Dear Genevieve: Time To Get Busier on HGTV

Genevieve Gorder is working harder to get noticed on HGTV.

The designer, who made her reputation with TLC’s Trading Spaces and Town Haul, has a new show on HGTV called Dear Genevieve, tackling design issues from viewers.

It launched in a prime location — on New Year’s Day, after the Tournament of Roses parade telecast. Two million viewers caught the initial episode, at 1 p.m., and about 1.57 million watched the one that ran right after it, according to live-plus-same-day Nielsen figures.

Since then, initial airings at Dear Genevieve’s regular time (Mondays at 8:30 p.m.) have ranged from about 809,000 average viewers to about 1.15 million. That’s on par with HGTV’s primetime average (about 1.12 million in January).

“She’s doing OK,” Jon Steinlauf, senior vice president of ad sales at HGTV parent Scripps Networks, said last week.

But HGTV has more in mind for the tall blonde in cowboy boots. “We see her as a future star on the network,” Steinlauf said. “Genevieve is being launched aggressively right now.”

On Feb. 8, she was featured in an HGTV Showdown episode, teamed with Carter Oosterhouse (Carter Can) against Monica Pederson (Designed to Sell) and Eric Stromer (Over Your Head) over who could best remake a Maryland couple’s family room.

This summer, she’ll be a judge on HGTV’s Design Star, a competition show, alongside Vern Yip and Candice Olson (Divine Design), another designer and host HGTV wants to promote.

“It’s been an area we’re concerned about,” Steinlauf said. “Television is very much of a star-driven medium.”

Scripps’s Food Network has benefited from brand-name talent — such as Guy Fieri and Bobby Flay — Steinlauf noted. “Food’s talent is so strong right now. You can go 10 to 15 deep and they’re all first namers.”

Gorder’s got a head start: Her first name’s in the show title.

Canoe Isn’t Awash In Cash This Year

Cable’s advanced-advertising initiative, Canoe Ventures, won’t be a “needle-moving business” in terms of revenue in 2009, Comcast chief operating officer Steve Burke said in response to an analyst’s question on the operator’s earnings call last week.

However, Burke said, “our pace of investment or excitement” with Canoe has not diminished even given the state of the economy. “Clearly there is a huge, huge business out there if you can get the interactivity that you currently get when you advertise on the Internet married with television spots,” he said.

Canoe, as executives have said previously, plans to bring out its first product this spring — “creative versioning,” which will allow national advertisers to place different spots in cable operators’ 2,700 geographic ad zones nationwide. “Two or three” other products from the six-operator venture are getting very close to launch, Burke added.

“We’re very pleased with [Canoe’s] direction,” Burke said. “It’s the type of thing I think has such a big reward that it really would not be affected by the economy or the current ad-sales environment, which as we mentioned is not good.”

Oscars Star Tracker Will Monitor Celebs

The folks who brought you the virtual first-and-10 line in football, NASCAR’s car-tracking system and that flaming puck in hockey are bringing some of that technology to the Oscars.

E!’s Live From the Red Carpet broadcast before the Academy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles Sunday night was to include Sportvision technology that allows real-time tracking of celebrities. E! also used it at the Golden Globes on Jan. 11, but the provider says there are new features this time around.

In addition to arrows and labels, Sportvision’s Star Tracker image-based system lets hosts identify select celebrities in a “three-dimensional perspective,” perhaps to point out luminaries “walking in close proximity to other celebrities who they are trying to avoid.”

E! also was to have graphic “name-tag” capabilities.

Power Trio Hosts N.Y. Event

New York — The lineup of Wonder Women and Women to Watch being saluted at a March 10 luncheon here got even stronger last week with the addition of three prominent electronic journalists as event hosts.

They are, alphabetically: Campbell Brown, anchor of CNN’s Campbell Brown: No Bias. No Bull; Giuliana Rancic, co-anchor and managing editor of E!’s E! News; and Maria Elena Salinas, co-anchor of Univision’s Noticiero Univision and host of the network’s news magazine Aqui y Ahora.

The luncheon, co-sponsored by Multichannel News and the New York chapter of Women in Cable Telecommunications, will honor 11 “Wonder Women” and 12 “Women to Watch,” who were profiled in the Jan. 26 edition of Multichannel News. The eleventh annual edition of the event will be held at the New York Hilton.

“We’re thrilled to have Campbell Brown, Giuliana Rancic and Maria Elena Salinas on hand to help celebrate the accomplishments of some of the cable industry’s most talented women,” Multichannel News publisher Larry Dunn said.

For more information, see Multichannel.com/ww2009.