It was January 1995, the middle of the first hell month for the six new English-language specialty channels, when Bravo! station manager Paul Gratton turned away an advertiser ready to buy airtime for 31 straight days.

Rejecting any advertiser during that bleak first year seems insane, but the potential client was a fast-food retailer running a drive-through special and the decision to send him over to MuchMusic rather than add revenue to Bravo!’s coffers was as key to the Bravo! identity as the program mix and scheduling strategy, says Gratton.

‘At the end of the day, I don’t think you can sell the specialty channels based on sheer numbers. You’ve got to sell as specific a psychographic and demographic audience as possible and the commercials must flow very well from the programming that draws them. You can’t end a classical music video with a loud fast-food commercial.’

If the advertiser felt snubbed, so be it. The decision, like all programming decisions for Bravo!, was based on the belief that to grow the channel, you have to stay true to your identity. If you’re going to be niche, be niche, with no borderline programming that dilutes the service’s identity.

‘We try never to step out of the mandate, which is to be eclectic, entertaining and informative, as well as celebratory. It’s a bit of an oxymoron, but the more you specialize, the more you open up the station to the world. Clearly defining your identity brings more people to you.’

Bravo! is sitting at a 0.4 audience share in the ratings, tied with Life Network and wtn. NCN New Country Network is at 0.6, Showcase is at 0.7 and Discovery at 0.9. With cable companies still adding channels and penetration on a slow but steady incline, it’s a solid showing considering last January’s launch, the subsequent distribution calamities, and the fact that Bravo! is a streamlined niche service, says Gratton.

‘Numbers for any specialty will be perceived as horrendous, but they’re not to us. We see them as relative to our own goals, the tool used to compare the product to itself.’

When other specialty services like Life and The Learning Channel are shifting away from vertical scheduling, themed primetime from 7:30 p.m. to 11 p.m. is the cornerstone of Bravo!’s identity. Monday is dance; Tuesday, music; Wednesday, drama; Thursday, literature; Friday, cinema; Saturday, great performances; and Sunday, visual arts, currently the highest ratings draw since a 12-week Shakespeare marathon last fall bumped Thursday and literature into second spot.

‘Too much Shakespeare didn’t work, and right now there’s a bit of overlap in places like music night and great performances, so we’re working on changing that,’ says Gratton.

Three horizontal blocks box the vertical: Bravo! Jazz, Monday to Friday between 6 p.m. and 7 p.m., BravoNews from 7-7:30 p.m., and TV Too Good For TV at 11 p.m.

Although few want to watch a full day of the same themed programming, the three-and-a-half-hour vertical sked in primetime works as a lighthouse for the specialty buried somewhere on the dial above channel 30. ‘It’s been a major challenge for any specialty to draw attention to itself,’ says Gratton.

With the tv guides, one of which only incorporated Bravo! into its regular listings six months ago, the best one can hope for is the title. The challenge becomes, says Gratton, how to get people interested in the programming.

The answer is in part in signature programming like Dame Edna, Bravo!’s highest-rated TV Too Good For TV series, which drew an average of 152,000 (three airing a week) viewers over the last eight weeks, according to A.C. Nielsen statistics. There are only so many episodes of the Dame in existence so reruns are inevitable, but the audience doesn’t wane. ‘It’s consistent with our mandate – a true cult phenomenon,’ says Gratton.

The nightly vertical schedule also works to feed viewers with an appetite for information, and the themes allow for savvy packaging arrangements, which often boost ratings in the process.

Case in point: a documentary on the life of Woody Guthrie, which brought in between 2,000 and 3,000 viewers the first two times out, rang in a 45,000 audience on the third airing when it was slotted on the coattails of Bound for Glory, the Hal Ashby-directed film about Woody Guthrie, which brought in 79,000 viewers.

Ideally, this kind of setup supports the program and ably fulfills Bravo!’s mandate to bridge the gap between the arts cognoscenti and the less knowledgeable, says Gratton.

‘We don’t want to be so reverent that we turn people off who are just learning. Our mandate isn’t to teach, but this way we are able to do more than preach to the converted and at the same time meet the needs of our core audience.’

According to Gratton, Bravo! has the freedom to pretty much schedule with blinders on. There are few cases where a microniche channel practises combative scheduling, he says.

Although Showcase and Bravo! both run a lot of movies and Gratton is ‘well aware’ that Showcase is slotting erotic movies after midnight, ‘I’m not going to start running the Kamasutra to compete. Their movie selection is more mainstream than ours, and I think at that level, we actually complement each other.’

As for a&e, a logical competitor, there isn’t enough ‘a’ on the service to stimulate combative programming, says Gratton. Yes, Pride and Prejudice put a dent in Bravo!’s Sunday night movie, but practical reasons such as having space on only one transmitter makes any kind of face-off difficult.

‘If I program against a 9 o’clock show, I show up at 6 in Vancouver, miss the boat and half the country,’ says Gratton. ‘We’re going to have to get bigger before we program head-to-head, and for now we just have to take it. For a specialty channel the emphasis is on growing.’

From the program end, Bravo! will be eyeballing the growth of its 7 p.m. arts news show, BravoNews, which launched in September. Gratton says the program is Bravo!’s mandate in a nutshell, a national snapshot of the arts scene in Canada. Ratings are ‘modest but growing,’ and The Best of BravoNews special airing on New Year’s Eve weekend generated a cumulative 71,000 viewers.

In terms of financial growth, for Bravo! and the rest of the new specialties the worst is arguably over. It goes without saying that original revenue projections haven’t materialized, but none have yet applied to the crtc for a reduction in Canadian content commitments.

Bravo! will spend $3.8 million on Canadian programming this year – one-third of year one’s revenues – en route to fulfilling a commitment to spend almost $24 million on Canadian production by the end of its seven-year licence term.

Licence fees typically run between $25,000 and $50,000, although the high end is $100,000 and the low can be less than $10,000. Bravo! never kicks in less than 15% of the budget in order to trigger related funds, and a lot depends on whether the project is a series or a one-off. ‘Each case is different, but we’re there to work with producers and put together new product,’ says Gratton.

According to Roper Reports Canada, Bravo! ranks first among the new specialties with the high-income crowd, with 51% of the Bravo! viewing households earning $50,000-plus and 24%, $75,000.

To appeal to the target audience, Gratton is looking for programming with ‘an attitude that the arts are a fundamental element of a rich life and worth celebrating.’

An original approach is mandatory, evident in programs like Bravo!’s Footnotes series, which showcases the arts internationally on a single thread – filming Swan Lake interpretations from around the world, for example.

Producers should also be mindful that the idea is to showcase the arts and the artists. ‘We don’t have hosts that teach you things, per se. We like a quick question and then a focus on the response, but there’s a tendency in the arts of the failed musician to talk too much. We want to be up close to the subject.’