Stuart Snyder

For years, Cartoon Network has been offering fun, sometimes goofy, always action-packed animated series attracting boys in droves, both to the linear channel and to the website. But in the last few months, following changes and additions to the schedule, including original productions and key acquisitions, ratings have soared. Stuart Snyder, the president and COO of Turner Broadcasting’s Animation, Young Adults and Kids Media group, tells TV Kids about how the new strategy has paid off.

TV KIDS: Children have so many entertainment choices, how do you keep them coming back to the network?

SNYDER: We’ve had a really clear strategy in 2008. We started destination blocks for kids one night at a time. We launched Har Har Tharsdays, our franchise of comedy programming for Thursday nights. We invested in the shows and the way we go about promoting them is very original, very fresh and very unpredictable. So that unto itself is of entertainment value for kids. Thursday is all about creating a destination night for great comedies. We have on air right now 6teen, which is one of our up-and-coming shows, and Chowder and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, which have just been great hits for us. Total Drama Island broke all kinds of records. It was our most popular series overall in 2008. We recently aired the finale of the series and it earned our best prime-time performance of the year.

The next thing we did was launch Friday night as our action-adventure destination. And that started with our acquisition of Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which really solidified our Friday night strategy of action-adventure fantasy. And around Star Wars we have other great shows like Ben 10: Alien Force, which has been a key franchise for Cartoon Network for many years now. And then we also launched The Secret Saturdays and Batman: The Brave and the Bold. So that block is another example of a destination evening with programming for kids.
We also premiered a Sunday movie night called Flicks at 7 o’clock each week. That came from a strategy of getting mom and dad and kids to watch movies together. And I’m really pleased that it’s worked, because our co-viewing numbers have increased dramatically on that night. We know that the moms and dads are watching these movies with kids. We’ve had some very good, exciting ratings successes this year.

TV KIDS: Are acquisitions becoming more important for Cartoon Network?
SNYDER: Acquisitions are a core strategy of our business. They play an important role in our schedule and we look for content on a global basis that fits our worldwide strategy. Adina Pitt heads up our acquisition efforts. Total Drama Island was an acquisition. We saw that show early on and really fell in love with it. At the end of the day, I believe in great content, and it really can come from anywhere—any company and from any part of the world. We look at acquisitions from a global standpoint. We work with our Cartoon Network international team as well, so we look for shows that can work not just in the U.S., but also on a worldwide basis. 

TV KIDS: Live-action and animated movies have become a big part of your schedule. Tell me a bit about your strategy.

SNYDER: Flicks was an important strategy for us to establish a movie night. And it’s a co-viewing opportunity for kids and parents. We believe that movies provide a wonderful event destination for kids. If you look back over the years, Ben 10: Race Against Time was a huge success for us; at the time it broke all of our records. Movies will continue to play an important role [in our schedule]. We’ve already announced two live-action movies that are going to be on the network in 2009: a sequel to Ben 10: Race Against Time that is going to be a live-action version of Ben 10: Alien Force. I’m also very excited about Scooby-Doo: The Beginning, a live-action movie about the beginning of Scooby-Doo and the mystery gang. These are our two big premieres for the fall of [this] year. We’ve also announced in development a live-action CGI movie called Tiger’s Apprentice [based on the best-selling young-adult book by Laurence Yep] that will premiere in 2010. And we’ve announced a development slate based on comic-book titles that will include the animated movies Firebreather and Mice Templar and the live-action movie The Vanishers. The movies will continue to play an important role for the network for multiple reasons. They reinforce event programming, but in addition, the right movie could bring a fresh audience to the network as well.

TV KIDS: Is co-viewing reaching out to the girl segment of the audience as well?

SNYDER: The good news is that our numbers with girls have increased over the past year. Girls have really reacted well to shows like Total Drama Island, for example, and to 6teen and Star Wars. We’ve seen those numbers increase and we’re very pleased with that. The co-viewing aspect [first occurred] with Star Wars—both moms and dads, but primarily it’s been dads who are showing up and watching the shows, either with their sons or their daughters or both. Star Wars is a multigenerational-type show. And it’s amazing how many moms are showing up for Chowder and Flapjack. We’ve heard from them saying, “We love sitting down with our kids to watch those shows.” Both are over-indexing with moms for us. And last but not least, going back to movie night, we are seeing co-viewing there. We don’t purposely set out for every show to become a co-viewing opportunity, but certainly with the movies and on Star Wars we saw a great potential for co-viewing. The co-viewing for comedy shows is just the icing on the cake. Because it really says that parents are going to watch that content and are enjoying the jokes as well.

TV KIDS: I would imagine that the Scooby-Doo live-action movie is going to bring in all sorts of people. The longevity of that property is amazing.

SNYDER: The popularity of Scooby-Doo is incredible. George Lucas has said that Star Wars appeals to kids 8 to 80, but I feel Scooby-Doo also appeals to this wide audience. Parents, kids, older kids, teenagers, Scooby-Doo has such a wide fan base and we’re so excited about the movie. We think it has the potential to cross all demos as well. We’ve also noticed more tweens watching Cartoon Network over the past year. We know that if we air the right programming, diverse audiences are showing up.

TV KIDS: If you have the right programs you can extend them across multiple platforms. How has your online business been?

SNYDER: I’m very excited and pleased with the job that we’re doing with the online side. First of all, for the past five months we’ve had more unique visitors than Nick.com, and in the last three months, more than DisneyChannel.com. From a competitive standpoint, I’m pleased that we’re doing well. It’s the seventh consecutive year that we’ve been the leader in average time spent online, [beating] our competition. We have approximately 6 million unique visitors on any given month on CartoonNetwork.com.

We are excelling at [offering] compelling gaming and an immersive experience for kids on CartoonNetwork.com. It’s not just about watching video, which is there and we certainly have tons of video streams. But we’re really bringing game play and unique game play. We had more than 2 billion game plays in 2008.

We launched a very exciting innovative product called Game Creator. This enables kids to go on CartoonNetwork.com and create a game. We launched it with the brand Ben 10, and we’ve had more than 3 million fan-generated games posted based on the Ben 10 Game Creator. Total Drama Island is an example of a show that truly was immersive beyond linear television. It was the first animated reality show on television, and kids got caught up in the characters and went to TotalDramaIsland.com to follow up on the continuing stories and watch video beyond the linear show, and also to play games. We saw hits on TotalDramaIsland.com go up before, during and after the show aired. There was a real connection back and forth between tele­vision and online.

Last but not least, from the standpoint of our new-media efforts, FusionFall is Cartoon Network’s first MMOG [massively multiplayer online game]. It was in open beta [for a while] and officially launched January 14, but this has been a project that we’ve been working on for more than two years. We’re very pleased with the initial results. The feedback has been incredible. The game is about saving the universe. You’re the hero of the game—you and all the characters from Cartoon Network save the universe from a bunch of bad guys. It is our biggest game effort ever in the history of our network.