Oprah admits her OWN faults and mistakes
When Oprah Winfrey signed off her iconic talk show, she ruled daytime television. Today, as her cable network flounders, she is admitting mistakes and even expressing a little regret.
For the Queen of Talk, it was far from a royal week. Oprah Winfrey, whose syndicated talk show made her a cultural juggernaut for years, was in New York last week before her most important audience: potential advertisers who will decide how many more seasons her struggling cable network has to promote her mantra to “live your best life.”
The “queen of talk,” who admitted in a CBS interview last week to “101 mistakes” in launching the Oprah Winfrey Network last year, came out fighting with a new slate of reality shows to revamp the channel and boost its lacklustre ratings.
Winfrey thanked the media buyers who crowded a Lincoln Center theatre for their support during what she called “the climb of my life.” Now, after “restructuring and rightsizing,” the network is ready to move forward, she said. “I feel now like you can see the summit.”
OWN unveiled new prime time shows to convince advertisers that Winfrey’s formula of uplifting programs will attract more viewers. They include a reality series about army wives in Alaska and another in which a married couple balance a family business and their sextuplets.
So far, her mix of interviews and feel-good programs has left the key audience of 25- to 54-year-old women less than thrilled. Ratings among them for the 15-month-old OWN are about what they were for the Discovery Health channel it replaced.
Last month, OWN, a joint venture with Discovery Communications Inc., laid off 30 staff and cancelled its heavily hyped Rosie O’donnell talk show that it had hoped would provide a ratings boost.
OWN’S stumbles have struck the network to its core. The aspirational message that fuelled Winfrey’s hugely successful syndicated daytime talk show for 25 years is not translating to a mass audience for the 24hour channel.
“On cable, the networks that work are far from aspirational,” said Brad Adgate, an analyst at advertising agency Horizon Media, pointing to shows such as Keeping Up With the Kardashians or the Real Housewives series.
“It has been difficult for aspirational shows (and) networks to get on track,” he said.
OWN did see a recent ratings boost as Winfrey added more airtime. At the end of March, the network reported a 21 per cent ratings increase for the first quarter compared with last year, with an average of 180,000 daily viewers.
The network’s mostwatched recent programs were Winfrey’s interviews with Whitney Houston’s family, Lady Gaga, rocker Steven Tyler and megachurch pastor Joel Osteen.
But few of OWN’S other programs have built audiences. Over the past year, the network averaged 50,000 viewers among women ages 25 to 54, slightly less than the 51,000 Discovery Health averaged in its last year, according to Nielsen data provided by Horizon Media.
Those numbers were less than the 98,000 women ages 25 to 54 who watched the male-skewing Spike TV, or the 69,000 who watched the Travel Channel during the same time period.
“As with any cable startup, it is going to take time” to build audiences, OWN president Erik Logan said before the network’s pitch to ad buyers.
The channel will stick with the uplifting menu, he insisted.
Earlier last week, in an interview with the CBS program The Early Show, Winfrey admitted she had been ill prepared for the venture.
“The idea of creating a network was something that I’d wanted to do, had I’d known that it was this difficult, I might have done something else,” she told the morning program.
Winfrey, 58, had appeared unstoppable in her career with a 25-year reign on The Oprah Winfrey Show, but when questioned about whether she seriously would have never taken on the project, she replied, “Oh absolutely.”
“I did not think it was going to be easy . . . but if I knew then what I know now I might have made some different choices. I would say if I was writing a book about it, I could call the book 101 mistakes.”
Within the top five mistakes?
“Launching when we really were not ready to launch,” she said. “It’s like having the wedding when you know you are not ready and you are walking down the aisle, and you are saying, ‘I don’t know . . . maybe we should have postponed it.’ ”
Now she realizes she should have waited to launch the network until she finished her duties hosting The Oprah Winfrey Show, which ended in May 2011.
The harsh reality of TV life is that time may be running short for Oprah to use OWN as the platform from which she trumpets her message. Although Discovery says it has no intention of killing the channel, not everyone thinks OWN will reverse its decline.
“I’m not sure the channel makes it unless it expands its base beyond the aspirational, Oprah-type brand,” said Robert Thompson, a professor of TV and popular culture at Syracuse University.
“They need to find their Jersey Shore, the show that will make people come to watch them,” he said. “When MTV started doing Road Rules, people at first said, ‘Where are the music videos?’ Now, they have very successfully rebranded themselves.”
For now, advertisers are sticking with the doyenne of talk. Early sponsors have reaffirmed their commitment to the network, OWN’S Logan said and General Motors Co. said it planned to continue advertising on the channel.
“It will take a little more time to achieve the expectations that she initially set,” said Andy Donchin, director of national broadcasting for ad buying agency Carat North America, which has bought time on OWN for clients. “It’s hard to bet against her because almost everything she touched turned to gold.”
Winfrey says she remains committed, not only to the network, but to the idea behind it. When asked if audiences would see more of her, she replied, “I said from the beginning, this channel can’t be based upon me, it has to be based upon my philosophy, my ideas” and vowed not to end the network or her general life aims.
“I believe that I am here to fulfil a calling, that because I am a female who is African-american who has been so blessed in the world, there is never going to be a time to quit,” she said.
The channel’s inspirational tone will still fit in with its early aims as a TV version of her O magazine, she said.
“I will die in the midst of doing what I love to do and that is using my voice and using my life to try to inspire other people to live the best of theirs.”