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When Viewers Talk, Scripps Listens

In a third floor office at the company's Knoxville, Tenn., headquarters, ten Scripps Networks' staffers do something fairly radical in the world of television: They interact with viewers. It's about all they do, in fact. They answer questions, provide information, keep track of which shows people like and which ones they flip past. They often wind up telling the programming execs what viewers want to see on the air.

"Viewer services is one of the keys to our close personal relationship with our viewers," said Scripps Networks president Ed Spray. "And we want to continue to build on that."

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Not a bad strategy for a company whose bread-and-butter programming - on such networks as HGTV, Food Network, Do-It-Yourself and Fine Living - is of the how-to variety and whose viewers seek more information than pure entertainment.

Indeed most of the questions fielded on the third floor range from, "What color were the draperies in that show?" to "Where can I get that dress the host was wearing?" Occasionally, a query is a bit off the wall. One viewer, having seen HGTV's Bed and Bath Design series, wanted to know, "What's the difference between a bathroom, powder room and rest room?" A Food Network watcher once said, "I was watching the Iron Chef and he made a soup using an ingredient called shark fin. What is shark fin?"

Viewers even have inquired as to the marital status of particular hosts.

Of course, there's a serious side to interacting with viewers. It's led to Scripps's programs being renewed and rescheduled, new programs being launched and it has even contributed to the creation of a new network.

In 1997, HGTV started using a more lifestyle-driven format, recalled Robyn Ulrich, one of the founders of the viewer services department and now VP of marketing for Do-It-Yourself. Calls and e-mails came flooding in from viewers who said they still wanted more step-by-step how-to programming. "Since HGTV wasn't going to program in that direction, it became more and more important and more apparent to Scripps that we needed a network to fill that need."

Hence, in 1999, DIY was launched. It's now in 13 million homes.

Scripps's viewer services department does an impressive amount of communicating, handling roughly a million inquiries thus far. Each month, it handles more than 10,000 e-mails apiece for HGTV and Food Network. The newer networks are gradually adding to the workload. DIY's total has jumped to 1,000 a month since it started covering the enthusiastic world of scrap booking, and Fine Living, launched this year, already draws 75 a month.

Viewer services also e-mails newsletters to those who opt to subscribe. HGTV has a list of about 1.5 million, Food Network has 600,000 and DIY is up to 100,000.

This little dynamo has humble roots. When Scripps launched HGTV in 1994, the network invited viewers to write in with comments or requests for information.

"In the first week, we got about 40 letters," said Ulrich, who was director of new media then. "We didn't anticipate getting mail even though we had an address up, and we thought, oh my, we've got to figure out what we're going to do here."

"It just landed in Robyn's area," said Tammy Esser, who worked for Ulrich and is now director of viewer services. "It didn't fit anywhere else, and she and I just took it upon ourselves."

There was no sophisticated software base to help store information. "We did it on a yellow notepad, keeping track of guests' contact information," Ulrich said. "If we didn't know an answer, we always wrote a viewer back. To this day, we never have let anybody go unanswered."

At first, other Scripps staffers were conscripted to make sure the mail didn't pile up. After a few months, a part-time employee was hired to answer letters and to research the answers to questions by asking producers about details of their shows.

Getting cooperation from outside producers could be tricky. "These are producers who produce for many other cable networks and are not used to supplying information like we want it, whether it was paint color, or product names," said Ron Feinbaum, VP and GM of the Scripps Networks' websites. "So we had to train the producers to work with us to supply the information. And to this day, I think we have a good relationship with all the producers, and they understand that if they work with our networks they've got to, in return, supply a certain amount of information back to us."

As the volume of mail increased, Ulrich and Esser attempted to create a phone center for the network because answering letters was so labor intensive and expensive.

"We did a time study back in '96 and came to the realization that it was costing us $5.34 to answer one viewer mail," Esser said. "So we stepped back and looked at the bigger picture to determine whether we could answer some of the questions in a more timely manner."

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When Viewers Talk, Scripps Listens

Cable World, Jan 6, 2003

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