FOCUS ON LIFESTYLE
The crew from FYI’s Epic Meal Empire made the move from webseries to cable TV.
“People often come to television to be entertained, and they go to the web on a more purposeful level, to try and find answers, directions or inspiration.”
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“They fall in love with the characters and what they learned from them, and they get to apply it themselves. So if it’s watching Stacy London on Love, Lust or Run and hearing a fashion or make-up tip, they are voracious about that because they’re learning how to apply it themselves.” What’s working for lifestyle particularly well, says Lewers, is producing targeted content for specific platforms rather than merely repurposing material made for a linear TV show. The exec – previously a senior VP of programming for Discovery – only made the move to TLC in February, but identifies his top priority as getting involved much earlier in pre-production. “I’m now digging into shows we are in development on and in production on and getting embedded while we’re making them, so we can build and harness materials and content that we can use on other platforms and actually influence that content,” says Lewers. Over at Canadian specialty channel W Network, there has been a similarly concerted, multi-pronged push into the digital lifestyle space. The first stage came in September 2014, when parent company Corus Entertainment
invested heavily in the Santa Monica-based lifestyle digital media firm Kin and its corresponding multichannel network Kin Community. “That signaled a desire for us to expand in a more purposeful way into the digital space, with content that was created specifically for the platform and was a little bit broader in terms of interest and categories than what we currently had on W,” says John MacDonald, the VP of television and head of Corus Women and Family at Corus Entertainment. The next step was this February’s launch of W View and W Dish. While the former is billed as a “first of its kind, digital video hub for women” that features content from various contributors, including Kin Community as well as original commissions, the latter is a lifestyle-focused site with recipes, articles and pop culture items targeting women between the ages of 25 and 44. “People often come to television to be entertained, and they go to the web on a more purposeful [level], to try and find answers, directions or inspiration,” says MacDonald. “I think the flexibility of the web to allow for content to be as long as it needs to be – rather than adhering to a schedule like a TV network – does lend itself to more task-driven lifestyle inspiration.”
ON THE TALENT TIP Another strategy increasingly popular among lifestyle networks has been recruiting talent from the digital space in the hopes that these personalities will bring their followings – which can be in the millions – to either the brand’s digital platform, or to a linear show itself. “They have a one-to-one relationship with many of the fans,” says MacDonald. “You can send emails and comments to talent that publish
March / April ‘15
2015-03-24 2:48 PM