ponders what women really need
Brooks: Better research leads to better shows
By Dave Lindorff
What do women want?
Tough question for any guy to answer, right?
It's an especially tough question for Tim Brooks. Brooks just took the job of senior vice president for research at Lifetime, a network that made its mark targeting women.
Very soon, Lifetime will have a formidable challenger, Oxygen Media, and it will be a contest in which research will be key.
"In an age of niche markets, Lifetime has been the only network for women, but now, with Oxygen, there is competition in the field," says Brooks. "To me, that's an advantage. Every network should benefit from competition and so should the consumer."
Brooks recently lost his job at USA Network when USA's Barry Diller decided he didn't need research to tell how to run his network. He feels very much wanted at Lifetime--and needed.
"We can no longer rely on being first," he says of Lifetime. "We're going to have to change with the times. When a smart, savvy competitor comes along, the worst thing you can do is be smug and take your lead for granted."
To be sure, Lifetime has a substantial lead. With a subscriber base of 75 million households, Lifetime is miles ahead of Oxygen, which starts out reaching only some 10 million homes. But as the Cartoon Network has demonstrated in taking on children's TV leader Nickelodeon and FX has shown in challenging USA, such leads can get whittled away quickly.
Brooks says Lifetime intends to improve its brand recognition by developing more targeted programming for women.
"You know, women watch more TV than men," says Brooks, "but there's very little that has been tailored to them, the way shows are tailored to men or to children. You've had shows that target women, like 'Murphy Brown' or 'Ally McBeal' but with the development of niche markets, what has developed is the clubhouse idea."
What's the clubhouse idea?
"Viewers today like the idea of a place they can go to get the programming they want any time of day, without the need to look in the TV listings, and it will be good. That's what we want to be: a clubhouse where women can get the programming that's right for them."
Concretely, Brooks says, that means more series development.
"Lifetime has had mixed results with its series to date," he says. "Things were not given time to develop and succeed. Now that's changing. We've got our first hit, 'Any Day Now,' and there will be more of that."
Getting a good set of shows is important, he says, "because original series are what brands a network. Reruns, no matter how good they are, don't do that for you."
So what do women want?
Brooks laughs.
"Women need to feel empowered, not victimized. They want a place where the programming recognizes a women's point of view.
"And women today work five jobs at once--something TV traditionally hasn't recognized. They're interested in information that helps them manage all those things in their lives, so service programs are much more popular too, and we're going to be opening a daytime series that addresses that need."
So why's a guy heading up the research operation at Lifetime? Why not a woman?
"One of the things you need in this industry is a variety of opinions and points of view," says Brooks, noting that Lifetime's CEO and several other top executives are women. "Hopefully with my knowledge of audience research I can contribute something."
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Dave Lindorff covers research and programming for Media Life.