Taking on one of the biggest jobs in cable ad sales during one of the most anemic media markets in memory doesn't seem to daunt Mark Lazarus.

Lazarus, president of Turner Sports, was tapped last week by Turner Broadcasting System chairman Jamie Kellner for president of Turner Entertainment Group sales and marketing.

He replaces Joe Uva, who as president and CEO of Optimum Media Direction (OMD) ? a media-buying unit of Omnicom ? becomes one of Turner's biggest clients.

Lazarus, who remains head of the sports unit, will be responsible for the domestic ad sales and marketing for TBS Superstation, TNT, Cartoon Network and Turner South. Turner Broadcasting, including its news networks, generated $2 billion in ad revenue last year.

Though a slow economy and jitters left over from the Sept. 11 attacks have generally depressed ad sales and forced companies, including Turner parent AOL Time Warner, to slice their earnings forecasts, Lazarus sounds upbeat, saying ?we've seen some vibrancy in the last month.?

In many dayparts, he says, Turner networks have written more business in the fourth quarter of 2001 than they did during 2000's fourth quarter. ?Given what we have to offer, the AOL Time Warner multiple-asset play, we see some positive signs.?

Turner will continue to expand intracompany promotions with other AOL TW components. But according to Lazarus, this takes a couple of steps. First, he will focus on the core business ? advertising on Turner networks. Then CNN's to create ?TV packages that make sense across all Turner properties,? Lazarus says.

Lazarus will push working with all AOL properties, including Warner Bros., Warner Music, the WB cable network, Time Inc.'s stable of magazines and America Online. With these units, Lazarus says, Turner Entertainment Group will ?create great ideas for marketers, share with them and take our incredible array of assets and put together marketing programs.?

Such deep partnerships, Lazarus says, are ?how we can utilize the value of our merged company and use our access to consumers to help [AOL Time Warner components] sell more advertising.?

An ?important differentiation point? when selling advertising is America Online's 31 million subscribers, Lazarus says.

Lazarus started at Turner in 1990 as an account executive at Turner Sports and moved up to EVP-sales of Turner before being named president of Turner Sports in November 1999. Lazarus has been responsible for all sports acquisitions, programming and production; media sponsorship sales and promotional tieins for sports programming airing on TBS Superstation and TNT; and sponsorship efforts on behalf of Philips Arena and Turner Field. He led efforts on behalf of the company to acquire the cable programming rights to NASCAR for TNT and CNN/SI; Wimbledon, for TNT and CNN/SI; the WUSA; and NASCAR.com.

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