I think that the strategy around FYI is really a corporate strategy, and that's that every one of our brands that we invest in have to matter and that we need to commit to building brands and investing in those brands, or we need to get out of that business.
In the media business and as a creative executive, if you don't take risks, you're dead in the water. Calculated risk-taking is essential for success.
I interned at NBC News and had a great experience there in both New York City and Washington. After graduating, I got an entry-level production job at PBS in Boston. There, I developed the bug for programming and production.
You can't manage the creative process on a quarterly basis. The way we're structured has really helped us grow.
The History brand has long been a supporter of not only our troops but organizations that support our troops.
It's always strange to get an honor from people who are the ones that should be honored.
We knew in our gut that History needed to be more than a timeline.
I think the culture and DNA of our organization is to take risks.
Successful shows will always generate great business deals in the future.
Beautycon has done an incredible job growing and evolving their business into a major player not only in the experiential marketplace, but also the digital content and ecommerce businesses.
We don't see the Lifetime brand as just a television brand. We see it as a female media brand. It has to represent what she is interested in, up and down the spectrum, in all kinds of content.
We're trying to create the connections of today that become the next generation's memories of tomorrow.
We have a powerful portfolio of brands that are well-positioned for future growth, both domestically and internationally.
In Vice, I saw all of it in one. I saw a studio. I saw a content creator. I saw an agency. I saw a distributor. We want to learn from them. They're talking to a generation we're struggling to connect to as an industry.
We've always been for women, and we always will be for women. How we express that will be fluid over time as generations move forward.
If you look at the coverage of female sports and athletics across any of the broadcasters that participate in league rights and/or sports programming, women are underrepresented, and it's a chance and an opportunity for Lifetime to support that movement and the importance of athletics and competition for girls and women.
If you're going to be a media brand and not just a linear television brand, then you have to make sure you're speaking to all women and all interests, so it may mean that you end up smaller audiences serving individual pieces of content, but the aggregate is what's important and what we're paying attention to.
We'd all like to be in the business where we don't have to report our numbers, too. You're dealing with a Netflix and an Amazon that don't have to report their viewership. They're not sharing those numbers, so how do you work with a creative entity to renegotiate future seasons when nobody has metrics?
I know that when I'm watching a drama that I love, I'm disappointed when it's over at the end of an hour.
Storytelling takes many forms, and even feature-length storytelling is often 90 minutes or two hours. There's nothing stopping us from trying to do that on a week-to-week basis.
