Thinking Inside theBox

Tweet

These days, any time you turn on Oxygen you'll see the target audience getting what it wants. On Snapped, for example, horny, homicidal twins plot to kill one twin's husband.

With Laybourne's reputation, and her network's future, hanging in the balance, she turned over significant creative control to Debby Beece, her head of programming and marketing. Beece, who had worked for Laybourne at Nickelodeon, overhauled the channel's lineup, which was clogged with two-hour blocks of bland informational shows. "I knew right away we needed to focus on entertainment," she says. She shortened Pure Oxygen and other information-based shows on her way to eventually phasing out most of them. Since the network couldn't afford to invest in original programming at that point, Beece searched for an affordable acquisition that would hint at Oxygen's new direction. "For her, it was getting in and figuring out what, if anything, was salvageable," Laybourne says. "It was getting out there, listening to focus groups, asking questions, listening to your consumers." After all that research, Beece finally decided to buy the rights to reruns of Universal Studios' Xena: Warrior Princess, a tongue-in-cheek show about a scantily clad, musclebound woman who slays evildoers. Laybourne liked the idea. "It was a good buy," she says. "It was available, and it was going to shake people up about what they thought we were."

Laybourne says the name Oxygen came to her in a dream. She woke up thinking that, as consumers and creative people, women were being shouted at. They needed a breath of fresh air. Today, Beece talks of "oxygenating" the network's programming. To oxygenate something, she explains, is to make it "bold, a little bit risque, with moments of funniness." To that end, Oxygen is plowing tens of millions into saucy new original programming in 2004. (Industry monitor

Kagan Research puts the figure for all programming at Oxygen at $113 million.) That's a sizeable investment for the network, which hasn't scored any outside financial help since late 2002, but it's still small potatoes compared with Lifetime, which is now co-owned by Disney and the Hearst Corp. and has committed $800 million to a rollout of original programming that began last year. Laybourne has a lot riding on her network's new lineup, which includes its first original sitcom, Good Girls Don't, about two roommates -- a tramp and a prude -- and Nice Package, a home makeover program starring two beefcake handymen with penchants for whiskey sours and tight T-shirts. Add to those a stable of popular Oxygen standbys like Girls Behaving Badly, a naughty hidden camera show, Absolutely Fabulous, an English comedy about an over-the-hill trollop and her best friend, and Talk Sex With Sue Johanson, in which Johanson, a Canadian grandmother, talks about such things as lesbian foreplay and genital piercing (while also giving lots of sensible advice about sex and relationships), and Laybourne has one libidinous lineup in the works.

If Laybourne is troubled by the occasionally lowbrow turn her once-brainy network has taken, she's not showing it. For the most part, she seems comfortable with the new spin. It's still smart fun, she maintains; it's just more entertaining. But she has moments of uncertainty. Last winter, for instance, Oxygen was preparing a show with the title My Best Friend Is a Big Fat Slut. In January, New York Post television critic Linda Stasi wrote about it in an article that featured a picture of Laybourne under the headline "A Big, Fat Slut by Any Other Name." Laybourne was obviously uncomfortable. The next month, in one of her bimonthly town hall meetings with her 220 employees, Laybourne announced she was switching the name to the much more innocuous Good Girls Don't. Not because of the Post article, she insisted, but because the name was "more Oxygen."

The new Oxygen is clearly stronger than the old: The channel's average number of daily viewers jumped 69% during the first quarter of 2004, compared with the same period last year. But that translated into just 56,000 viewers among the crucial 18- to 49-year-old women, compared with the 388,000 who tuned in to Lifetime. (That's still better than WE, which drew 34,000 viewers in the same category.) Laybourne needs to jump-start ratings, and to do that she is relying on Beece. So far, research confirms that women like jokes, especially jokes that have to do with sex. "Younger women are completely comfortable with humor about sex," says Laybourne, citing a survey of 1,849 women that the network commissioned and released last spring. The study reveals that women between 18 and 49 are just as likely as their male peers to think that sex and body parts can be funny. Focus groups give the same message. At a focus group about women and high-speed Internet access, for example, a stylish, young New York musician gave high marks to a commercial for Cox Communications because she thought the word Cox was funny.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4  NEXT 

Read more:

Nadine Heintz

The Goods is focused exclusively on products and services for business owners. We won't ignore the latest netbook or the hottest smartphone, but we'll also examine the services, software, and Web-based tools that can help make your business succeed. Nadine Heintz, a senior editor at Inc., edits The Goods, as well as Quick Hits. Send suggestions, comments, and deals to nheintz@inc.com.

Sign-up for our Start-up Newsletter

Email Address: