People Interview: Crowning Achievement
Armed with family fare, veteran TV executive leads new Hallmark Channel into competitive cable world.
By DARRELL SATZMAN
Staff Reporter
Having just taken over as president and chief executive of the Hallmark Channel, Lana Corbi is faced with taking a brand known more for greeting cards and turning it into a force on the cable landscape.
Corbi, a Los Angeles native and one of the highest ranking minority women in Hollywood, left her job as president of network distribution at Fox Television in 1999 to become chief operating officer of Crown Media’s Odyssey Network. Hallmark Cards Inc. has a 66 percent equity interest in Crown Media, and in August, the formerly Christian-oriented cable network was re-branded as the Hallmark Channel. Corbi was then tapped for her current position and charged with leading the drive to double the channel’s domestic reach to upwards of 80 million households.
With a mixture of syndicated programming and offerings from Hallmark’s library, including several decades worth of Hallmark Hall of Fame original movies, the channel improved its prime time ratings by 33 percent in 2001, although it still commands less than 1 percent of the television audience.
Question: Hallmark is trying to make its name on family-friendly programming. What’s the philosophy behind that?
Answer: People can find a family-friendly environment by cutting and pasting together various program offerings across the dial, but not a channel where you can turn it on in the morning and you can leave it on all day. It is wholesome television.
Q: Is there a demand for more wholesome programming?
A: Television has moved further and further towards pushing the envelope in the other direction. We have come to a point where there has to be a push back. Not that we won’t see more in the area of profanity and violence and sex and all of that, but it’s not going to come as easily. People want to enjoy television as a family, or even individually, without being assaulted by things you may not welcome in your home.
Q: It sounds like you intend to produce more shows.
A: We just hired a very well known production programming executive named Dave Kenin. He has had a brilliant career and track record in building up the USA Network, launching the Sci-Fi Network. He was president of CBS Sports and he’s had a long career in both cable and broadcasting. What we’re doing is defining a strategy that will dictate what kind of original programming we want to launch, both in movies and series television. And what kind of acquisitions we want to make.
Q: How will programming change?
A: The backbone of our program schedule is our movies. We have a primetime movie, a midnight movie, a noon movie. Those movie blocks are the primary expression of the brand. They come from the Hallmark library, which has 4,000 or so titles including the Hallmark Hall of Fame collection. The programs that we are pursuing now are compatible with that brand and that tone.
Q: Anything in particular we should look for this year?
A: We have a series that is coming out, produced by Hallmark, on adoption. Each week it tracks a family that goes through the process of domestic adoption. We’re getting ready for the 25th anniversary of Roots. We have the exclusive rights to the whole series and we are going to be running it in its entirety.
Q: Since launching as the Hallmark Channel, the network has grown. How was that accomplished?
A: Last year we grew by 58 percent, 16 million viewers, from 27.5 million to 43 million. We did deals with some of the major (satellite operators) in 2001. We had deals with AT & T; and Time Warner, and they continued to roll us out more broadly. We did a deal with DirecTV. We were all ready on the family package and they rolled us down into (the basic package). That was a huge increase for us.
Q: How hard is it for a smaller network to get widespread distribution?
A: It’s difficult. We are essentially carving out a path that not many people have been down. There are a lot of smaller, niche services, but not many attached to a brand. There are a lot of big brands, the Disney channels, the Discovery channels, that have much greater leverage because of their assets. We’re coming down the road and clearing the rubble in front of us because we are a major brand that’s well recognized and trusted but we don’t have a lot of the same leverage points that other big brands have.
Q: How do you overcome that?
A: We’re forging new relationships with advertisers to put their brand and our brand together in a way that provides value to both of us. And we’re providing value to our distributors, both through our primary channel as well as through a digital offering we have developed that provides video greetings and interactive programming from Hallmark.
Q: So Hallmark wants to be involved in interactive TV?
A: The cable operators are investing billions of dollars to rebuild their systems. What they are trying to do is not just provide more channels but to provide more value to their customers through telephone service and interactive offerings. We want to be represented on that landscape.
Q: The Odyssey Network was launched to broadcast Christian programming. Does the Hallmark Channel also have a Christian orientation?
A: Once we launched as Hallmark channel, we became a general entertainment, very broad-based family-friendly network. We maintain a relationship with the National Interfaith Cable Coalition, which was one of our original partners. They are partners now in our parent company and we have a production relationship with them. But we are producing broader commercial, general entertainment programming that has a values base but is not necessarily religious programming.
Q: With the advertising slump and the slow economy, it could not have been the easiest year to launch.
A: Despite the fact that it was a soft ad market, we were up about 30 percent (in 2001 over 2000). Most people were really scrambling just to stay even last year, and some came in significantly below where they had been a year ago, so for us to be growing at the rate at which we are growing was excellent.
Q: What are trends to look for in the cable industry in 2002?
A: I think we will continue to see consolidation. We will continue to see creative partnerships because you can’t do business as usual in an environment that is not usual. Since Hallmark first invested in the channel in late 1998, the market has changed significantly. It’s a very crowded market place and the cost of doing business is much higher.
Q: Why is that?
A: If you are single network and you don’t have all the other assets you don’t have a broadcast network, you don’t have sports rights that you can use as leverage to gain carriage then there’s a cost. The rate at which you are coming to terms in these deals, which have various structures, is high enough that it really cancels out much of the initial subscriber revenue the channel would enjoy.
Q: Tell me about your efforts to help promote the V-Chip.
A: The V-Chip exists, it’s mandated, it’s on every television set today. The problem is that people don’t know it’s there, they don’t know how to use it and they don’t know why it’s there. (Hallmark) thought we could take a position and help educate viewers, not to tell people what to watch but to say “You have a choice, you can take control in your own household.”
Q: How do you respond to complaints from politicians and others about the negative impact of some television programming?
A: I think it is fair criticism because television can have a negative effect. That has been documented by many people and organizations and I don’t think anyone would argue with that. So the government is saying this is an issue and there is an impact on kids. Our role in this is to provide an alternative.
Lana Corbi
Title: President and chief executive
Organization: Crown Media U.S.
Born: Los Angeles, 1955
Education: Bachelor’s degree in journalism from USC. Attended graduate school in film and television at Cal State Northridge
Career Turning Point: Entrepreneurial stint developing a marketing business in partnership with Dow Jones
Hobbies: Spending time with family
Personal: Married with 14-month-old twins
