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From: The New York Times

Rivals Unafraid to Borrow, or Steal, From Each Other
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: February 23, 2009

Early in his tenure as chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Michael
Eisner said he became so frustrated with the competitive advantage
that Nickelodeon held over the Disney Channel among young cable
viewers that he set about poaching a cadre of Nickelodeon executives,
including Rich Ross, who now oversees the Disney Channel.

The cast of "Glen Martin DDS," about an eccentric dentist's family,
which will start on Nick at Nite this summer.
"Although Disney has its own ethos," Mr. Eisner said in a recent
interview, "Nickelodeon was a model."

For Nickelodeon, it seems, turnabout has been fair play. Cyma
Zarghami, the longtime president of Nickelodeon, has been fighting
some of the recent successes of the Disney Channel — including the
hit series "Hannah Montana" and the "High School Musical" movie
franchise — with some Disney fairy dust of her own.

This summer, in its prime-time Nick at Nite program block,
Nickelodeon will introduce "Glenn Martin DDS," an animated series
about the dysfunctional family of an eccentric dentist that was
presented to Ms. Zarghami by Mr. Eisner, who left Disney in 2005 and
now works part time as an independent producer.

Next month Nickelodeon will introduce "Penguins of Madagascar," a
Saturday-morning animated series featuring some of the characters of
the "Madagascar" movies, which was brought to Nickelodeon by Jeffrey
Katzenberg, who is now chief executive of DreamWorks Animation but
who was for many years the head of Disney Studios. And in the most
direct, tip-of-the-mouse-ears to its rival, Nickelodeon began trying
to build its own "High School Musical" when "Spectacular" — an
original, feel-good musical about a high school show choir — had its
premiere on Nickelodeon on Feb. 16.

"I think they tapped into a genre that had been sleepy," Ms. Zarghami
said, referring to the global audience that Disney has corralled
with "High School Musical." "Now, it's a genre that is open for
everybody."

While much of Nickelodeon's daytime and weekend night programming is
aimed at children 2 to 16, those efforts — which Ms. Zarghami, 46,
has led for nearly a decade — have produced grown-up revenue.

Viacom, the parent of Nickelodeon, does not disclose the channel's
earnings, but the research company SNL Kagan estimates the combined
revenues of Nickelodeon and Nick at Nite to have been $2 billion in
2008. That, by Kagan's math, represented an increase of nearly $140
million, or 7.4 percent, over 2007, and $240 million, or 13.7
percent, over 2006.

And yet, however much she may be nodding to Disney, Ms. Zarghami's
broad strategy for the main Nickelodeon channel has centered on the
philosophy that has guided Nickelodeon since soon after its founding
three decades ago: capturing viewers from "cradle to grave," as Judy
McGrath, the chairwoman of MTV Networks (and Ms. Zarghami's boss) put
it in a recent interview.

As "Hannah Montana" became a phenomenon on the Disney Channel, Ms.
Zarghami found a means of counterattack within Nickelodeon's own
stable: she built a show, "iCarly," around the actress Miranda
Cosgrove, then 14 and a co-star of the hit Nickelodeon series "Drake
and Josh."

That move has paid off: last year, according to Nielsen Media
Research, each episode of "iCarly" drew an average of 2.6 million
viewers, nearly 350,000 more than "Hannah Montana," though still not
as many as "SpongeBob SquarePants," the goofy cartoon that has
anchored the Nickelodeon lineup for a decade. (Because both channels
show multiple episodes from their series throughout the day, those
averages include original episodes and repeats.)

In an effort to build on the success of "iCarly," Ms. Zarghami
introduced the series "True Jackson VP" last fall. It stars Keke
Palmer as a 15-year-old executive in a fashion company. With each
episode drawing an average of 2.2 million viewers since September,
according to Nielsen, the audience of "True Jackson" has itself been
competitive with "Hannah Montana." "True" has, however, lagged
behind "The Suite Life on Deck," a recent spinoff of Disney's "Suite
Life of Zack and Cody."

In a further indication of how hard it can be to replicate the Disney
buzz, the estimated 3.3 million viewers who tuned in to the premiere
of "Spectacular!" on Nickelodeon on Feb. 16 represented about 1.3
million fewer than watched the premiere of a competing original
movie, "Dadnapped," on the Disney Channel at the same time.

Meanwhile, to ensure that the parents of children tuning in to
Nickelodeon's daytime fare gather together in front of the TV at
night, Ms. Zarghami added the syndicated series "George Lopez" to the
Nick at Nite lineup in September 2007. It was originally shown on ABC
but struggled to find an audience.

To put the success of Ms. Zarghami's bet on "George Lopez" in
perspective, consider that the 1.4 million viewers who, on average,
watched each episode of the series on Nick at Nite in 2008
represented more than twice as many as watched "Sex and the City" in
syndication on TBS, and nearly three times as many as watched "The
Sopranos" on A&E, according to Nielsen.

When asked by phone recently whether he could have imagined doing so
well against such competition, Mr. Lopez said, "I'm not as beautiful
as the women on `Sex and the City,' but I am as dysfunctional."

He added, "It was a risk that a show that wasn't incredibly
successful in production could have a life in syndication, and that
decision right there was the big one Cyma made."

In an attempt to extend the association of the Nickelodeon brand to
two sister cable channels, Ms. Zarghami is expected to announce soon
that it intends to change the name of one channel, the N, which is
aimed at teens, to TEENick, and that another, Noggin, will henceforth
be known as Nick Jr.

Ms. Zarghami brings to Nickelodeon the perspective of a lifer: she
joined the channel in 1985 as a data-entry clerk, a year after
graduating from the University of Vermont. Since then she appears to
have been guided as much by the shows she watched growing up as by
the tastes of her family. (She has three sons, ages 12, 6 and 2, with
her husband, George, a former Nickelodeon production executive.)

Ms. Zarghami is the second-oldest of four children of an Iranian-born
doctor and Scottish-born nurse, and was born in Iran, before moving
eventually to Englewood, N.J. "Ours was the typical Friday night of
my generation," she said. "It was `Love American Style,' `The
Partridge Family,' `The Brady Bunch,' `The Odd Couple.' "

Mr. Katzenberg, the DreamWorks executive, said that "being a mom is
so invaluable" to Ms. Zarghami's "understanding of her constituency
out there." But he added that in watching her response to the Disney
Channel, he had noted other traits.

"She will look at that and say, `Nice for them, here's how I'm going
to beat them,' " he said. "She then puts on the flak jacket and the
crash helmet, puts the bayonet in between her teeth and heads into
the trench to do battle."