Lisa Gersh

World Screen Weekly, March 1, 2007

President and COO

Oxygen

As a corporate lawyer who founded a law practice with six partners back in 1986, Lisa Gersh’s transition from the world of corporate law to the cable television business wasn’t as unusual as it seems.

At some point, she realized that she liked the building of the law business more than the actual practice of a law business. “I think everyone knew that I was ready to move on and do something else in my career,” says Gersh. “I’ve always been a fairly large consumer of television—people thought it was a good match for me.”

In fact, for Gersh, now the president and COO of the female-targeted cable television network Oxygen, her experience in corporate law was a big asset when she co-founded Oxygen in 2000 with Geraldine Laybourne, the former president of Disney/ABC Cable Networks and creative founder of Nickelodeon. Gersh was the principal engineer of Oxygen’s foundation partnerships, including those with Carsey-Werner and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Productions, as well as all of the company’s financing and major MSO agreements.

Gersh’s hands-on approach towards understanding her clients and their businesses—whether it was waste management or the distribution of the soft drink business—served her well. “What you really do as a lawyer is that in order to help someone with a business problem or even litigation, your job is to understand their business as well, if not better, than they do," explains Gersh. “You become someone who’s used to rolling up their sleeves and learning about business.”

Through her work on an executive compensation case for Laybourne, now the CEO of Oxygen, the two women grew to know each other well. When Laybourne approached Gersh in 1998 about helping her get Oxygen off the ground, it wasn’t very hard to sell her on the idea. “We were a very complementary pair and it seemed like a partnership that would work even though I had very little experience in the cable business,” says Gersh.

In founding the company, Gersh says that even the name Oxygen paired itself well with the network’s mission to develop a multiplatform brand that would not limit its ability to serve young women. “We thought that some of the brands for women at the time were really pigeonholed,” she says. “The name Oxygen had a lot to do with the ability to give the creative community a [chance] to develop and an ability to breathe, and it’s an [opportunity] for the audience to breathe and expand.”

One of the first original shows that premiered on the network was the in-studio daily live series Pure Oxygen, where the network’s interactive employees were actually part of the show and created content online as the show was being aired. However, the network decided to move away from this because, according to Gersh, “it didn’t prove to be something that would deliver an audience.”

In the network’s early stages, Gersh says that the Oxygen brand was still not very defined on any platform, which also made it difficult for the network to merge the two platforms of interactive online content and television together and develop two businesses at the same time. She also acknowledges that “there were no existing business models for it” and “the technology of the interactive platform really wasn’t there.”

Now, as the company begins to “venture back into the interactive space fairly aggressively” through initiatives such as its broadband channel SheDidWhat.tv and social networking site Oomph.net, Gersh says that the network has a platform for the Oxygen brand and a more concrete brand identity. “We know who the Oxygen woman is [and] we know what the oxygen brand is, so it makes it easier to take that brand and translate it to a different platform,” she explains.

Oxygen achieved early success with original series such as the female prankster show Girls Behaving Badly, which is now in national syndication in 100 percent of the country, and its first call-in show Talk Sex with Sue Johanson. Original reality series such as The Bad Girls’ Club and The Janice Dickinson Modeling Agency are also doing well. Gersh is looking forward to the launch of Tori and Dean: Inn Love this month. “[The programming] is fun [and] it keeps evolving,” says Gersh.

Gersh has adapted her hands-on approach to understanding the needs of her clients in her corporate law practice to gauging what the Oxygen audience wants through holding over 200 focus groups a year. The key to Oxygen’s success is that it is always looking for ways to meet the needs of their constituents, which include their viewers, their affiliates and their advertisers. “We’re not just giving lip service,” says Gersh. “I think one of the reasons Oxygen has been successful, and I know for me personally, [is] the ability to really listen and not just say you’re listening. It is key—key to any business, and I think that’s what we do as a company really well.”

—By Irene Lew