Exclusive Interview: Nancy Dubuc

When A&E Television Networks (AETN) announced last year it was acquiring Lifetime Networks, Nancy Dubuc took on a whole new programming remit and audience demographic. Along­side managing the HISTORY brand, with its very popular linear and digital assets and extensive educational outreach initiatives, Dubuc is now charged with breathing new life into Lifetime, a top TV brand for women that of late has been feeling the pressure of competition from a number of other channels. Dubuc, the president and general manager of HISTORY and Lifetime, is confident that the lessons she and her team learned while propelling HISTORY into the top five cable channels in the U.S. can be successfully applied to Lifetime.

WS: What can you tell us about your plans for Lifetime?
DUBUC: It’s very early days for me on Lifetime but I can say that Lifetime has the same brand gravitas that many of the AETN portfolio brands have. It’s a pioneer in cable much the way that A&E and HISTORY were, so I see it fitting incredibly well into the overall portfolio of this company. I have no doubt in my mind that we will do to Lifetime what we did to A&E and then what we did to HISTORY. Lifetime is tailor-made for it and it’s a brand that women connect to. It resonates with women and has for decades. There are some programming challenges at Lifetime, but that’s where the teams here shine, when they are given a challenge to come up with creative, innovative, entertaining programs that speak to the audience that is relevant to that brand. That is a process; it’s a creative process. We’re looking closely at how we express that brand and I can’t speak to that yet, but I’m hoping that by the end of the year we will have a very strong handle on the way we talk about the brand, the way we are going to visualize our brand on air, and the kinds of programs that will be representative of how we want people to relate to and experience the brand.

WS: Certainly adding a strong female target to the mix of what AETN can offer advertisers can only work to your advantage.
DUBUC: Of course, it’s a beautiful fit inside the portfolio. We’re very, very fortunate. We’re not like many of our competitors where there is a tremendous amount of overlap between the channels and therefore there is cannibalization. We have very clear swim lanes here! HISTORY feeds a very hard-to-reach upscale male audience. A&E is one of the strongest adult networks in all of cable. And Lifetime is the strongest female brand in all of cable.

WS: Despite the recession, last year was not a bad year for HISTORY. How have you been working with advertisers?
DUBUC: We had one of our best years ever. This is a real testament to Abbe Raven, AETN’s president and CEO. Throughout a very difficult economic year, we stayed focused on our priority, which was investing in our core programming. We needed to maintain those investments because we were going to come out of this downturn and if you don’t provide viewers with the kind of programming that they’ve come to expect, then you really can find yourself in a bad place when times are turning around. She led the [way], biting the bullet when times were difficult and we are [seeing many of the] benefits now. Our ratings success last year helped carry us through a very, very difficult year and we are seeing a lot of share strength in the market right now because of our success last year and our continued success this year. No longer can you look at HISTORY and see it as an anomaly. It has earned its place in that top tier of cable networks and not only its place as a top-rated network, but a brand that advertisers want to be associated with.

WS: HISTORY turned 15 this year. What has been the greatest contribution HISTORY has made to the TV landscape?
DUBUC: Yes, the opportunity to be all things history to consumers both digitally and on linear is a huge, huge honor and one that we take very seriously. To be able to be part of the force that is putting history as a subject at the forefront of people’s minds and to be part of the force that is helping to create and support a dialogue about why history is so important—not only that we learn from our history, but also that we acknowledge that history is happening around us every day—is a responsibility we take very, very seriously. That goes hand in hand with every brand discussion, every programming discussion, every business discussion that we ever have.

WS: What objectives did you have in mind with ambitious projects like The People Speak, or America: The Story of Us?
DUBUC: These are real tent poles of the History brand. We have a business to run and it was our goal to create appointment-
viewing series that keep audiences tuned to us day-in and day-out. We have succeeded in that strategy with many, many of the hit series that we have launched throughout the last three or four years. But in addition, one of our secret weapons is the strength of our specials. We do about 40 specials a year, that’s 80 hours of programming. These specials need to stand as the definitive record of the subjects they cover. America: The Story of Us was incredibly ambitious for us, not only financially, but also from a scheduling standpoint. We couldn’t be more thrilled with the response that we’ve gotten from it: the successful ratings, the recognition from our peers through Emmy nominations, as well as recognition from educators, as we have distributed the DVD of the series to every school and accredited college in America. The response both critically and performance-wise validates our belief that people have an appetite for history. People come to us for history and the way that we translate and communicate these important stories of our times is widely accepted. Anything that gets people to sit up and think about their human story is a good thing.

WS: You made a commitment to move HISTORY into the top five cable networks in the U.S. How did you achieve this?
DUBUC: We’ve been among the top five since June and feel pretty confident that we’ll finish the year there. We did it with appointment viewing series, tent-pole event specials and the innovative programming that every day this team challenges itself to do. We are one of the only voices in the TV landscape that audiences come to for quality information that’s authentic and entertaining.

WS: How do you maintain a channel’s strengths but broaden its appeal so it reaches new and maybe younger viewers, while not alienating the core audience?
DUBUC: One of the things we talk about a lot is just how much that question remains a part of our daily dialogue. Our job involves more than creating innovative programming and shaping the brand as audiences’ tastes evolve. At the heart of what we do every day is finding a balance between growth, the brand equity that we have and quality. It’s really portfolio management, that’s how we refer to it. We need to make sure that we are true to who we are, but we also recognize that who we are is evolving, and that is a natural progression, but at the core, we’re still an information-driven brand, a history-driven brand.

People come to us for factual entertainment. And it’s that balance of the factual part with the entertainment part that we watch every day. Sometimes we overshoot it and sometimes we hit it square down the middle. But I believe if you are not trying and pushing then you are not growing and evolving. There are so many options for consumers in the media landscape these days. The risk of losing your brand is far greater if you stand still and think that you don’t have to push creative boundaries, than if you take risks and are innovative.

WS: Nowadays we have many sources of 24-hour news, whether online or on TV. There’s a need sometimes to sit back and have events explained and put into context.
DUBUC: We talk about putting events into perspective and giving context to stories every day and that’s what we do—it’s one of the veins of our heart that we take subjects that people know and give the context of the larger story, what its implications were and how it affected everything around it. Stories, quite honestly, evolve throughout history. The more we learn, the more we know, the more needs to be told and we are constantly looking for those next chapters, that next generation of this continuously unfolding onion that we all are part of.

WS: Would you say that viewers’ expectations of HISTORY today are different from what they were, say, five years ago?
DUBUC: Yes, and whenever you have the kind of success that we have, viewers constantly expect more. It’s the human nature of our business. People like to be entertained and once they’ve experienced that, they want the next thing. That’s just television and I believe it’s the point of entry for everything that we do. As soon as you have a hit show, if you’re not thinking about what that next hit show is going to be, you are going to fail. We’re in a very fortunate place to have a lot of shows to lean on, but believe me the dialogue around here is not about those shows. The dialogue around here is about what’s coming next. We are really evangelical about that because I believe in my heart it’s what keeps us successful and it’s what keeps us a strong team—because we own that responsibility. One of the things that we talk about a lot is it’s great to herald your best year ever, but we are in the business of having the best year ever every year. So how do you keep that engine moving, not only from a business standpoint but from a viewer standpoint as well? Viewers tend to start to expect a certain level of performance of us. Now for me, performance might be a real numerical performance, looking at budgets and looking at ratings. Performance for viewers is the entertaining side of the word, they want to be entertained and they are waiting to see what we do next. We need to feed the beast, yet at the same time keep the ideas coming at a pace at which viewers understand and come to expect that they are always going to get something new from us.

WS: How important has online become not only in allowing viewers to view video but also to support the programming you offer on the linear channel?
DUBUC: We have a unique opportunity here because our brand is a niche genre unto itself, history, which allows us to have a site that isn’t just a marketing arm of the channel. We rebuilt History.com all last year and launched it this year in connection with America: The Story of Us. Our vision for History.com is a video resource for all topics of history—events, people, places, things—and it’s a never-ending resource that can be augmented on a daily basis. We continue to build the number of pages and sites and video portals for everything related to history. I see the site as an unbelievable resource, not necessarily as a marketing extension for the channel. While there are places on the site to go to for a deeper dive into our shows, really what we hope people are doing is going to our site and looking up “Civil War,” for example, and immersing themselves in all the interactive elements: maps, journals, videos, text information, and really getting a sense of the fun of exploring that topic on their own, in the order in which they want to, in a way in which they want to. A linear experience of the Civil War on our channel would be very passive and one-way. On History.com, viewers are allowed to become much more interactive, they can immerse themselves in the content the way they want to and in a way that they control.

We’ve seen tremendous success with interactive elements on History.com. We launched the Ultimate History Quiz around America: The Story of Us and the growth for the Ultimate History Quiz was exponentially larger than what we had expected. That is really thrilling for us because it sends a very clear signal from consumers that we have a very clean and clear place in the market that they are enjoying.

WS: Why have education and outreach initiatives always been important?
DUBUC: It is just part of who we are, it’s part of the DNA, quite honestly, of AETN. Outreach and education were important legacies at A&E originally through our programs like Biography. Then when HISTORY blossomed out of A&E, it just was a natural extension, not only because it’s such an important part of AETN’s culture but there is also such an obvious subject connection and opportunity. We represent not only the genre of history, but we also represent an academic discipline and it’s important to work with that community and give them the access and expertise that we have to help move different techniques of education into the next century.

WS: Besides programming, how important is marketing in driving viewership of a channel like HISTORY?
DUBUC: It’s critical. Chris Moseley, our head of marketing, has a great line, “Programming is the great story and marketing is the story about the great story.” Marketing is a reflection of our core job, which is to produce great shows, but marketing is also the voice of what the overall HISTORY brand is. Marketing has a job not only to drive tune-in to specific shows, but it has the burden of making sure that people have a sense of what our brand reflects and what it represents. We’ve done a great job in the last year of really making HISTORY feel like a destination. There is a three-dimensional aspect to a lot of promos now—the way the logo interacts with on-air talent, the way the propel arrow works throughout our on-air elements—so that you have a real sense of place when you watch our network, we feel like a destination. You even see it reflected in one of our brand spots that we call “The Factory,” whose premise is that we are a place, a factory, and we make things. And the four walls around us create a destination for viewers. The History Made Every Day campaign has done an unbelievable job of helping to express what we are trying to convey through programming and it’s also helping to express that history is a living, breathing story that’s around us every day. Sometimes it’s a reflection of something that happened 2,000 years ago and sometimes it’s a reflection of what’s happening right now.