Exclusive Interview: Anne Sweeney

PREMIUM: MIPCOM 2011 Personality of the Year Anne Sweeney talks to World Screen Newsflash about deepening viewers’ engagement with Disney/ABC shows, enhancing the linear television experience, creating multiple revenue streams for broadcast networks and finding the next Disney Channel stars.

As technology continues to serve up new platforms and devices, some media executives have been nervous or complacent about finding additional ways to satisfy viewers’ desire to enjoy content wherever and whenever they want. Not Anne Sweeney. As co-chairman of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, she is at the helm of a team that continues to explore possibilities in the digital world, from the groundbreaking deal with Apple in 2005 that made episodes of some ABC shows available for purchase on iTunes, to streaming episodes online on ABC.com, to creating apps for the iPad. She has also made significant deals to turn broadcast television into a multi-revenue business. For these and many other accomplishments, she has been named MIPCOM 2011 Personality of the Year.

WS: What have you learned about how consumers are viewing content?
SWEENEY: We’re really seeing the continuing evolution of television and we know our consumers want flexibility. This is the demand that’s driving multi-stream viewing. They want access to their content on whatever their platform of choice is, whether it’s a TV, a PC, a mobile phone or, most recently, an iPad, as well as on our digital platforms—ABC.com’s full episode player and the ABC Player iPad app. The majority of the viewing takes place in the first week an episode is available. So this tells us that we’re still seeing the digital platforms being used primarily as a catch-up tool allowing people to watch episodes that they’ve missed. Continuing the evolution of putting our content on other platforms, we started to develop iPad apps. We created the Grey’s Anatomy Sync app, the Oscars Backstage Pass app and the ABC Family Chatterbox app. There were really three key reasons to do these. The first was to create real stickiness with our viewers. The second was to deepen their engagement with our shows and our brand, and the third was to enhance the linear television experience. We’ve launched all of these apps over the last 12 to 18 months, and more than anything it tells me how innovative our team is and how prepared they are to take risks to deliver their content in new ways that would be compelling to our audience. A couple of our apps have been nominated for Emmy Awards, which has been very exciting for everyone, but we’re really focused on creating technology that changes our business and improves the production of our content. And believe it or not, our television group has more than 20 technology innovations that are patent pending right now. The ABC Player iPad app launched the day the iPad was available in stores.

WS: You’re finding that all of this viewing off the network is incremental, right?
SWEENEY: Yes. We do research constantly on this, we still see that it’s incremental. Even though the iPad app has been downloaded more than 2.5 million times and we’ve clocked about 40 million episode starts to date, the viewing remains incremental.

WS: Has it been a challenge to get advertisers to follow your programming from the linear channel to ABC.com?
SWEENEY: You know what’s so interesting, after we announced the iTunes deal, my phone of course lit up like a Christmas tree. We were getting phone calls from our broadcast affiliates, from advertisers, from a myriad of our business partners. The phone call was, “I understand why you did this, but whatever you do next, put us in the mix. Plan to take us with you.” So six months later, we launched the ABC full episode player and we did a beta test for 60 days. We invited ten of our broadcast affiliates and ten advertisers in and we said, “We’re going to be doing research throughout. We’ll share all of the research with the people who came into the test and then we’ll decide whether this is a good idea or not.” One of the great things about that test is we all learned together that this was a very good idea and we saw going forward what we needed to do to make it a great experience.

WS: ABC has also made deals with Netflix. Tell us about those deals, and can over-the-top services be a friend to a broadcaster or a cable network?
SWEENEY: The key is really to be experimental, and when getting into a deal with Netflix, making sure we give ourselves the ability to do shorter-term deals that allow us to look at the results and to study our consumers and see how they’re using these services. So as a content provider we see any viable method of commercially and securely delivering our content to consumers as good. So the key going forward is really establishing business models that provide us with a fair return on our investment, and we’ve been very careful about determining which content to experiment with on these platforms.

WS: You launched ABC TV On Demand last year on BT Vision in the U.K. Do you have plans to launch more on-demand services in other territories?
SWEENEY: We do, and actually I love the ABC TV On Demand backstory. Ben Pyne’s [the president of global distribution at Disney Media Networks] team, led by Catherine Powell, came to me one day with the idea of ABC TV On Demand. We’re always very cost-conscious in our business and I loved the idea but I said, “OK, great. Wonderful. Figure out how to do it within your budget.” And they went off and developed the technology and today we’re on BT Vision in the U.K., having launched in September of 2010. In March of this year we launched the service in Portugal with ZON Videoclube, followed by Germany with Vodafone in April, and we hope to announce more launches in European markets in the next few months.

WS: It used to be that many in the media business considered cable and satellite services better positioned in today’s very fragmented marketplace because they had a dual revenue stream, while broadcast TV was considered weaker because it only has advertising. But how is the view of broadcast TV changing and how are retransmission and affiliate license fees making broadcast healthier?
SWEENEY: You hit the nail on the head. The retransmission consent fees, the fees from the licensees from affiliates, have made the broadcast-television business a multi-revenue-stream business for the first time in history. Just in the past year we closed some groundbreaking deals with Cablevision, Time Warner Cable and Verizon. We see that these operators now recognize the value of our broadcast content with cash compensation for retransmission. We’ve also reinvented our relationship with our ABC affiliates. We really have established an unprecedented level of collaboration with them and our recent agreements with our affiliates across the country ensure that we’ll realize greater revenue from their success going forward as well. We’ve also done something that is fascinating and hasn’t been done before, but I’m happy to say we’re leading the charge. We’ve created something called an inventory exchange system [which offers each ABC station the opportunity to buy commercial slots in shows that air on the ABC network at an appropriate price for their particular market], thus allowing the network and the affiliates to maximize the monetization of ad inventory. We’ve really injected entrepreneurial thinking and market dynamics into a model that hasn’t changed literally for 60 years. This will basically allow the broadcast network and the affiliates to look at the value of the commercial time and have an exchange system where whoever has the most opportunity can derive the most value.

WS: What has Paul Lee, the president of the ABC Entertainment Group, been preparing for this fall season?
SWEENEY: Well, Paul had a very ambitious and I believe very successful development season. He has put together a strong schedule that balances the stability of some of our hits with some very big creative swings. When you look at the roster of talent that he’s attracted to ABC…it’s a very, very exciting time for ABC the network and ABC Studios. In fact, we’re going to be showcasing the world premiere of one of our mid-season shows, Missing, at MIPCOM. We have, of course, paid very close attention to social media and we have very, very positive buzz on Twitter and Facebook and other social-networking sites.

WS: It is fascinating to see that Facebook and Twitter and other social media are creating opportunities to reach your viewers in ways that you didn’t have a few years ago.
SWEENEY: Yes, it’s fascinating to us. Once Upon a Time, which is a new ABC Studios show, really earned the most praise in social media when we gauged it against the number of impressions. Good Christian Belles is another one that is getting enormous buzz, and this was weeks and weeks before they went on the air.

WS: What role is ABC News playing in offering consumers news on multiple platforms?
SWEENEY: News is actually the perfect content for the digital era because its value is in its timeliness. People want to stay connected to what’s happening in the world….We were early movers in the digital space with ABCNews.com. We have an iPad app, which delivers ABC-quality journalism and a very customizable user experience. We’re also leveraging social media to bring viewers the stories they care about and to engage them in those stories…. During the 2008 presidential election we partnered with Facebook to bring real-time insight into the campaigns and the candidates’ debate. And during the Michael Jackson memorial, I feel that ABC News took our efforts in that online community to a whole new level. We made it possible for users to link to ABCNews.com, participate in polls about Michael Jackson’s legacy and watch video-on-demand clips of the service that were posted throughout the day. They could also share their memories of Michael Jackson with other members of the online community that were created on that page. So it’s not just about delivering the news, it’s about engaging people in news and encouraging the conversation.

WS: ABC Family has some very successful shows. Wasn’t Paul Lee the one who started the whole original-programming thrust on ABC Family? Has that strategy paid off?
SWEENEY: Oh, very much so. Paul was the president and really founder of this millennial strategy, and Kate Juergens is our head of programming who developed all of these shows. The Walt Disney Company bought what was the Fox Family Channel ten years ago. The first thing we always look for is the gap—we look for what’s missing in the landscape—and we realized that there was a huge group of viewers who were being overlooked and underserved. It’s that young-adult demo; they had aged out of Disney Channel but they hadn’t fully aged into ABC. We called them the millennial generation. They’re the kids between the ages of 14 and 34 who grew up…in this digitally enabled world. They’re very tech savvy, they’re a driving force in social networking and they’re also the largest generation in the history of the U.S. There are 86 million of them, which also makes them a huge consumer force, and this offers wonderful opportunities to our advertisers. So we paired great content with technology, and ABC Family became a true social network. It became the first TV network not only to give viewers the shows that resonated with them, but it also gave them the social-media interactivity. This is very important because those millennials thrive on social interactivity and they have an expectation that it will be part of entertainment. So at ABC Family, we engage our viewers before, during and after our shows via Facebook, Twitter, ABCFamily.com and other sites. We knew from our viewers that The Secret Life of the American Teenager was a hit long before the ratings came in because we saw hundreds of thousands of viewers go online to talk about the show right after it aired. It actually crashed our website in the process—always a good sign!

We see ABC Family as an area of potential growth [internationally]. Its shows have been selling very well outside of the U.S.

WS: What growth opportunities do you see for the Disney channels?
SWEENEY: We just launched Disney Channel in Korea. We have the Disney Junior U.S. launch coming, and there were ten international Disney Juniors that preceded the launch in the U.S. That has been a wonderful learning opportunity for us. All of these international channels are doing extremely well. They have been very experimental and I love the fact that we have the U.S. learning from all of those launches.

WS: What growth opportunities do you see for the Disney channels?  What prompted the decision to launch Disney Junior?
SWEENEY: Well, it made sense. We had a very strong Disney Channel, we had launched Disney XD, which is our boy-focused, girl-inclusive service, and we also had a third service called SOAPNet where we were seeing performance issues related to the availability of the audience for the soap operas. So we made the decision to convert SOAPNet to Disney Junior in the U.S. again, because we had so much learning and great experiences from the Disney Juniors that had launched around the world. The Disney Junior brand is very closely aligned with the overall mission of the company’s preschool business. It’s also a wonderful thing for parents to have 24 hours of preschool programming available to them every day.

WS: What growth opportunities do you see for the Disney channels?  Disney Channel has had great success with live-action series for tweens and has set the bar so high for the genre. But many of the stars are now aging out of the demographic, so how do you seek out and develop new talent and shows?
SWEENEY: What Gary Marsh [the president and chief creative officer of Disney Channels Worldwide] and his team have done so artfully is find the right stories and pair them with the right stars all in an effort to enrich kids’ and families’ lives. These are great stories with relatable characters, and on the production side, this strategy has also provided wonderful opportunities for some very talented performers to follow their dreams across multiple Disney businesses. You only have to look at Miley Cyrus’s recording career or even Hilary Duff in her Lizzie McGuire years—there have been many wonderful successes. We have an amazing casting team that searches for talent every single day. Diversity is always at the forefront of their efforts because we really want viewers to see themselves. We want them to see their families and their cultures on television, so we look for talent all over the world to create content that’s global as well as localized for our 100-plus channels out there.

WS: What growth opportunities do you see for the Disney channels? And, of course, kids aren’t only watching TV, so how are you reaching out to them beyond the TV screen?
SWEENEY: The first thing we do is put them first. The reason we have done well is that we put our viewers ahead of our business model, and really learn how they’re using our content. The strategy plays out in different ways based on the content of the target audience and our goals. The recent premiere of the Disney Channel original movie Phineas and Ferb: Across the 2nd Dimension is a perfect example of how we leverage content across multiple platforms to maximize our performance. We made previews of the movie available a couple of days before the television premiere and we did it through our Disney on Demand VOD service. When the movie officially premiered on Disney Channel in August, it did so with a video simulcast on Sprint and Mobitv mobile devices. Several months before the premiere, Disney­Channel.com and DisneyXD.com had invited users to visit an enhanced Phineas and Ferb supersite complete with all of the new interactive content and games that became available during the summer. We were operating on multiple platforms, not just to create excitement for the movie, but also to continue the excitement through the premiere and after the premiere.

WS: You’re being given the Personality of the Year award at MIPCOM. What does this recognition mean to you?
SWEENEY: First of all, it’s an incredible honor. I spent more than 20 years working in the international television arena, and it’s been a great experience. To be recognized in this way is just extremely gratifying. But the best part to me is that it gives me a huge platform to publicly acknowledge, thank and celebrate everyone in the Disney/ABC Television Group and our Disney Media Networks team. They create the best content in the world. They continue to develop new and innovative business models and they are just a wonderful group of people that I’m privileged to work with.