TORONTO – TwoBlueRhino has been hired by Canada’s The Fight Network to be its U.S. affiliate sales and marketing agent, the company announced this week. Nory LeBrun, TBR’s president and founder, will act as the channel’s executive vice-president of U.S. affiliate sales and marketing.
Cable veteran LeBrun has had his hand in a number of successful cable brand launches, including CNN, Headline News, The WB 100+/CW Plus, The Food Network, and most recently, the Gospel Music Channel, which now boasts nearly 40 million subscribers after just over three years of operations. LeBrun also led the rebranding and revised distribution plans for Home Shopping Network in the mid-1990s.
“We are very pleased to have TBR and Nory on board,” said George Burger, president and CEO of TFN. “The scope of his relationships, his outstanding reputation, and his knowledge of the nuances of an extremely complex market take us to a level at which The Fight Network can compete with the US cable brands for the support of the cable, DBS, and telco companies and their consumers. We have all the resources we need to execute our drive into the U.S. market, which we are launching effective today.”
LeBrun will be charged with developing and executing a distribution plan to launch The Fight Network in the United States and will be responsible for all aspects of affiliate sales/marketing, distribution and network development. TFN believes it can hit 40 million subscribers in the U.S. over the next three years as part of its overall objective of reaching 100 million homes worldwide by 2012.
“I am excited to be a part of the unique ground-floor opportunity The Fight Network represents,” said LeBrun, in the same press release. “The concept is timely on many levels, it is being well executed, proving itself already in Canada and the United Kingdom, and the company has a team of executives and industry professionals on a par with the best I have been associated with. I am eager to get going.”
LeBrun began his career working under Ted Turner as vice-president Turner Cable sales and marketing. “LeBrun built and led Turner’s original affiliate sales and marketing team – he and his team were the architects of the multi-service fee financial structure and local ad sales inventory for CNN, CNN Headline News and WTBS, the models widely used by cable networks today,” says the TFN press release.
