Cable Able To Cash In

Cable World,  May 26, 2003  

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Lucas attributed the buzz for USA and Sci Fi last week, which are sold in a package with sister network Trio, to better-than-ever original programming at both networks.

"On the Sci Fi side we put on Taken, which averaged a 4.1 over ten nights - that's not cume, it's average, which is amazing from a network that when we sold the [2002] upfront and sold Taken, was doing a .6," Lucas said. "At USA, we put on Dead Zone, which was the highest premiere in basic cable ever, and we put on Monk, which was the highest-rated drama in its first season, higher than [FX's] The Shield, and was then repurposed by ABC. So we fulfilled our promise, we put on quality programming. People took a gamble, they went with us, they had a good year and we had a great year. Now this upfront's here and we're selling what we put on the air last year and what we're putting more on the air of this year, which is quality, original programming."

USA has just aired its final Eco-Challenge, a sports franchise from Survivor producer Mark Burnett that was a magnet for product placement. But Lucas said a new show conceived by Universal Studio's in-house production arm Reveille, run by former William Morris agent Ben Silverman, generated heavy buzz among buyers last week interested in product-placement opportunities on USA. Lucas has been pitching advertisers interested in the hot home makeover challenge category with Silverman's concept Dream House (working title). "It involves four houses on a cul-de-sac, and four families compete room by room to overcome different challenges in order to put each room together, and it will run over an eight to ten week period," Lucas commented late last week. "They get judged by experts on-site, and the winner gets to keep the house. So if you win a certain challenge Home Depot comes in and does the next room for you while you sit in the hot tub, and all the other families get pissed off. Ben only came up with this two weeks ago, so we weren't able to present it before the upfront, but we're now close to signing Home Depot."

Discovery Networks ad sales president Joe Abruzzese, who last year joined Discovery from CBS, was also surprised by the size of last week's broadcast upfront.

"I didn't realize that the network business would get that far sold out, and now they're even more sold out than they were last year, which is pretty incredible," the ad sales veteran commented on Friday. "A lot of it appears to be scatter money moving forward, some of it's organic growth, and some of it's speculation. With that said, the growth that I'm seeing in the cable budgets is outpacing the network budgets. What we're seeing in the cable budgets are anywhere from 30% to 40% more dollars, whereas the network piece is probably 10% up, which is still incredible. So it looks like cable is still getting more volume increase. I think maybe only a few [cable] networks will come close to the broadcast network CPM increases, but cable doesn't need to because our ratings are going up."