Networks: Let Your Shows Be Your Brand

How Content Can Build a Channel’s Identity With Consumers

By Andrea Morabito -- Multichannel News, 10/10/2011 12:01:00 AM

New York — When it comes to the question of which came first — the show or the brand — the answer is not so clear-cut.

“We had a brand before we launched a huge hit show, but then the show became the launch pad for what the brand became, because we saw what was working with the audience,” Frances Berwick, president of Bravo and Style Media, said about Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy during a CTAM in New York panel session.

Queer Eye, through its five male hosts, illuminated the five passion points of the Bravo audience — food, fashion, beauty, design and pop culture, points that would manifest in future network shows like Top Chef and Project Runway.

“Those then became the tenets of the network out of which we then created a development filter,” Berwick said. “Everything that we developed fell within that framework. It started it all.”

Perhaps the most-often-cited example of a show transforming a network is AMC’s Mad Men, and as such Ed Carroll, chief operating officer of AMC Networks, tends to believe that it is the show drives the brand.

“I think it’s always the show,” Carroll said. “I have come to believe the audience tells you where they’re willing to go. You get that first show, and then the work really starts, because no network wants to be just one show. So you have to convert that show into a mandate.”

Herb Scannell, president of BBC Worldwide America, and former president of Nickelodeon, employed a similar strategy at the kids channel based off the success of the series You Can’t Do That on Television, which portrayed a world where kids were smarter than adults.

“That was really the signature of Nickelodeon,” he said. “And all the shows that were made afterwards, we always took the kids’ side,” he added, citing later hits Rugrats and SpongeBob SquarePants. “That’s really what put Nickelodeon on the map, this attitude of celebrating kid-dom.”

More than 10 0 shows launched this summer on cable and broadcast, making it increasingly difficult for any show to break through the clutter, moderator Jason Klarman, president of Oxygen Media, noted at the start of the panel. So to ensure a show can gain enough viewers to support a brand, it’s increasingly important to be present across multiple platforms.

For Bravo’s unscripted series, that means creating a conversation around characters that viewers want to know and interact with, like those of its popular Real Housewives franchise. The aim: Getting more live tune-in.

“The real learning for us has been we can mitigate the DVR use a bit by creating an event,” Berwick said. “The audience doesn’t want to talk to the network. They want to talk to each other while they’re watching the show. With unscripted shows, they want to know these people.”

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Andrea Morabito is a staff writer at Broadcasting & Cable.