Almost lost in the coverage of Canwest’s much-publicized troubles is the success the media giant has had with its specialties, both homegrown and those acquired in 2008 from Alliance Atlantis.

As in the U.S., where viewers and advertisers alike are migrating to cable in record numbers, specialty in Canada continues to grow. Compared to conventional, it’s still a maturing business, and given that it’s still largely free of its bigger sibling’s addiction to primetime numbers, specialty is a platform with the freedom to experiment with scheduling, programming and audience targeting in a way that would seem heretical on conventional.

At Canwest, one programmer who has helped shape the network’s success is Daniel Eves, VP, strategic programming, specialty. Eves oversees the scheduling and acquisitions strategy for 10 services – Showcase, History Television, TVtropolis, National Geographic Channel, Showcase Action, Showcase Diva, IFC, MovieTime, Mystery TV and Deja View. More impressively perhaps, his channels represent three of the top 10 analog specialties (History, Showcase and TVtrop) and seven of the top 10 digital specialty channels in Canada (Action, Diva, Nat Geo, Mystery, MovieTime, IFC and Deja View).

Perhaps it’s because he has such a wide mandate that Eves tries to keep his approach simple. ‘We work in the industry so, obviously, we love TV,’ he notes, ‘but you can get wrapped up in your own services… It’s very much about making sure you have the right brand so viewers know what the channel is, and then your next goal is to get into their surfing rotation.’

That’s Eves’ mantra – get into the surfing rotation – become one of those three or four channels viewers default to after they’ve checked out what conventional has on offer.

And getting there means fighting the urge to think like a conventional.

‘One of the things I learned early on was that there was a real counter-logic,’ says Eves of his approach. ‘There is this prevailing belief that exclusive is always better, new is always better, and it’s not necessarily true. New is great when you have the newest, biggest hit show – and on conventional, it’s the priority. But on a lot of digitals, it is about giving people what they love.’

Give people what they want, when they want it… Where have you heard that lately? To really get behind the logic of specialty, you need to think about it in the same way you would on-demand, or even online. There are plenty of common references – for example, most viewers don’t stick with the service for hours in a day, or necessarily even show up every day. They drop in when they want a dose of the particular type of content they expect to find there, and then they move on.

Easy access to that content, therefore, is critical. For online or on-demand, that means a digital interface. For linear broadcast on specialty, it means program repetition.

‘If you look at a couple of the grids,’ observes Eves, ‘you might say: ‘How can you schedule the same show two hours apart?’ It sounds bad and it looks bad, but it’s not, because of the way people come to the channel.’

Given that much of specialty’s audience is driven by sampling, and that even a hit on most services will leave a huge potential audience remaining, repetition is key for getting the most mileage out of shows, both for program investment and for branding. (Eves notes that 6 and 9 o’clock are often an especially good pairing.)

It would be easy to be swayed from that logic by complaints of critics or die-hard viewers who find repetition annoying, but it’s for the greater good.

‘There is a whole audience who will never write in and never complain, they just will or won’t watch depending on what you do,’ says Eves. ‘But if they stop and watch, and then they do that again next week, and then the next, suddenly you have expanded your surfing rotation audience… If you bring them back, you start to grow a network.

‘It’s all habitual. You create the habit by having the type of content they want. If you only have the show once and then you never air it again, you’re never going to get those people who are just going by, and you are not going to build the habit. So, it is acknowledging both those audiences and trying to address them, which is always the challenge.’

Much of what Eves does appears to be a question of balance. It’s certainly true when it comes to acquisitions, especially given that, for many of the services he programs for, new acquisitions can be older series and programs. That presents both complication and opportunity.

When it comes to classics, says Eves, ‘I’ve found that audiences come in quickly at the start because they are interested in reliving it, or seeing it again. But then they grow bored with it as well. If you pick the right older show, you have a nice nostalgic factor at the start, but it dies really quickly.’

Capturing that momentum is critical when it comes to creating new viewing habits. ‘Moving an audience on a successful channel is the best way to get audiences into other products on your service,’ says Eves. ‘Big marketing budgets are great, but it’s really hard to make that penetration. If you are pulling big viewers to that channel who like that type of content, you should be able to move them into, or at least get them to sample, a product that they haven’t heard of before.

‘[Being able to] move the audience around the service is one of the best benefits of having a mix [of programming], whether it is movies or repeat series, or even U.S. original series – even when there is a ton of press around them, they are still brand new. Launching something brand new on conventional is difficult, and on specialty it is really difficult. So, being able to move the audiences between well-known products into new product is really the best way to be able to make something a big success.’

The test comes in knowing how far you can push the mix before it flies apart. When it comes to well-defined brands such as National Geographic or History, Eves knows he has to work within a very specific mandate in order to meet strong viewer expectations. For some of the other services, however, he tries to be a little more flexible. ‘You want to be unique enough to stand in the market,’ he observes, ‘but you’re really not trying to target just these people who like that type of product.’

Outside of Canada’s genre-delineated broadcast licence world, it’s not uncommon for services to chase new niches and markets, and wander far from the original promise of the brand. A case in point being the History Channel in the U.S., which turned to primetime reality series such as Ice Road Truckers in order to attract a younger demo. It’s hard to argue against the enormous numbers and viewer shift the series helped generate, but many die-hards believe it pulled the channel too far from its remit. (Ice Road Truckers premiered on History in Canada in March of this year.)

While Canadian specialty licences limit the degree to which programmers can wander, they don’t change the fact that, unlike conventional, specialty services can have a distinct life cycle. The length of that cycle varies according to the brand, but in order to thrive services sometimes need to morph, adapt or entirely change as time progresses.

‘I always approach it as a sort of a puzzle,’ notes Eves of his schedule tinkering. ‘That’s ultimately what it is. You have all these components: What is the licence? What does it allow? What does it not allow? What content is actually available? What is missing in the market? What can you do? How can you put that together? Are there things that are not being served?

‘I think when you first launch a specialty, you start out being very tight – ‘This is what it has to be.’ And [if you] then cap out on your audience, you realize you have an option: Do you grow or do you stay where you are and never change? Obviously, as a business, you always want to grow. So then the challenge becomes what is the next step to carry your traditional audience along and expand?

‘The ones that work are the ones that successfully grow – and they might have to change their brand or expand it, but then it begins to stand for something new.’

Ultimately, services need that opportunity for growth, or they need to change. Consider Lonestar as an example of one such radical makeover in the face of stagnation. Launched as a westerns service in 2001, the Canwest channel got a refresh in October of last year to become MovieTime. In looking at that example, Eves notes the problem was that there was simply not enough new programming to feed the channel in a meaningful way. (Insert Bonanza joke here…)

‘Ultimately, I think what you want,’ says Eves, ‘whether it is my services or specialty in general, is that there is a home for all types of successful product. There is nothing worse than turning away something great just because you think, ‘Oh, it can’t fit.’

‘If you are always turning it away, then you are probably missing a market, or a channel or a theme, or something must not be right.’

After all, what kind of a puzzle would it be if it were simple?

Pragmatic programming

‘At the end of the day, a great show always turns out to be successful. There are ones that people will say, ‘Well, I wish the audience was bigger.’ Ultimately, it probably wasn’t bigger because the audience that loved it was as big as the audience was going to be. I loved Arrested Development, but it did as well as it was ever going to do.

‘I don’t think there are shows that get missed or lost, ultimately. They really do for the most part hit what they are hitting. There are a few shows that I put on the schedule, with limited promotion, and they launch huge. That’s just because intrinsically it was obviously of interest to a ton of people… And then there are ones that have mass promotion, or publicity and no one samples it in the first place. And then you know it is not about growing or not growing, it is about the concept, the idea, what they saw – they just didn’t have an interest there.’ ~ Daniel Eves