Viacom-owned cable network the National Network is getting new leadership and a new target audience: men.
Albie Hecht, president of film and TV entertainment at Nickelodeon and TNN, will assume the role of president of TNN. Diane Robina, senior vp and general manager of TNN, will exit the network, and her position will be terminated. She is exploring other opportunities with Viacom, according to the company.
TNN will abandon its billing as a destination for young adults and reposition itself as television's first channel for men. The move effectively puts Viacom out of the general-entertainment cable network business.
"Lifetime has a clearly established niche with women," Hecht said. "We want to do the same for men."
Since coming over to Viacom in the merger with CBS in 2000, the TNN brand has been in near-constant flux. Known as the Nashville Network when it featured country-flavored programming, MTV Networks renamed it the National Network and gave it a more mainstream focus with the tagline "We've got pop." That catchphrase was eventually scrapped, and the network was rechristened the New TNN. The network's name and on-air look may be changed yet again, Hecht said.
"It points out the difficulty in branding a network that's already been established," said Brad Adgate, senior vp and director of research at Horizon Media. "Now it just seems like TNN is going back to the drawing board."
By heavily investing in youth-friendly programming -- including three World Wrestling Entertainment series, "Star Trek: The Next Generation" and "CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" -- Viacom engineered a steep drop in the median age of its audience from 55 to 36, the lowest among general-entertainment nets. But both WWE and "Star Trek" faded last year, dropping TNN's 18-49 primetime viewership from 714,000 in the first quarter to 592,000 in the fourth quarter, according to Horizon research.
With men composing 60% of TNN's viewership, Hecht believes the new focus is more of a natural evolution than a radical shift. "We're building off a terrific base of male-skewing programming," he said. "We'll be fine-tuning our on-air look and branding to where we've naturally been going."
Although better known for his hand in launching successful Nickelodeon properties like "SpongeBob SquarePants," Hecht has overseen development on many of its recent original series, including "Slamball" and "Oblivious." None have been big ratings draws, but he has higher hopes for upcoming originals he expects to establish, including an animation block with the returning Nickelodeon classic "Ren & Stimpy" and a video game-themed awards special.
TNN will announce additional new original programming in the coming months, which could mean some portion of the existing schedule is on the way out. "There may be things that disappear," Hecht said, declining to specify particular programs.
Wrestling will still play a key role for TNN. The network's average primetime rating last year among males 18-34 was a 0.71, according to Nielsen; without wrestling in the lineup, that figure drops 34%.
But with the WWE flagship series "Raw" down 17% in households versus the previous year, wrestling may not make the ideal foundation.
"USA had one of the biggest hits in cable for many years with wrestling but found it as impossible as TNN is to build upon it," USA Network president Doug Herzog said. "It's a very particular audience that comes for a very particular thing, and they aren't interested in anything else."
Although TNN is staking a claim as the first male-targeted network, it's not entirely without precedent. Boasting the tagline "It's a guy thing," TBS remade itself as an entertainment haven for men three years ago.
But in 2001, the network backed off from the positioning in part because it alienated such major female-friendly advertisers as Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, according to an executive familiar with the situation.
"A lot of advertisers were not happy," the source said. "Suddenly there were problems selling that position to the marketplace."
But Hecht believes that marketing TNN to men won't necessarily exclude women, citing top-rated Lifetime's audience, which is 30% male. "Women will still be in the mix on this network," he said.
A 10-year veteran of MTV Networks, Hecht will continue to oversee Nickelodeon's film division. He will relinquish development duties for Nickelodeon's TV arm to Cyma Zarghami, executive vp and general manager of Nickelodeon. Both will report to Herb Scannell, president of Nickelodeon, TV Land and TNN.
Still uncertain is the fate of Robina, who has been the chief architect of TNN's transformation under Viacom's auspices since 2000.
TNN will still get plenty of competition from cable networks that skew heavily male, including Comedy Central, the History Channel and especially ESPN. In addition, several digital networks with the same positioning are reportedly in the works.