Fresh Breath: Oxygen Gets Upfronts Underway
Oxygen doesn’t just have fellow women’s nets Lifetime and WE in its sights. Pres Lisa Gersh said the net is now matching the viewer profiles of E!, Bravo and VH1 and took pains ("without naming names") to position her net as younger and funnier than other women’s nets. Oxygen kicked off the upfront season yesterday, getting things off to a very early start (not only January, but 8:30am) as well as hosting its 1st-ever upfront presentation. A big part of its message to advertisers is that it has a young, upscale female demo, noting that women pay 84% of all bills and are tech savvy. "Double your client base with us in the next 12 months," Gersh challenged buyers, saying that Oxygen did over $100mln in ad sales business last year. Oxygen just launched social networking site Oomph.net and its first broadband channel, SheDidWhat.tv. "We want to figure out this multiscreen world with you," Gersh told buyers. Oomph seeks to unite women through shared interests, while SheDidWhat provides on demand net programming clips and original series, such as "Our Bodies, Myself." Linear highlights include reality pilots "Adfight" (competing ad agency teams) and "Homefield Advantage" (Deion Sanders’ wife’s travails raising her family in small town Prosper, TX). The TV arm of Quentin Tarantino’s prod co will produce movie "Everything but the Girl." Oxygen’s development slate included 3 scripted series. Among them is "Angry Little Girls," an animated half hour based on Lela Lee’s book. Previous specials, "Mo’Nique’s F.A.T. Chance" and "Fight Girls," will return this summer as series. In the Oh-No-You-Aren’t dept, programming pres Debby Beece said Oxygen will be in the delivery room filming during pregnant Tori Spelling’s upcoming bed & breakfast reality series. Ewww…—Foxxy move having A-lister Jamie Foxx come in at the end of the event to sing and tickle the ivories (and the female-skewed crowd). Funny to see Janice Dickinson head out into the audience and rip the shirt off some random media exec—turned out the rippling, muscle-bound man was a model who had been hired for the gig.
