Nick Celebrates Milestones

This year, Nickelodeon celebrates its 30th anniversary as a premier destination for children. From delivering fun animation to live-action series for tweens, from specials on important issues in the news to influential  prosocial campaigns, Nickelodeon has made it its mission to put kids first. Along the way, the Viacom-owned channel has created some of the biggest hits in the children’s television business, including SpongeBob SquarePants, which marks its tenth birthday with a host of special programming this month. The brainchild of creator Steve Hillenburg, the series has emerged as a pop-culture phenomenon with 70 million viewers monthly. It has been the number-one animated program with kids 2 to 11 for more than seven consecutive years, and is seen in more than 170 countries in 25 languages.

To commemorate the landmark anniversary of the show, which premiered July 17, 1999, Nickelodeon is set to roll out the Ultimate SpongeBob SpongeBash Weekend from July 17 to 19. The 50-hour event will include 11 SpongeBob premieres and a top ten countdown of celebrities’ favorite SpongeBob episodes. Sister channel VH1 is also getting in on the act with Square Roots: The Story of SpongeBob SquarePants, a documentary from critically acclaimed producers Creadon O’Malley (Wordplay, I.O.U.S.A).

Cyma Zarghami, the president of Nickelodeon and MTVN Kids and Family Group, recently spoke to TV Kids about the channel’s achievements.

TV KIDS: What do you consider to be Nick’s biggest accomplishments in the last 30 years?
ZARGHAMI: The general accomplishments are our ascent to being the number one kids’ channel and our ability to stay there for 14 years, the relationship that we have with our audience, the idea that we have given kids a voice since the very beginning, and the sense of innovation and reinvention that keeps us evolving year in and year out.

TV KIDS: How has the strategy of putting kids first helped Nick?
ZARGHAMI: The sheer focus of a mission like that guarantees that we never take our eye off of our consumer. That does a lot of things: it creates a filter, a mission and a set of criteria that you can always measure yourself against. Because that is one of the tricky things, as you become a bigger, more mature business, if and when you take your eye off your focus, you do lose your way. Nickelodeon has never lost its way.

TV KIDS: Acquisitions have always been a part of Nick’s schedule. What role do they still play?
ZARGHAMI: It’s interesting because I’d divide it into three phases. Phase one of Nickelodeon’s evolution, in the early days, it was primarily an acquisitions-based schedule that added a few originals where it could to help define the brand. Phase two was, what we couldn’t make ourselves, we bought. Now, we are in phase three and the lines are really blurry between what is licensed versus what is originally produced. Because of the way the acquisitions model is evolving, programming comes to us before it gets made. So it’s really about putting together the most effective portfolio of programs and less about what you can buy and what you can make.

It’s still easier, however, to buy things for the preschool segment and the grownup segment of the audience than it is for the core Nickelodeon audience. We have cut our teeth on the big kids’ programming and have become the premier producer of shows for the 6- to 14-year-old audience, so it’s hard to find something that fits into that bucket, but periodically there are some great things that have come our way. H2O: Just Add Water is an example of that. There have also been animated series along the way. We’re filling the Nicktoons schedule with acquired animated properties.

TV KIDS: What are you learning about your viewers from the website? Are they doing more than just playing games?
ZARGHAMI: They are. They use it in a variety of ways. Games are social networking for kids: Sharing games, playing games, communicating about games. In many ways it is a form of social networking, and that’s one of the things that we think is exciting about [the website] AddictingGames as we move forward. They also love the connection between TV and digital. And the more times that we can connect the two together, the more exciting the experience becomes. So for our Kids’ Choice Awards show, we got 80 million votes online. For Kids Pick the President, millions of kids voted. iCarly.com—you leave the TV show and you get added-value content on the website. It makes the experience bigger than what one of the platforms on its own can offer and that is what kids get excited about. We can see the spikes in usage every time we do something that is really connected.

TV KIDS: How do you roll out a property like iCarly across multiple platforms?
ZARGHAMI: The great thing about iCarly is that from the start, the website was an organic component of a narrative show. And that’s what made it special. When you find something as innovative as that, and it works, then that is truly exciting in our business.

There are so many things about iCarly that resonate with the consumer. One, it’s a great comedy. Two, it does have this added component that allows kids to go back and forth between the website and the show and it features a complex idea but a really exciting idea: a show within a show. The talent is extraordinary. It’s one of those shows that has broken out of the pack. So you can assume that with this kind of success, the show is going to live longer than other live-action properties might.

When the consumer starts to ask for products, then we know that we should do something different, and the consumer is definitely asking for iCarly stuff. We introduced electronics into the marketplace at the end of last year. And they seem to really strike a chord.

When a property like iCarly, which is now almost a household name, gets an incredible audience every week and has this other element that is extremely popular, the website iCarly.com, then it feels like there is an opportunity to give the consumer more in multiple places. That is how we go about it. Then you have to stay true to what the property is. Again, it is a show that is steeped in digital. It’s a comedy and it has characters that are really resonating, so we take the combination of those three things and try to make the best possible products that we can and put them in front of the consumer.

TV KIDS: What have been some of your favorite moments at Nick?
ZARGHAMI: I believe we are about to have some of our favorite moments at Nick because the first generation of Nickelodeon consumers is now [having families]. This means that we are on the eve of having a dialogue with the first generation of Nickelodeon families. That is incredibly exciting and incredibly challenging for us because while our DNA is about putting kids first, our brand now has the opportunity to expand to include audiences that are adjacent to kids—parents and slightly older kids who have just outgrown the Nickelodeon demo—with [offerings] like Spectacular and TEENick. The best is yet to come, and with 50 years in our sights now that we have turned 30, there are some exciting things ahead!