Signs of the Times
The intriguing faces of CBS prime-time stars Candice Bergen, Ken Wahl, Linda Hamilton and Ron Perlman have popped up on billboards all over Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Philadelphia in the last week--places usually reserved for syndicated and local TV figures like Geraldo and Fred Roggin.
Why has the once golden network resorted to trolling for viewers on street corners?
When you’re in last place in the prime-time ratings, “you have to do things to get noticed,” Michael Mischler, CBS’ vice president for advertising and promotion, said of the billboards for “Murphy Brown,” “Wiseguy” and “Beauty and the Beast.”
“With all the choices available now, with Fox and independent stations and cable and pay cable and home video, if you’re not on the top of people’s minds, you need to do something to break out,” he continued. “It’s demanding us to reach out to new (promotional) areas.”
Billboard advertising represents a significant departure from the Big Three networks’ traditional means of promoting their shows--primarily on their own air, supplemented with print ads in TV Guide and newspapers.
On-air advertising is still the backbone of network promotion, but it is no longer as effective as it once was simply because a larger percentage of the TV audience is now watching something other than the networks. Network promotion executives say it is imperative that they look to alternate ways of grabbing the attention of those viewers.
“To be heard now, you have to yell louder,” said Mark Zakarin, vice president of marketing at ABC, “and you also have to find more interesting messages--messages with greater subtlety, greater drama, greater theatricality. And you also have to find different media to get your message across. Anything that is the usual simply fades into the background. It becomes wallpaper.”
Zakarin said that about 60% of ABC’s programs are now advertised on cable channels and that the network’s expenditure on cable promotion is increasing every year.
The specific nature of the cable audience makes it easy to target specific demographic groups. To reach men, Zakarin said, ABC will buy time on ESPN; women can be reached on Lifetime, a more upscale audience on Arts & Entertainment and a youth audience on MTV.
Cable advertising is effective, he said, because an ad for an ABC show on a cable station strikes viewers as odd: It makes them sit up and figure out just what station they’re watching and in the process pay attention to the spot.
The networks are also looking for ways to cross-promote their programs with other products. Sony, for example, packaged blank video tapes in a special “War and Remembrance” 4-pack last November that brought attention both to Sony’s tapes and the ABC miniseries.
Some of the companies that produce series for the networks have recognized the promotional problem. Suppliers such as Paramount (“Family Ties,” “Cheers”) and Warner Bros. (“Night Court,” “Murphy Brown”) have been supplementing network promotion of their shows with a large amount of their own advertising.
Paramount, for example, usually opts for ads either on cable or in TV Guide. But last Saturday, the studio took the unusual step of buying on-air time to promote its new CBS series “Dolphin Cove” on the CBS affiliates in the nation’s 17 largest markets.
(Even with the additional advertising, however, the series’ ratings grew only one point over the previous week, and it again finished near the bottom of Nielsen’s prime-time pack.)
The weakening effectiveness of on-air promotion is more pronounced at CBS, where lower-rated programs translate into fewer people seeing promos for other shows. It makes it that much more difficult for a last-place network to climb out of a rut.
“Our on-air time is worth less in prime time than NBC’s,” Mischler said. “And that weakens you internally, because it takes more air time to do what you used to with less. And so of course you have to spend more money and look for new and unusual ad buys to help turn up the heat.”
Hence the billboards. Mischler said that CBS chose “Murphy Brown,” “Wiseguy” and “Beauty and the Beast” for this unusual promotion because “these shows represent the future of CBS.”
But ABC’s Zakarin argued that billboards are mere vanity advertising and not at all cost effective. Billboards in the four top markets, he said, are expensive and are seen by only a sliver of nation’s TV viewers.
“Billboards (for a network show) in L.A. are put up to reach the creative community,” Zakarin said. “To tell the studios, the producers, writers and actors that we’re still here, we’re still in business. And New York and Chicago are home to the largest ad agencies, the people who buy ad time. That kind of advertising is designed to reach the opinion makers, the media, not the general TV audience.”
But that doesn’t mean there won’t be more of that kind of advertising, or even more unusual promotional efforts, from the networks. As CBS and ABC continue to trail NBC by a wide margin, each will be looking for anything to give it a boost.
“We all have roughly the same promotional budgets, the same amount of on-air time,” Zakarin said. “It is just more crucial for ABC and CBS that ours work. We have to be smarter, better, more adventuresome. I don’t doubt that you’ll continue to see us trying new things.”