Lisa Hsia

Following Her Digital True North

Bravo is blessed with an audience that is very passionate and is determined to get their point across. And that engagement is my "True North"

Lisa Hsia began her career as a traditional journalist, producing Emmy Award winning news programs and documentary films. She travelled the globe as a producer for Katie Couric and Diane Sawyer and depicted what was happening through a lens of reporting and storytelling.

Those were the old days or journalism when the reporter’s vision was the governing spirit behind the story. Pre-twitter, 24-hour news cycle, citizen journalism.

“When I worked in news, I thought of it as a higher calling - a service - that I was drawn to,” Hsia explains. “It was about telling great stories, informing the world about what’s going on and giving context. Technology has really sped up that process because people know instantly what’s going on.”

Today, Hsia is Senior Vice President of Bravo Digital Media where she doesn’t tell stories – she provides interactive experiences. And she clearly loves the digital whirlwind around her.

Hsia is quick to note that she didn’t have the “foresight” to move into digital media. In 2005, in an unexpected confluence of events, she left news and was offered a position at Bravo. Her directive: to grow and develop the network’s digital media components. Put more simply, there was a digital “space” and she was supposed to figure out what to do with it.

“It didn’t feel like a gift at the time,” Hsia says of her unplanned career shift. Nevertheless, the change has been “transformational.”

Hsia is thriving in the viral, constantly changing world of digital media. “There is so much going on it’s a daily managing of priorities – what are we capable of pulling off, given staff and financial constraints?”

Five years ago, Bravo’s website was primarily a marketing site with a program schedule and other basic information. As an experiment early on, the network posed a question to viewers about who should win on one of their contest reality shows. Over 100,000 people voted in a matter of minutes. Hsia paid close attention.

“Bravo fans like to share. They are very opinionated,” she says. “Bravo is blessed with an audience that is very passionate and are determined to get their point across. And that engagement is my ‘Truth North’.”

Hsia describes Bravo users as 60% female, urban, affluent and early adopters of new technology. They are “super digitally engaged:” They tweet, they blog, they’re on Facebook. One of her favorite research segmentation groups is the “PTA trendsetters” – soccer moms with killer apps on their iPhones.

“I always have the faces of the users in mind when we’re building things,” Hsia says. “And everything is done with their experience in mind. What do they want to do? What do they get from the interaction? Will they take a gander to this innovation?”

Hsia continually experiments on multiple platforms to keep users seamlessly engaged with Bravo. She worked with “one-screen” technology using the cable remote to interact with content, which resulted in 25% audience participation. That evolved into the Infoframe, on-screen technology that enhances user interaction through polls, trivia and other activities, which allowed both program and commercial to be interactive using your mobile phone.

Interactive offerings like this have intrigued advertisers and have helped drive the financial success of Bravo’s digital businesses.

One of Hsia’s major focuses in the last year has been on Bravo fans that want conversation in real-time. She noted that when Kanye West stormed the MTV Video Music Awards stage last year to “dis” Taylor Swift, everyone was instantly in on that viral conversation. “Social media drove that on-air rating big time.”

So whether it be driving fans to viewing parties via their “Talk Bubble” or streaming the premiere party of “The Real Housewives of New Jersey” on Ustream, Bravo threw themselves full force into the Twitter sphere, pushing social media virality front and center.

While Hsia is enjoying this wild digital ride, she says her finesse with the market did not come naturally. She recently completed her MBA at Columbia University, where she hoped to acquire the business acumen necessary to move Bravo forward. But the most critical knowledge she gained through earning that degree came from an unexpected source.

“I learned the most from my classmates,” Hsia says. “Microeconomics and corporate finance are useful, but watching my 20 and 30-something friends and how entrenched digital media is in their everyday lives is a learning seminar in itself. The live in a richly digital world.”

Hsia holds a supremely positive vision of what the world will soon look like. She sees the future as “platform agnostic,” meaning a television show is not just for television. “It can exist on our phone, in your book, on your wine bottle. It can live in many different places. Content and Bravo as a lifestyle brand will be everywhere.”

“There will be multiple screens taking you out into your life.”