Wonya Lucas
Position: President and chief executive of TV One, a cable television network and entertainment company targeting African American adults; headquartered in Silver Spring.
(COURTESY OF DISCOVERY COMMUNICATIONS) - Wonya Lucas is the new chief executive of TV One.
Career highlights: Executive vice president and chief operating officer, Discovery Channel; executive vice president and general manager, Weather Channel Networks; senior vice president of strategic marketing, CNN Domestic Networks; vice president of business operations and network strategy, General Entertainment Networks, Turner Broadcasting System; vice president of marketing, director of marketing, director of new business development, TNT; brand manager, Coca-Cola Co.
Education: BS, Industrial Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology; MBA, finance and marketing, University of Pennsylvania.
Personal: Lives in Bethesda with husband Bruce Kirton. They have two daughters, Alexis Kirton, 18, and Sydney Kirton, 14.
I loved television growing up. It was the first place I saw a great representation of African Americans in environments different from mine. I watched TV, and it made me feel something.
How many products can make people think, feel, cry and take action? That was so powerful to me. So when I would hear people say that I should follow my passion, I knew I was passionate about being in a medium that can do all of that.
After business school, I decided to go into brand management with Clorox and Coca-Cola to understand marketing and, more importantly, to understand how to influence a consumer’s behavior to drive business results.
The skills I learned in the five years doing brand management were transferable to television. I went to Turner Broadcasting working as the vice president of marketing at TNT, doing everything from launching original movies — “Buffalo Soldiers” and “Passing Glory” — to television. I loved being in the entertainment space.
I arrived at CNN when competition was really heating up. I spent a lot of time thinking about the competitive space with Fox News and MSNBC. What was our unique position, when you shift from being the only one in the market to being one of three? I was also there during the Sept. 11 attacks. Being a touch point to America in very difficult times was a great learning experience.
I eventually went to work for the Weather Channel, for a couple of reasons. Its mission was to help people make decisions that could impact and possibly save their lives. To evacuate? To stay?
It was also very technology-oriented, which was an interesting mix between my short engineering experience and my marketing background.
One of the things we did that I loved was to broaden the brand beyond the man and the map to tap into the emotional elements of the brand. We tried to more fully dimensionalize weather. We started moving into things such as long-form programming. Before that, the mission was to warn people about an event and then turn it over to the news organizations. Then we did a show called “Storm Stories.” This was the first time we started covering the aftermath of events.
I then moved to Discovery, mostly because of the international experience I could get as global chief marketing officer, working on multiple brands in multiple countries. It was about showing people things they’d never seen and trying to stimulate their curiosity. Very different from TNT.
I’ve pretty much worked on every type of target audience there is in television. I’ve worked on networks that were more geared toward women or men or more slightly intellectual or older or younger or very established brands. TV One is intriguing because it’s targeted to the African American community.
When I look at the options there for African Americans, they’re relatively limited. For many years, BET did an amazing job of being there for us, but there was a huge opportunity that TV One was already capturing to really diversify who we are as a people and show that on the screen.
It’s very exciting working with that audience, which also happens to be the audience of which I am a part.
I’ve watched a lot of start-ups in this business fail, but TV One has done an amazing job of gaining distribution in a very short period of time and becoming financially secure and profitable. There’s so much more we can do and so much growth ahead of us.
— Interview with Vanessa Small
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