AMC's tricky reinvention

But Heburn and Wayne remain

AMC's tricky
reinvention

From old movies to all things movies is working

By Heidi Vogt

    The great thing about American Movie Classics used to be that it showed old movies.
The not-so-great thing was that its viewers were as old as those movies.
   It was good television, surely, and good for viewers.
   For a network concerned about advertising, though, it was a different matter entirely. One's late 50s are a fine time in life but not necessarily the time when advertisers want to make your acquaintance.
   Three months ago, the network decided on what might seem a radical change. Instead of being an old movie network, it would morph into a network of and about movies.
   The goals were two: building audience and lowering the age of that audience, and lower it dramatically, from the mid-5os to to 40ish.
   There were several risks. One was failing to draw new viewers -- all those young people -- while alienating its core, if older, audience.
   Another risk was blurring the network's identity with all the other cable networks known for showing movies.
   So in October the network once known as American Movie Classics, more recently as AMC, adopted a new look, a new slogan -- "TV for Movie People" and, heaven forbid, began showing newer movies, many in color and some that dated back no more than a decade.
   Also came, even worse, commercial breaks within the movies.
   Old-movie fans squawked, and they are still squawking.
    Yet early signs suggest the transformation of AMC is taking hold.
   Viewership is up.
   AMC’s primetime household ratings climbed throughout the fourth quarter of 2002 from a 0.6 in October to a 0.74 in December, an increase of 23 percent.
   The new viewers appear to be much younger as well -- sufficiently young to lower the network's overall median age. It dropped from 56.7 in the fourth quarter of 2001 to 53.2 in the fourth quarter of 2002.
   But, perhaps most important, viewers seem to get the new AMC concept.
   “An older audience is not finding a nostalgic network anymore on AMC,” says Noreen O'Loughlin, executive vice president and general manager of AMC.
   “At this point the movies that we’re showing on AMC are primarily from the '70s, '80s and '90s. It’s not like we’ve shifted radically to a totally contemporary product,” says O’Loughlin. “We still do have some older classics on the network, and I think there will be always be Audrey Hepburn and John Wayne on AMC.”
   To distinguish itself as a network about movies, AMC is adding a fair dose of original content and expects to add more. It includes more features about stars and Hollywood backgrounders and the great ages of film.
   In April, AMC will premiere “The Wrong Coast,” a stop-motion program in which movies are recast to answer the questions you never thought to ask, like “What if Woody Allen were Spiderman?” or “What if Britney Spears choreographed Braveheart?”
   Other upcoming documentaries follow all aspects of Hollywood life from reality show fame to gay Hollywood to women who have risen to power in the film industry. “It’s a cross-pollination of movies and television,” says O’Loughlin.
   She describes the shift to more contemporary movies and original content as an evolutionary process that started five years ago, not a quick decision made three months ago.
    “Over the years we’ve been integrating more contemporary movies. It’s a matter of growth. We’re trying to build our audience and build our network. And we’ve stayed true to a core of people who really love movies.”
    She says those viewers will get used to the commercials, if they haven't already. The network now runs eight minutes of national advertising and two minutes of local advertising per hour across all shows and movies. This is the final shift for a network that started book-ending movies with commercials in 2000 and then gradually phased in commercial intermissions mid-movie.
   “We’ve gotten some feedback from some of our viewers who are disappointed,” says O’Loughlin.
    “But these are movies that people are used to seeing on television, used to seeing them with commercial interruption."

-Heidi Vogt is a staff writer for Media Life.

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