Discovery’s Kathleen Finch

With the integration of the Discovery and Scripps portfolios now complete, Kathleen Finch, chief lifestyle brands officer at Discovery, Inc., talks to TV Real about the importance of brands, the art of finding compelling lifestyle personalities and the keys to driving viewer engagement.

Finch oversees some of the biggest, most well-known channels in the pay-TV universe, including Food Network, Travel Channel, TLC and ID. She assumed the post earlier this year after driving the strong performance of HGTV and Food Network, among other services, in her long tenure at Scripps Networks Interactive.

TV REAL: How did you go about integrating the Discovery and Scripps channels under the lifestyle group? And how did you get to know the DNA of the Discovery channels you added to your remit?
FINCH: The integration has been going great. So many of us across the aisles at Scripps and Discovery knew each other long before [the merger], and it’s been fun to have everybody working together. The DNA between the two is similar. The channels are very brand-focused and very consumer-focused—we don’t make a move without thinking about what our consumer is going to want. On a practical level, in the months we’ve been together I’ve had two big cross-network brainstorming meetings. Even though we all liked each other, we were frenemies before this! So it was fun to get all the creative people in a room, spending the whole day together spit-balling ideas. A lot came out of those. [Drew Scott from] Property Brothers on HGTV was getting married, so we did a wedding special on TLC. We have some TLC talent that are coming over to Food Network to be guest judges on Chopped. We’ve had a lot of fun.

When you hear Travel, Food Network and HGTV, you know they’re about traveling, eating and homes! Equally, ID, the number one [cable] network for women, has this passionate audience of women who are interested in crime investigation and mysteries unfolding. The length of tune is among the top in the industry. And on TLC, one of the things we love to do is celebrate people and relationships and circumstances that don’t generally get celebrated. The through-line there is really about sharing lives with people and everyone is accepted. We tell intimate stories about people, with a lot of drama and emotion. They’re different from a Food Network brand, but they all have passionate audiences that are pretty consistent night by night.

TV REAL: The portfolio has such a wealth of on-screen talent. How are you managing relationships with these personalities?
FINCH: Talking about our talent is our most favorite thing! Our talent is the best in the business; they are what make our brands unique. They’re not actors—they are real people in real-life situations, and they are experts who viewers invite into their homes every night via the television because they want to learn from them. So our viewers have a relationship with our talent that is completely different than typical TV talent. They’re always interesting, are at the top of their fields and are engaging to watch. It’s hard sometimes to find them—that’s probably our hardest job. They’re not handed to us on a reel with ten other talents from an agent. We go out and find these people. That’s a job the programming teams do exceptionally well. At our big Upfront in New York, we had about 50 or 60 talents across all of Discovery, and the most amazing thing was watching them offstage fangirling over each other! It was fun to see how many HGTV stars love stars on Velocity [which is rebranding as Motor Trend Network] and how many TLC stars love Food Network. It was cool to see all of them come together.

TV REAL: Where are you looking for new talent?
FINCH: We find quite a lot on social media. We recently had a show on Food Network called Girl Meets Farm featuring Molly Yeh. She’s huge on social media. On HGTV we have Ben and Erin Napier from Home Town. All of our programming teams comb social media to find interesting people. We also have these great producing partners that we work with—our TLC producers know we want interesting families, our ID producers know we want great detectives and investigative journalists. We’ve empowered a lot of our partners to go out and find talent because we can’t sit and wait for it, we have to be out aggressively looking for it. We also have Digital Lifestyle Experts, about 40 talents who we’ve put on retainer. We work with them in social and digital to get them to a place where they can come up with a show we think might work. We use it to train our next generation of stars.

TV REAL: What are the best ways to build a schedule that promotes stickiness and watch time? Once a viewer arrives on the channel, how do you keep him or her there through multiple shows?
FINCH: We suck people in. Our goal is to not let viewers leave! We’ve got this incredible length of tune across our brands. ID and HGTV are among the top. We super-serve audiences what they like. We hold them through the commercial breaks with short-form content. We create a lot of compelling interstitial content. And we also spin off a lot of shows. Something like 90 Day Fiancé on TLC works well, and we’ve announced our fourth spin-off of that show. The behemoth of them all is House Hunters on HGTV, and we have a hundred spin-offs of that title! If we find content that holds a viewer, we might do a three-hour stack, but then we’ll also make spin-offs because we know the audience is there. Unlike a lot of cable networks that only do premieres one or two nights a week, we have a premiere every single night of the week all year long, particularly on ID and HGTV. Our viewers keep coming back because they know that we’ll give them new content. That’s something we work very hard to do. We make sure our viewers know that if they tune in on a Tuesday, they’re going to get something new, just like if they tune in on a Wednesday. It keeps people coming back on a very consistent basis.

TV REAL: You have a lot of franchises that have been on the air for a long time. How do you maintain their momentum season after season?
FINCH: We’ll do a lot of things to juice it up a little bit. For instance, one of the longest-running shows on Food Network is Chopped, where we just introduced Martha Stewart as a judge. So even though the show has been doing well, suddenly we got this influx of curiosity seekers—“Martha Stewart, that’ll be interesting to watch!” We’ll find something and spin it off to give it a new twist. We came up with the 90 Day spin-offs. We have a lot of titles with [Jonathan and Drew Scott from] Property Brothers. We’re fortunate in that they are twins so we can work them twice as hard! Brother Vs. Brother is a spin-off of Property Brothers where each brother buys a house and renovates it and whoever can sell it for the most wins, and the winnings go to charity. So we find different ways to take something that people love and give them a new reason to tune in.

TV REAL: Do lifestyle and factual channels fare better in a linear channel environment than perhaps a scripted-content service where viewers could instead search out those shows to binge online?
FINCH: It is true that our networks have much more live viewing than typical networks. That’s because we stay true to our brand. When people tune in and get sucked in, they’re probably not going for a specific show. That’s our secret. You’re in the mood to watch a mystery get solved, you’re in the mood to learn about food, you’re in the mood to learn about home renovation, so you turn our networks on and you stay for a long time because we consistently give you that experience over and over. It might be with different titles and different talent, but the reason you turned it on is always satisfied. That’s what makes us sticky and very relevant in a more fractured world, as opposed to a network that is all full of off-net or scripted programming. You can get that in other places. You can’t get a 24/7 home-renovation show someplace else. You come to HGTV because you know you will get satisfied every night, you come to ID because you know you will get satisfied every night. It’s really about being loyal to our brand and our audience.

TV REAL: You mentioned the cross-network brainstorming sessions. Will there be more of that kind of collaboration between the different programming teams? If one team gets a pitch that isn’t suitable, can they share it with another channel?
FINCH: Now we’re one family, we’re absolutely doing that. If a food pitch comes in that isn’t quite right for Food Network, it might go to Travel Channel, or if a wedding pitch comes in that’s not quite right for TLC, then maybe we can put a spin on it to make it about wedding cakes for Food Network. We’re doing a lot of sharing. TLC made the really smart decision to bring back Trading Spaces and it did great. It was the highest rated Saturday night on TLC in I don’t know how many years. So we’re doing a second season. We’re going to find a way to incorporate some of the HGTV talent and the HGTV audience to make Trading Spaces even bigger. We’re leaning across the aisle to find ways to work together. On any given night, over 20 percent of the female audience is watching one of our nets. So our goal is to build a big moat around them and keep them within the portfolio. We’re finding ways to cross-promote, to co-produce big events, we’re cross-pollinating talent when it makes sense. The idea is, we have this 20-plus percent of women [watching our channels] and we’re going to hang on to them by super-serving them on all of our networks. You’re in the mood for weddings, go to TLC, you’re tired of that, try Food Network. We’re being very strategic about cross-promoting big events on our networks to keep the core audience from leaving.

TV REAL: Are you collaborating with your international counterparts on programming initiatives or sourcing talent?
FINCH: We have regular meetings with them. They’ll show us talent, we’ll show them talent. Because we own so many of our formats, we’ve produced [versions of] some of the U.S. shows internationally. Now that the legacy Scripps brands are part of Discovery, we see a huge amount of opportunity. Just imagine House Hunters all over the world, in different languages, shot in different places. There are so many opportunities with all the formats we own.

TV REAL: What innovations are you excited to see in the factual space?
FINCH: One of the things we’re all seeing is a very talent-forward focus. It used to be there were a lot of formats out there that were plug-and-play—you put a person in as host and have everybody compete. We’re now seeing more talent-led ideas, which is great. That’s what we excel at. And other people are trying to do things like that, trying to find the next Ina Garten or Joe Kenda. That’s not easy to do, but we know how to do it and we’re good at it. That’s replacing the big, shiny, overly formatted shows.

TV REAL: What programming highlights are you particularly excited about?
FINCH: I’m super excited about rolling out 90 Day Fiancé’s fourth franchise. That show is insane in its popularity. We are number one on Sunday nights, repeatedly. I’m also really excited about a huge slate of holiday programming that’s coming up on Food Network. Holidays are huge at Food Network. And we’ve got some really good documentaries on ID. The team has done a great job of working with skilled documentarians and filmmakers and we have some important stories that are coming to light.

TV REAL: I saw 90 Day Fiancé trending on Twitter over the weekend. What does that social media engagement mean for you and your programming teams?
FINCH: We love it! It says that young people are paying attention, which is what everyone wants. And it means we have watercooler television, which is every programmer’s goal. The fact that on a Sunday night, millions of fans are not only watching it but are engaging in social media about it, it’s great. We do look at that very carefully because it gives us a lot of good insights. It’s trended for a few Sundays in a row. That says that people care about the characters, about the outcome, and they like the idea of, I might be sitting alone in my living room watching, but there are millions of other fans on Twitter enjoying it with me.