CBS’s Paley first met an equal rival when NBC hired ad executive Pat Weaver

Evidence

As though awakening at last to the real challenge of programming, Sarnoff put the job in the hands of a former advertising executive named Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, then president of NBC. In Weaver, Paley for the first time faced an opponent with a talent as great as his own, and in some ways deeper. Unlike Sarnoff, Weaver understood the business of both attracting and selling attention. He had cut his teeth in radio at the agency Young & Rubicam, producer of many leading radio shows over the 1930s, and had later moved to the American Tobacco Company to help George Washington Hill sell Lucky Strike. Like Paley, he was a cultural omnivore, comfortable with the highest of the high and lowest of the low, and he had an uncanny gut instinct for what would work and what wouldn’t. While still subject to the General’s ultimate command, Weaver turned the war into a fair fight. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 472

Categorization

• XREF: Weaver bringing advertising-agency psychology to a network echoes the agency-driven programming model described earlier in the book; also prefigures how platform execs later came from ad-tech backgrounds.