Distinguished Vanguard Award for Leadership

During his first television job at HBO in the 1970s, Matt Blank remembers getting a lesson in the importance of being a hands-on manager.

“We would put together these great marketing campaigns for operators,” Blank said. All the cable system had to do was add a few bits of information at the bottom of the print-ready ad and send it to the local newspaper.

“There would be a space at the bottom of the ad that would say 'your system name here,’ ” Blank said. “ 'Your phone number here.’ That’s all they had to add. But when we got back the printed ads, the bottom of the ad would still say, 'your system name here.’ 'Your phone number here.’ It taught me the importance of staying hands on and preparing for any eventuality.”

This attention to detail while keeping track of larger marketing and programming strategies helped Blank rise through the ranks at HBO and then Showtime, which he joined in 1988. It has also helped Blank and his team transform Showtime from a perennial also-ran in the pay TV business into the home for such critically acclaimed programs as Dexter, The Tudors and Weeds.

“In the last three or four years, our marketing and promotion, and particularly our programming, has all come together,” Blank said. “We’re firing on all cylinders. For the first time in the history of Showtime, we are clearly a leadership brand.”

That has helped Showtime expand its subscriber base to about 15.5 million, up 1.3 million subscribers in the last year, and is a key reason Blank is winning another Vanguard Award for leadership. He won a Vanguard for marketing in 1991 and for programming against defamation in 1999.

Those award-winning leadership skills will also come in handy as CBS Inc.-owned Showtime faces new competition in the pay TV arena from sister company Viacom. Recently, Viacom’s Paramount Pictures, MGM and Lionsgate announced they would launch a premium channel in the fall of 2009, a move that will also deprive Showtime of first-run movies from those studios.

Growing up in Queens, N.Y., Blank was a TV buff as a kid, with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Fugitive among his favorite shows. Early on he dreamed of making a career in the entertainment industry.

But after graduating in 1972, the economy was in a deep recession. So Blank honed his marketing skills in a series of jobs in the packaged goods and financial services industries until he finally landed a job at HBO in March 1976.

Those early days at HBO, “were a great business experience,” Blank said. “I had been working on big corporate brands, where you had ad agencies and marketing service groups and media planning and lots of support. At HBO, you were involved in everything. I’d go to the airport two or three days a week at six in the morning, fly to Cleveland or Pittsburgh and drive for an hour to find the cable system. If I got lost, I’d follow the trunk until I got the headend. It was a very grassroots experience that took me to a lot of different parts of the country and taught me a lot about how people used television.”

Over the next 12 years, Blank climbed the ladder at HBO to senior vice president of consumer marketing. But in 1988, Blank decided to join Showtime as executive vice president of marketing, where he oversaw all of the premium network’s consumer marketing, creative services and public relations.

Blank made the risky career move because he saw more growth opportunities at Showtime.

Viacom, Showtime’s owner at the time, was struggling under huge debts, and the network was a distant second in the premium business behind HBO. Some press reports and analysts worried that Showtime’s costly movie contracts could have a potentially catastrophic impact on Viacom’s bottom line if management didn’t either sell the service or make it more competitive.

That would take time. Blank rose from president and chief operating office in 1991 to president and CEO and then chairman and CEO in 1995. Along the way, he was able to capitalize on technological changes that provided new distribution opportunities, first on satellite and on digital tiers, for Showtime.

“When I became CEO, it was really the beginning of the digital era, which made it possible to offer many more services,” first with multiplexes of their channels and then on-demand programming, he said. “Those technological changes helped set the table for all the programming success we’ve had in the last three or four years” because it became much easier for viewers to find and watch the company’s programming.

In the 1990s, Showtime began the long process of improving its original programming by producing a large number of critically acclaimed movies that won a number of awards.

But the big breakthrough didn’t come until 2003, when Blank and his team decided to focus on original series. In July 2003, to spearhead that effort, Blank hired Robert Greenblatt, co-founder of The Greenblatt Janollari Studio, which produced a number of successful shows, including the critically acclaimed HBO drama Six Feet Under.

“Bob [Greenblatt, president of entertainment at Showtime Networks] and I were eerily in total agreement about the type of programming we wanted to do and the type of thing that would work,” Blank said.

The result has been a string of hits. In 2004, the network launched The L-Word and Huff, which was quickly followed by Weeds in 2005; Brotherhood, Dexter and This American Life in 2006; and The Tudors and Californication in 2007.

“It’s been an embarrassment of riches,” Blank said. “It’s about as good of a batting average as you’re going to have in television.”

Those programming successes will come in handy in the next few years as Showtime deals with changes in the way viewers access video and an increasingly competitive landscape.

Faced with the planned launch of the studio-backed network in 2009, Showtime is negotiating with other film suppliers and plans to use money spent on film output deals to expand production of original series.

Blank also sees opportunities in new distribution platforms. “This January, five or six of our series were in the top ten ranking of sales of the whole season of a program on iTunes,” he said. “It shows the kind of attention our programming is getting and the opportunities we have to build new businesses as new distribution platforms develop.”