The force behind the fireworks. (Chris Mosely, senior vice president for marketing & communications, Discovery Networks)(includes related article on brand logos)(Cover Story)(Interview)

If you ask Chris Moseley (and we did), "Field of Dreams" author W.P. Kinsella was only half right. You can build it, but to make sure they come you have to promote it too. Moseley, senior vice president, marketing and communications, for Discovery's U.S. cable networks, has spent the past few years helping to make Discovery Networks one of the most recognizable brands in the cable network universe (as evidence, one of the worM's most identifiable brands, Coca-Cola, tapped Discovery to be its only media partner in an Olympics pavilion in Atlanta). As Promax's incumbent chairman--the first from a cable network--Moseley's goal will be to help members make the "most buttoned-up, professional, effective" case for the value of promotion and marketing to the bottom line. What she does looks fun (it is) and easy (it's not), says Moseley, which makes it that much more important to demonstrate the muscle behind the magic.

You were a promotion and marketing executive on the broadcasting side. How is cable different?

The biggest shock for me was these rules you heard of in broadcasting--that people don't watch channels or networks, they watch programs. I came to cable--this was seven years ago--and heard from viewers that most of the time they really didn't know what we had on.

We didn't have a lot of stripping; we didn't have a lot of strategies in place that enabled people to recite the schedule. In fact, I couldn't recite the schedule. It was the first place I'd ever worked in television where I couldn't reel off what was on, because it changed every quarter.

But it didn't seem to be a big deal for viewers. People have a viewing set of maybe six or seven options that they flip between at any one time. So the real goal is not to be the one that they always turn to; the goal is to be in the top several of the six or seven they flip to.

But aren't cable channels increasingly establishing that stripped prime time identity?

Yes, and so are we. Certainly anytime you can make it easy for the viewer to remember what you have on, you're going to do better. We have a challenge at our types of channels because our programing doesn't come to us from a Hollywood studio; it doesn't come off-network; it doesn't come with a nice promotion kit. In fact, my first week here I went around saying, "Where are the kits?" We had to do the kits, we had to do the press materials--everything--from scratch, which was a bit of a shock for me.

The other issue is that there's no built-in equity for our programing. You take a Seinfeld, you run it in syndication, people already know what it is. We take a program, we …