Oprah Winfrey On Her Talkshow & Whitney Houston – Cannes Lions

Oprah Winfrey can still identify the moment she truly realized what her classic syndicated talkshow was about.

The presenter and The Color Purple star told Cannes Lions delegates it was in 1989, three years after the show had begun, that she recognized the impact her personal brand was having as a “force for good” and began applying that to The Oprah Winfrey Show.

Winfrey had taken to the stage at the Lumière Theatre in the Palais des Festivals to talk about purpose, the responsibility of brands and creators, her early life in Mississippi, the impact of being ‘intentional’ on both her herself and her show, philanthropy and why she now accepted her name as a “brand.”

“I said to the producer, ‘We’re not going to let TV use us any more. We’re going to use it as a force for good. Every show we do, in some form or another, is going to speak to their lives and what the yearning and the search is for all of us,’” she recalled.

The show ultimately ran for over 4,500 episodes and won almost 50 Daytime Emmys before ending in 2011, and it established Winfrey as one of the country’s biggest small-screen stars. She also acted in films such as The Color Purple, for which she was Academy- and Golden Globe-nominated.

Winfrey recalled her connection with the studio audience became so strong that when the late Whitney Houston, who had relapsed, fell off the stage while performing on her last Oprah Winfrey Show appearance, she was able to convince the crowd not to release any pictures they had of the incident. This had followed a popular previous interview when the singer was clean.

“I had such trust from The Oprah Show audience,” she said. “The first interview I did with [Houston], when I had gone behind the stage when I asked her about her intention, she was clean, but the day she came to perform in front of the audience she was not and she fell off the stage.

“I knew that if that story got out, she would be destroyed by that,” said Winfrey. “Even though the audience had cameras, I begged them not to put those pictures out because it would ruin her life, and they did not. That would not happen today.”

Audience as focus group

Winfrey recalled how The Oprah Winfrey Show really took off when she stopped signing autographs after filming and instead sat down with audience members and talked about their lives.

“I’d been doing the autographs because that is what everybody else wanted to me to do,” she said. “I actually just wanted to sit down and talk to people and see why they came to the show and what they got out of it. I learned so much just from listening to people and that became my focus group.

“I would have a producer in taking notes and we would build shows based on what people were telling us about their lives. We built a brand based on my heart and what I needed to serve myself.”

The star was asked about the concept of intention, which she attributes to learning from the books of Gary Zukav, who would appear on her show and has sat down with her many times since for interviews.

“When you personality comes to serve the energy of your soul, that is authentic empowerment,” she replied. “Nobody can take that away from you. No amount of views, sales, subscriptions, that will rise and fall. The most important thing is to neve rlose sight when you have come to the planeyt eart

“I recognized early on I was a surrogate for the viewers. When I think about that show and what that show meant to me, it did so much because of the people supporting it. There is not a day that goes by in my life, even here in Cannes, that people don’t come up to me and say they watched it. I realized that we were speaking to the heart of people. Trying to reach people where they were was exactly where we were so the shows became more spiritually focused with Gary Zukav talking about the soul on broadcast television.

Winfrey pointed to her own childhood in Mississippi as formative in her desire to provide for the audience, recalling a Christmas when her family had no presents before nuns turned up to her house with gifts.

“It wasn’t the gift, it was the fact that they showed up,” said Winfrey. “They showed up and they let a 12-year-old girl know that she mattered.” The incident ultimately led her to launch the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa.

Winfrey was in Cannes to collect the Cannes Lionsheart award, which the festival hands to public figures who have used their platform in a positive way. Cannes Lions runs between June 22-26.