Disney's Anne Sweeney

October 2007

By Anna Carugati

As co-chair of Disney
Media Networks and president of Disney-ABC Television Group, Anne Sweeney not
only oversees the entertainment and news divisions at ABC—including ABC
Entertainment, ABC Kids, ABC Daytime and ABC News. Her responsibilities also
include Disney Channel Worldwide—which has grown to 24 international
channels—Toon Disney, SOAPnet, ABC Family and Jetix. In today’s media
environment, in which cable and satellite channels and a whole range of
new-media platforms encroach upon broadcast networks’ viewership, she has to
ensure that as many people as possible are watching ABC’s shows. And on the
other hand she has to grow Disney’s portfolio of channels. One thing is sure,
for both ABC and the cable channels, Sweeney and her team consider new
platforms and devices not as threats but as opportunities to connect with more
viewers, wherever they may be.

WS: In today’s multichannel world where viewers have a
lot of choices with our remote control every night, how important have
scheduling techniques become for a broadcast network?

SWEENEY: We have had a great deal of success thanks to some
very innovative scheduling strategies as well as some innovative on-air
promotion and marketing. Steve McPherson [the president of ABC Entertainment] took a huge gamble last year in moving Grey’s Anatomy to Thursday nights. We already had a very solid
Sunday night schedule with Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy, but we really believed that Grey’s was strong enough to make ABC a contender on
Thursday nights. It turns out he was right. I found that this was a wonderful
use of programming assets to open up a whole new night of television for ABC.
In fact, it was the first time in 30 years that ABC had won [in the ratings] on
Thursday night. So on the scheduling side they were very savvy and used the
time well.

On the on-air promotion
and marketing, Steve’s been very smart for a number of years now. Instead of
trying to launch every single show and give equal budget to every single show
launching in the fall, he chooses one or two priority projects for the
season—shows that are strategically important to the network. Last year I
remember there were countless billboards and bus sides and marketing all over
the place about Thursday night, because that was the priority—opening up Grey’s. Even though it was a show that had been airing on
the network on Sundays, driving people to watch in on Thursday night was a
marketing priority. And he’s doing the same thing again this year.

The other thing that
Steve’s doing which is a new twist is ABC Start Here, which was developed by
Mike Benson and Marlo Provencio. It’s a campaign aimed at guiding consumers to
ABC programming on a variety of platforms, such as on-air, online or mobile. In
this world of many platforms where we can see our content, ABC Start Here is a
navigational device and it has icons that represent everything from your
computer to your iPod to your phone. These little icons will appear on the
bottom of your screen to let you know where else you can receive this
programming. So it’s a useful tool for consumers.

WS: You were one of the first networks to start
streaming your shows on your website. What have you learned about your audience
from the broadband player on ABC.com?

SWEENEY: We’re also the first network to have our broadband
player in HD. That actually just launched this summer. We learned a great deal
from the broadband player. First of all, we learned that people want the
option, and more than 135 million episodes of our shows have been streamed
online at ABC.com since we put up [the broadband player] last September.
We learned that the majority of the online viewing happens in the first 24
hours after a show has aired on ABC. And we also found out, because we’ve been
tracking this quite carefully, that 77 percent of our audience watches the
shows online because they missed them on television and they wanted to catch
up.

We also found out that
85 percent of people who watched the shows on the player were able to recall
the advertiser, so not only was this a great convenience for our
viewers—giving them a chance to catch up—but it was a wonderful
boom to our advertisers.

WS: All of the new-media consumption of your content
is not cannibalizing ABC network or the channels themselves.

SWEENEY: Yes. It is complementary to what is offered on
television. We’ve also tracked that very carefully because as you can imagine
we’re very concerned that these new technologies are additives and not
cannibalistic.

WS: ABC Family seems to have hit its stride. What has
contributed to its success recently?

SWEENEY: I really give Paul Lee [the president of ABC
Family] and his team tremendous credit. They redesigned the channel as, “A new
kind of family,” and they’ve been targeting an audience of 18-34 year olds and
slightly younger. And they’re really delivering programming that reflects
modern relationships in all of their diversity. They’ve also made a strong
commitment to original programming and had a great summer with Kyle XY, which was a returning hit from last summer, and a
new show called Greek. In fact,
I should also mention that Kyle XY
and Greek have enjoyed very
strong international sales as well, and Greek was sold to the BBC.

So ABC Family’s strategy
is really built around this 18-34 group. We’re calling them the millennial
generation because they’re different from other demographic groups that we deal
with. These millennials are interesting because they’ve grown up in a multiplatform
world. So as we launch new shows on ABC Family—we did it with Kyle XY last year, and we did it with Kyle XY and Greek this year—they’re premiering on ABC Family; they’re moving to
iTunes; and they’re airing on the ABC Television network after their initial
play on ABC Family. These are shows that will appear on DVD again reaching out
to this millennial audience every place they are and on every technology that
they use.

WS: These young kids aren’t bound to a specific
schedule on a linear channel. They want to watch what they want to watch.

SWEENEY: That’s exactly right, so we go where they go.

WS: What is your approach as a major content producer
toward user-generated content?

SWEENEY: We don’t consider it so horrible. Our approach is
to create an environment for user-generated content that still has some
editorial support to make the experience richer. We’re also connecting
different platforms, for example television and the Internet, and probably the
best example of this is actually America’s Funniest Home Videos. It is 17 years old is ABC’s longest- running
show. America’s Funniest Home Videos actually pioneered the whole user-generated genre. It was the first
public showcase for videos, and now we’ve actually leveraged that brand into an
ad-supported environment on our website so users can upload their own
masterpieces as well as watch videos from the television show.

This summer ABC’s news
division also began to leverage user-generated content in a very experimental
series called i-CAUGHT. It
really redefines the idea of a news magazine for the YouTube generation. It
lets amateurs upload their videos onto the website where everyone can see them.
And on the TV show the ABC News correspondents build news stories and features
around those videos. So we really expect a wide variety of stories from the
series—breaking news, celebrities, investigations, politics, crime, you
name it. These are the interesting moments of everyday life, and I think this
is a unique and interesting way to capture them.

WS: What would it take, in today’s crowded
multichannel environment for Disney to be interested in launching a brand new
service in the U.S. or internationally? Or do you think the VOD model is more
appealing to consumers these days as opposed to a full-fledged channel?

SWEENEY: I think it really depends on the idea. There are
some ideas that are perfect for a broad-based distribution system like a Disney
Channel. There are other ideas that may find a stronger, better life as a
broadband channel, and then there are some offerings we may do that are pure
VOD or pure SVOD, but it’s really driven by the idea. Right now, we’re
proceeding down the path of expanding our offering using all of these new
technologies, but I think the next wave will likely be launching new properties
off of these different platforms as they mature and become viable for us and
for the consumer.

WS: What has made High School Musical so successful in so many countries?

SWEENEY: The beauty of High School Musical is that it translated into all cultures across all
platforms. It delivered a group of characters and a story that connected to
real kids and real families. Disney Channel is a kid-friendly, family-inclusive
brand, and the message is, across Disney Channel—High School Musical, Hannah Montana, Cory in the House, That’s So Raven—[these shows and these characters] are inspirational.
And the channel really connects with the larger meaning of the Disney brand.

WS: In today’s media landscape, a successful property
must be exploited across many different platforms. High School Musical accomplished this.

SWEENEY: It became a franchise. This actually moved out of
the world of being a Disney Channel original movie and there was such a
tremendous appetite for it. So many kids, so many parents, so many people
wanted to keep High School Musical
with them. They wanted the music. Certainly the most gratifying thing for me
was to see this burst of theater in schools and to read the letters I’ve gotten
from parents, from kids, from drama teachers saying, “We put on High School
Musical and the line of students
went around the school during the audition. You can’t believe how this has
transformed our theater program.” When you look at the messages in High
School Musical—express
yourself, believe in yourself, follow your dreams, celebrate your
family—this is what I think people were waiting for, and this is what High
School Musical delivered for them.

It shows you that the
appeal has jumped over [and reached older viewers, too]. It was created to be
kid-friendly and family inclusive and targeted at these tweens, but it has
transcended all of that.

WS: Do you think High School Musical 2 and the issues it presents will resonate in a
similar way?

SWEENEY: The issues are not just high school issues. They
are about: do you ditch your friends? Adults have these issues too. It’s the bigger
name, [the more important person on hold] on the other line. Are you loyal to
your friends? Are you comfortable being a fake? What do you give up to succeed?
I think kids are going to love it.

WS: Has High School Musical’s cross-platform success set up a model for the
ways you would like to exploit other properties?

SWEENEY: It has in an interesting way, because High
School Musical has really caused
us to focus on one of the components of managing a franchise: how we do it at
Disney Channel, and how we do it at Disney with television properties. First of
all, by starting with great creative content, and secondly, by creating a
foundation within the organization that supports that content: a strong
marketing group, a strong PR group, that helped launch this content in its
first window.

The other thing that we
do before we launch is showcase our shows. We showcased High School Musical
1 and 2 to all of the other Disney divisions. Not only to
get input from them, but also to help them create their own launch plans,
whether it was consumer products or home video, parks and resorts, or the
theatrical division. Once we’ve launched and we have the TV results, because
we’ve done all of this legwork, we’re able to move very, very quickly on what
other ways this product should come into the marketplace.

We asked, What is the
appetite for home video? And then we did a karaoke version. We’ve done a dance
version. These are the things that we heard back from our audience. These are
the things that Kevin’s group [Kevin Brockman, the senior VP of communications
at Disney-ABC Television Group] was carefully tracking for us as stories were
appearing in the press, and as we started to hear from reporters about what
they were hearing in their communities and what they wanted to write about. All
of that was part of a larger feedback loop that came back into Disney Channel
and went into all of the other divisions and informed their product decisions.

The last piece of it is
truly the gut feeling you have about something, and I can tell you that there
was a strong gut feeling about High School Musical—that sense that something was different and
something had changed.

WS: Disney Channel boasts megahits like the
studio-produced High School Musical.
But the Italian-made Quelli dell­’­Intervallo, which has been formatted for several of the
international Disney channels, makes a very interesting story.

SWEENEY: To truly be a global-content company, you have to
recognize that great ideas and compelling storytelling can and should come from
any country. You can’t simply be a content exporter. Quelli is a perfect example of that reality. This started
as a homegrown short-form production at Disney Channel Italy, but its
phenomenal success and simple, effective storytelling made it easy for us to
take the format and stories and re-version them in other countries. The U.S.
version, As the Bell Rings,
[recently had its premiere on Disney Channel here in the U.S.], and I couldn’t
be more thrilled.

WS: Disney has been at the forefront of providing
content on various platforms. Is this as much with youth-oriented shows as it
is with network fare?

SWEENEY: Absolutely. We’ve had a subscriber video-on-demand
deal with Cablevision for quite a few years now, and we actually premiered High
School Musical and High School
Musical 2 on Cablevision’s
video-on-demand service, a little less than a week before they premiered on
Disney Channel. Cablevision was absolutely thrilled with this. We’ve done it
with episodes of television as well, because that is a service they provide to
their subscribers. We provide Playhouse Disney programming, things like High School Musical, some of our live-action scripted series, and
that’s another way to reach kids. Although, it’s very funny to hear some kids
say, “Yes, I know I can get it on VOD but I have to wait until the Disney
Channel premiere.” And then there are other kids who are absolutely thrilled to
have it earlier on VOD. Most recently, at the NCTA [National Cable & Telecommunications
Association], we announced a deal with Cox cable where they are disabling the
fast-forward button on that part of their VOD [service], so our programming can
air with commercials that won’t be skipped over, which is a move that is very
important to our advertisers, and it’s a first.

WS: Consistently, on Apple’s iTunes Store, Disney has
five or six of the top ten downloaded shows, among them Hannah Montana and The Suite Life of Zack & Cody.

SWEENEY: It’s very exciting. We were the first company to
put our shows up in the iTunes Store. I remember very well many conversations
that we had internally about this, because we couldn’t even build a business
model. It was the great unknown, but we decided to take this very good step
because as consumers, we all had a very positive relationship with our iPods.
And the idea of putting video in the iTunes Store, having seen what it looks
like on the video player, really felt to us like the right thing to do. It was
a very consumer-friendly move. And it turned out very well for us: we have six
of the top ten episodes sold on iTunes from all of our
networks.

WS: Children are among the earliest adopters of new
technology, and Playhouse Disney, Disney Channel and Toon Disney are the entry
points for your young viewers and consumers. How do you see them growing up
with Disney and ABC? And how do you want Disney to keep pace with this
generation as they grow up?

SWEENEY: We have a wonderful portfolio of services. One of
the reasons that we targeted 18- to 34-year-olds for ABC Family was really thinking
about how we move an audience from their very early days of Disney Channel into
slightly older-skewing programming on ABC Family and then moving to ABC. All of
this is driven by the shows. All of this is driven by content that people want
to see, so the great work that everybody is doing is really about being
relevant to these different audiences.