• by Paul Gough , June 10, 2003

The company that owns the This Old House properties plans to add a third PBS show to the brand in the fall with a focus on antiques and design.

The half-hour Find! will debut on an undetermined number of PBS stations nationwide on Oct. 9. The show, produced by Find! Productions/Time4 Media, will be hosted by Leigh and Leslie Keno of another PBS show, Antiques Roadshow. Find! was unveiled to PBS affiliates during the public broadcaster's annual meeting a few days ago in Miami.

It will join the seminal PBS series This Old House, which was purchased by Time4Media in December 2001 after 23 years with WGBH, a public TV station in Boston. This Old House is one of PBS' highest-rated shows, airing on 300 stations and is also syndicated in 93% of the nation. It also appears on HGTV. It's spawned a monthly magazine, which has grown in its eight years to a 950,000 rate base and 6 million readers. A second half-hour series, Ask This Old House, has become the top-rated new series on PBS.

Find! will have 26 half-hour episodes this season and be distributed by WGBH, which remains the distributor for This Old House and Ask This Old House. The new series will also have a Web site and at least one special print publication is on the boards.

Erik Thorkilsen, president of This Old House Ventures, said that the new brand is part of the company's strategy to continue catering to the home enthusiasts who have supported This Old House.

"We wanted a means to better provide content about home design, decoration and furnishings, the whole destination aspect of renovation: Once you build a house and properly maintain it, how do you do it with style and grace and properly decorate it," Thorkilsen said. Thorkilsen said that while the subject is touched upon in print and television, he didn't think it was being done at the level that the This Old House brand could accomplish.

The new show will feature the Keno brothers traveling around the country, visiting viewers' homes and searching for known and hidden items of value to discuss on the show. They'll be joined by experts in restoration, conservation and other fields. The show will also feature interior designers who will discuss design in show and private homes. The show will, in its earliest stages, open itself up to viewers' comments and questions and then build shows around them.

This Old House and Ask This Old House appear at various times on the PBS schedule, depending on the individual station. There's a national feed at 8 p.m. Thursday, where the two shows run back to back. They also appear throughout the week and weekend, including what Thorkilsen calls a "sweet spot" between 4-8 p.m. Saturdays when much of the audience is finishing up home-related activities for the day and "looking forward to watching someone else do it." Thorkilsen said

"A big part of why we're doing this is that we see it as a natural extension of our two existing shows, Ask This Old House and This Old House, and have been suggesting to PBS that it be scheduled as a three-part block where the audience we know would find it interesting and benefit from each show and we think from our knowledge and research would like to sit for an hour and a half" watching the shows, Thorkilsen said.

That audience is almost evenly split between genders, with between 52%-54% male. The median age is early to mid-40s; about 85% are homeowners. The median income is about $70,000 for the magazine; about 75% of the TV audience has a household income surpassing $75,000. This Old House delivered more than 3.5 million household viewers in the October 2002-April 2003 Nielsen Media Research Custom Cume Analysis. Ask This Old House delivered 2.7 million household viewers. This Old House reaches about 98% of U.S. television households, while Ask This Old House reaches about 94% of U.S. television households. Thorkilsen expects similar numbers for the new show.

Find! will be introduced in stages. The Keno brothers will write a furniture and design column for This Old House magazine beginning with the October issue. In October 2004, a year after the show debuts, Time4Media will publish a special magazine called Find! Whether that becomes more frequent, either quarterly or an monthly, will be determined later.

Thorkilsen said the Find! concept was developed not only for television but as a multimedia brand. The advertising and sponsorship opportunities will be different in television, where PBS restrictions apply, compared to print and Web, where Time4Media will have a freer hand. PBS restricts each sponsor/underwriter to a 16-second announcement at the beginning and end of each show, with four sponsors that are category exclusive per show. Thorkilsen said that This Old House programming on PBS offers a relatively uncluttered advertising environment.

And with the ability to project to the Web and print, Thorkilsen said that they're able to accommodate call-to-action messages, which aren't allowed on PBS. "We're able to do that [in print and on the Web] because it's a multimedia platform. Beyond the message they can provide on the air where they're always uniquely associated with the show, we can also do more typical advertising with them to essentially the same audience" as the TV show, he said.