Read Online Our Turn by Kirstine; Stewart - Free Book Online Page A

headhunter told me about a major job opportunity in Denver that sounded close to perfect, if slightly intimidating. The job would put me in charge of programming at Hallmark Entertainment, which had seventeen channels and an international audience of fifty million viewers. I was nervous about moving to a new country, the biggest entertainment pond on the planet, with two babies in tow. There were plenty of reasons to find a more comfortable arrangement to curl up with. But Denver struck me as family friendly, and the opportunity to gain experience in the international cable market and expand the skill set I had been growing for a decade outweighed my apprehension. And I wasn’t wrong.
    At Trio, I had a clear mandate to broaden the audience base and shake up the status quo. At Hallmark, my role was essentially mine to create. When I arrived in Denver, the networks’ schedules were geared toward airing the showsin the Hallmark Hall of Fame Library, a rich repository of programs and television movies stretching back to the 1950s. But the lineups tended to have little to do with the interests of its international audience. In fact, a recent Employee of the Month had been lauded for finding a way to maximize the number of times a show could be broadcast by using a program that worked out the run dates and spaced out the repeats. It was called a “schedulizer,” and was designed to benefit the company as rights holder over the viewer. The audience didn’t factor into it at all. The Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All just doesn’t mean much to people watching in Australia or Japan, for instance. But no one wants to hear, especially from the new boss, that they are pursuing the wrong definition of success and serving the company’s narrowest interest.
    So I told these employees that their approach was important in maximizing the benefits from the rights we held, but I suggested that they could create a bigger business picture by serving, even potentially building, audiences where we had them. I commissioned research to understand our viewer base, research that informed the way we redesigned our schedule. There would be no more one-schedule-fits-all and no more being only a movie channel. We picked up the broadcast rights to Star Trek in Asia, where research showed audiences were keen on the old-school sci-fi series. For women in Latin America, who reported that they often watched television while they did household chores like ironing, we featured the emotional dramas they said they enjoyed.
    Every tweak to the lineup represented a departure from what the company had been doing—and a risk. But they’dhired me, an outsider, which indicated that management was ready to take risks.
    By its nature, television is all about taking risks: you select a show and invest in its development and have no real idea if it will succeed until after it goes to air. Since many shows do fail, you have to live in that space that drives accountants crazy. They always want to know how many will fail—two shows out of ten? Five out of ten? By contrast, as the person in charge, I had to allow for the possibility of failure. If you never fail it means you are never trying anything new. Success means you’ve made more right decisions than wrong ones, but you can’t let failure define you. Making a big generalization here, but Canadians tend to be risk-averse, too worried that we are only as good as the last thing we did. Whereas in the States, the emphasis was not on what you’d done that had worked or failed, but what you were going to do next. At Hallmark, I learned to be less intimidated by failure, because failure was not cast in the same devastating light as it was back home.
    Over three and a half years, we built a wide and diverse international audience, which made Hallmark Entertainment yet another attractive property, and eventually, it was sold. But even before that happened, I knew it was