
In barter syndication, there is limited inventory. With Rainbow, I'll look at ways to broaden advertisers' relationships across programming, marketing, on-air and online platforms.
Does that include packaging across the various Rainbow channels?
To date, the networks have been sold largely on an individual basis. Part of my job is to see how we can present the bigger picture to advertisers and sponsors. Packaging will be part of the strategy to make our assets more valuable.
What's Bravo's advertising potential?
It is the number one upscale network in terms of programming and audience. For certain categories, being able to reach that audience is like a dream come true.
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