Thinking Inside theBox
Geraldine Laybourne of the Oxygen channel has finally discovered what women want -- perhaps to her chagrin, definitely to her profit.
Published July 2004
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEGeraldine Laybourne sweeps into a small conference room at the headquarters of Oxygen Media to watch a focus group getting under way one floor below. Most of Laybourne's employees at Oxygen, the four-and-a-half-year-old cable TV channel for women, have left for the day, and the usually bustling office -- located on three stories of a converted Nabisco factory in Manhattan's Chelsea district -- is quiet. Laybourne has been looking forward to this focus group, which she commissioned to gauge the interest of women in some kind of election-season special, an idea that is dear to her heart. Leading the discussion is Karen Ramspacher, a head of research at Oxygen, who sets the group at ease with friendly introductions and banter about everyone's favorite television shows.
Laybourne sits upstairs, watching the roundtable group via closed-circuit television. She happily munches popcorn while Ramspacher breaks the ice, offering soda to the seven participants and reminding them that pizza's on the way. She starts off by asking them to describe their jobs and name their favorite TV shows. "The OC," says Whitney, a 22-year-old college student. "Yeah," the other women agree enthusiastically. "American Idol," says Anna, a stay-at-home mother. "Reality TV...every one of them," says Trisha, a fifth-grade teacher from New Jersey, adding that she has two televisions right next to each other so she doesn't miss anything.
After the introductions, Ramspacher wades into more serious subject matter. "Where do you guys get your news from?" she asks. The women, all between the ages of 19 and 28, are here because, during a screening process, they expressed apathy toward politics. They fidget nervously in their seats. The schoolteacher reads the Bergen Record, the New York Post, and the New York Daily News. "I don't read them for politics," she says. "I read them for Page Six [the Post's gossip section], that's about it." Her students receive copies of The New York Times every day, she mentions later -- but she doesn't encourage them to read it; she uses it to cover the tables when they paint.
Switching gears, Ramspacher asks the group how political content could be presented in a more interesting way. "CliffsNotes," jokes the student. Before long, two pizzas arrive, and Ramspacher asks the women to write down ways they could make their opinions known to politicians. Nobody mentions voting.
Laybourne -- who three years ago spearheaded a media campaign encouraging women to run for political office -- is determined to pique the women's interest. She scribbles a note to Ramspacher, telling her to ask the women how they would react if politicians started talking about drafting young women, along with young men, for military service. As the women dig into their pizza, Laybourne checks her watch. She's late for another event. She slips out of the room and heads downstairs, handing Ramspacher the note before walking past the front desk to the elevator.
As they say at the network: Oh! These are good days, at last, for Oxygen. Viewership is way up, and nearly five years after launching its TV channel, the company recently reported its first quarterly profit. But that certainly isn't the result of trying to make better citizens of young women. It's more a matter of ceasing to do so -- via a business plan succinctly expressed by the show, and maybe just the title, Girls Behaving Badly. Is Laybourne, a schoolteacher turned TV exec turned TV entrepreneur, still struggling against that? For all her successes as a builder of hit shows and profitable cable channels, she has shown a persistent inclination toward wishful thinking about her audiences. Her high-mindedness (in TV terms, at least) is sometimes out of sync with the taste of her target audience -- which at Oxygen is women between 18 and 49 years of age -- and it's sometimes tripped her up. Laybourne is one entrepreneur who sometimes needs to be reminded to think inside the box.
When Laybourne formed Oxygen Media in 1998, the Lifetime Network had already been around for more than a decade and was the established leader in the women's category. But Laybourne wanted to challenge female viewers with a funnier, more sophisticated alternative to tearjerkers and stalker movies -- she was interested in what she often calls "smart fun." On an early program called Pure Oxygen, for example, she served up Maya Angelou reading poetry. On Exhale, Candace Bergen interviewed distinguished guests like Hillary Rodham Clinton and architect Frank Gehry in what Bergen once described as "mini courses." Laybourne was also determined to succeed at another first by linking the Oxygen television channel to the Internet, creating a kind of interactive megaportal chock-full of great information for women.
