Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President and CMO, GE

VIDEO HIGHLIGHT: BETH COMSTOCK ON GE, COMCAST, AND NBC

FULL EVENT VIDEO

Beth Comstock, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, GE
Beth Comstock leads GE’s growth and market innovation initiatives, including three company-wide platforms: GE Ventures, which partners start-ups with GE capabilities, and ecomagination and healthymagination, which harness innovation for better environmental and health outcomes.  As chief marketing officer, she also leads the sales, marketing and communications functions. Previously she served as president of integrated media at NBC Universal where she oversaw ad sales, marketing and research, and led the company’s digital media efforts, including the formation of hulu.com, Peacock Equity, and ivillage.com. In 2003, she was named GE’s first chief marketing officer in more than 20 years. Previously, she held a succession of roles at GE, NBC, CBS and Turner Broadcasting. Comstock is a member of Nike’s board of directors and trustee president of the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum.  She graduated from the College of William and Mary with a degree in biology.

Moderated by Scott Kurnit, Founder & CEO, Keep.com and TheSwizzle.com

Scott Kurnit is the founder and CEO of Keep.com and TheSwizzle.com. Keep is a leader in the new field of crowd-sourced social commerce and Swizzle enables users to manage commercial email overload by easily unsubscribing, aggregating desired brands into a daily digest, and adding up to 1,400 brands to their digests with one click. Kurnit also founded and served as chairman and CEO of About, Inc. as it grew to a public market value of $1.7 billion and was the fifth largest of all Web properties. About invented or popularized important Internet staples such as blogging, content SEO, and contextual pay-per-click advertising. He sold About US to Primedia in 2001 for $724 million. About was then owned by the New York Times Company and was purchased by IAC in 2012. Kurnit has founded four companies, all of which continue operating today. He holds four patents, led the team that embedded the first Web browser into an online service, started the first Pay Per View cable network, and co-led the team that implemented the first use of national caller ID. He was also the youngest program director in the PBS system and served as program director for Qube, the world’s first fully interactive cable system. He was president of Showtime Event Television when it generated the largest one night gross in the entertainment business and aired the first rock concert (broadcast in seventy countries) from the former Soviet Union. Kurnit serves on the boards of Keep Holdings, Appssavvy, Brightcove, The Paley Center for Media, The Mianus Gorge, and Stein Eriksen Lodge. He has been a filmmaker, TV director, station program manager, marketer, and CEO. He has worked at the highest levels of Warner, Viacom, News Corp., PBS, IBM, and MCI companies.

This event is exclusive to Media Council members and other invited guests. To find out if you're eligible to join the Media Council, contact Stephanie Kousoulas at 212-621-6732 or mediacouncil@paleycenter.org.

Information about upcoming Media Council events, or learn more about past Media Council events.