COLEMAN’S BILLBOARD OF FARE

Did Fritz know it would be like this?

No way.

“It’s been unbelievable,” the lanky weatherman at KNBC Channel 4 says of the attention that suddenly has befallen him.

In the last 2 1/2 months, Fritz Coleman has moved up from second-string weatherman to first-string and has made two appearances as a stand-up comedian on “The Tonight Show.”

But what has really catapulted him into the public eye is a massive billboard advertising campaign proclaiming: “Fritz said it would be like this.”

KNBC spent $150,000 to get that slogan splashed on about 500 signs in Southern California--enough so that every motorist theoretically passes at least one every day.

“My recognizability factor has shot up geometrically. It’s been phenomenal,” Coleman marveled during an interview this week. “Whether I’m out shopping or at a movie or just walking on the street, it’s rare if I don’t get at least two or three people a day coming up and saying it (the slogan) to me.”

When it comes to being a household name, however, the promotion campaign also has demonstrated that Coleman still has a way to go. That’s evident because both he and the station have gotten a fair amount of mail from people chastising them for taking such a blatantly political stand.

It seems they think the billboard is a suggestion that the recent problems besetting the Reagan Administration, from tax reform efforts to the hostage crisis, might not have occurred had Walter (Fritz) Mondale been elected President last year.

KNBC is mailing those people an autographed photo of Coleman with an assurance that his weather reports show no political bias whatsoever.

“If Mondale had had this (advertising) campaign, he would have gotten more than three electoral votes,” Coleman jokes.

If anything, Coleman’s weather reports are comically biased, and that’s not by accident. A 37-year-old native of Philadelphia, he moved to Los Angeles in 1980, forsaking 15 years of experience as a radio disc jockey and talk-show host to pursue a career as a comedian.

KNBC news anchor John Beard, a friend from the time they both worked in Buffalo, N.Y., brought one of his bosses to see Coleman at a local comedy club and he was hired as the station’s weekend weatherman in February, 1983.

Last May 31, Coleman was elevated to the top spot--where he appears weekdays on the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. newscasts--following Kevin O’Connell’s departure to join rival KCBS-TV Channel 2.

To herald his promotion, KNBC General Manager John Rohrbeck and News Director Tom Capra came up with the teasing billboard and related on-air promotion campaign, adapting it from one they’d seen in another city. “Who could resist ‘Fritz said it would be like this’?” Capra asks. “It’s a wonderful phrase.”

The advertising campaign also served as a subtle lead-in to this week’s introduction of a new set, logo and name for the KNBC newscasts. Although Rohrbeck denied in an interview that there was a connection between the two events, the Coleman billboards bore the new “Channel 4 News” title, rather than the old “News 4 L.A.” moniker that was still in use when the signs went up in July.

The changes, while cosmetic in nature, are meant to “symbolize the beginning of a new era here,” said Rohrbeck, who took charge of the NBC-owned station a year ago. He complained of the old set, “It was ugly. I felt uncomfortable looking at it, and I don’t think it made our people look good.”

Capra, who joined KNBC in March, agreed. The new one, he said, “looks like a news set instead of a hospital room.”

As for the Coleman advertising campaign, the news executive said that he had no problem with trying to lure viewers to KNBC’s news programs by promoting the weatherman instead of the anchors or reporters. “The best advertising we have for our news coverage is our news coverage,” Capra reasoned. “I’d rather see a billboard that said, ‘Fritz said it would be like this’ than one that said we have the best news coverage. We put that on the screen every day, and we’re proud of it.”

Capra also said he considers it an asset that Coleman has appeared on “The Tonight Show” and continues to work regularly at the Improvisation comedy club in Hollywood. In a place like Los Angeles, where the weather doesn’t change much and rarely has an impact on people’s lives, he argues, the weather report offers the chance for some levity in the newscast.

Coleman, who jokes in his comedy routine that his primary function as a weatherman in Los Angeles is to tell viewers if they can’t go to the beach the next day, share’s Capra’s view.

“Regardless of what they might say, their philosophical overview is, all three (major) stations in this town get their weather information from exactly the same source at exactly the same time every day,” he says. “It comes over a teletype from the National Weather Service. None of the stations is forecasting the weather itself. The only thing that’s different is the presentation--the packaging of it. My feeling is that there’s nothing wrong with packaging it in a light, humorous fashion as long as you don’t dilute or change the weather information.”

When the advertising campaign began, Coleman says, he was somewhat concerned about how his colleagues in the newsroom would feel about his getting so much attention, but he’s found the reaction to be very positive.

“It’s been the greatest shot in the arm, and not just because it’s been focused on me,” he explains. “I think it’s shown everyone that John Rohrbeck has a good sense of taking our product to the market, which is something we’ve been starved for for a long time.”

The campaign does not appear to have produced any significant change in KNBC’s ratings. The 4 p.m. newscast got a larger audience during July than it did in May, but the 5, 6 and 11 p.m. programs all attracted about the same number of viewers as they had two months earlier.

But Coleman certainly has been affected by the whirlwind of activity.

On the positive side, he loves the recognition he’s getting in public and from audiences at his stand-up comedy appearances. The full-time job as weatherman also has taken the pressure off of producing a comfortable living out of comedy for him and his wife, Kristen.

“I don’t know if I see myself as being a major stand-up comedy star a la Bill Cosby or David Brenner,” Coleman says. He’d like to combine TV and comedy sometime in the future, he says, but he doesn’t having anything specific in mind yet.

Having just begun a three-year contract at KNBC, he doesn’t need to decide now anyway. Coleman says his major emphasis at the moment is on honing his skills as a TV weatherman.

“My big thing at this point,” he confesses, “is to live up the hoopla.”