THE NEW TV SEASON : Attention Shoppers: Fall TV Shows Are Here : Networks and retailers team up in cross-promotions to trumpet new season; but will viewers buy it?

The 1988-89 season will go down in television history as The TV Season That Wasn’t. Crippled by last summer’s 154-day Writers Guild of America strike, the networks’ new prime-time programs seemingly wandered onto the schedule whenever they felt like it. Instead of being unveiled with a flourish in late September, new shows turned up sporadically from early October until the following February.

It was bad for the networks, but even worse for the networks’ promotion departments. As the ratings slid, programming executives blamed weak and haphazard promotion campaigns. The three networks ended the season with a 3% loss of their combined audience to the increasingly aggressive competitors at independent stations, cable TV and home video--continuing an erosion process that has been at work for the last decade.

“When we looked at what happened last fall--no premiere season, the strike--it really took a lot out of the networks,” George Schweitzer, senior vice president of communications for the CBS Broadcast Group, recalled recently. “We said, ‘Hey, we have to do something next fall to generate some excitement!’ ”

And so CBS, ABC and NBC are taking drastic and offbeat steps to try to restore their place in what Mark Zakarin, ABC’s vice president of marketing, 40, describes as the rituals of fall he remembers from his childhood: “The leaves turned, the football season started, the new cars came out, you went back to school, and you watched the new fall shows.”

No longer will viewers be able to get away from network TV promotion simply by turning off the set or changing the channel. This season, rather than relying on traditional on-air promotions, the networks are hunting down potential viewers wherever they can find them.

Expect to see the faces of the stars of the new fall shows on movie theater screens, in airplanes, high school gyms and department stores and back-lit with neon on telephone kiosks. Expect promos for at least one male-appeal series to turn up on the big screens in sports stadiums nationwide. When you open a brand-new videotape, expect a network schedule flyer to fall out.

And, if you head to K mart or Sears, expect to find along with the merchandise a barrage of new-show hype in the form of posters, videotapes playing on big screens and contests offering prizes, prizes, prizes as incentive to sample the new shows.

Some industry watchers are predicting that overkill may drive new viewers away from prime-time television, rather than drawing them in. But the networks are forging ahead.

Already, ABC is promoting its fall shows in 5,000 movie theaters nationwide, and will continue through August. CBS recently began doing the same on American Airlines and TWA. The in-flight spots include plugs for the network’s new Monday night block of six comedies.

In September, CBS brochures for the new season will be stuffed into more than 5 million new Maxell videotapes, encouraging viewers to tape what they can’t watch when it’s broadcast. “These (buyers) have TVs, they have VCRs,” Schweitzer said.

NBC plans to go after that same affluent VCR user in a joint promotion with 3M, producer of Scotch videocassettes. Beginning in mid-August and continuing through November, purchasers of five-packs of Scotch videocassettes will receive a free tape of “Behind the Scenes at America’s Favorite Network,” a one-hour NBC video program. NBC’s fall preview guides will be distributed with 18 million blank videotapes.

Not to be outdone, ABC has announced an unorthodox promotion with Panasonic: Beginning in November, just in time for the first important ratings “sweeps” of the season, some of ABC’s ads in TV Guide will feature bar codes at the bottom. The bar code--similar to the price code on supermarket items--allows viewers to program their Panasonic VCRs to tape ABC shows using a scanner device, rather than figuring out how to set the timer manually.

Another soon-to-be-announced ABC plan: “Stadium Vision,” in which spots for the male-oriented “Mission: Impossible” series will be projected on the big screens in sports stadiums in 25 major cities.

ABC also will return to school: During two weeks in September, up to 1.2 million students in 925 public high schools across the nation will see flyers and gym board posters pushing “Young Riders,” a youth-oriented Western about riders for the Pony Express.

The gym boards, designed by American Passages Media Corp., are in girls’ and boys’ locker rooms. They consist of three panels: a blackboard, a panel featuring a news article on a subject such as teen suicide or personal hygiene and a panel that can be purchased by advertisers.

ABC pays American Passages; schools receive no money for installing the boards. Although some schools have turned down the gym boards, preferring not to feature advertising in the schools, a company spokesman said 3,000 schools nationwide have accepted the boards. The boards have been used for about a year to advertise teen-oriented products such as Clearasil acne treatment.

ABC also plans to plaster the face of comedian Jackie Mason, star of its new series “Chicken Soup,” on the sides of telephone kiosks in New York City, the city that knows and loves Mason best.

Mason is not the only stand-up comedian who stars in an ABC series. “Anything But Love” has Richard Lewis; the new series “Homeroom” stars Darryl Sivad as a teacher, and “Roseanne,” of course, has Roseanne Barr. So ABC will advertise those shows in Laugh Track, a magazine distributed in comedy clubs.

And the biggest blitz of all will start on the Labor Day weekend: NBC will launch a cross-promotion with Sears, and CBS will nab the attention of K mart shoppers by sponsoring contests. At NBC, some contest winners will become a star for a day with a minor role on a series. The promotions will last through September. During that period, all the TV sets for sale at K mart will be tuned to CBS programs.

John Miller, senior vice president at NBC Entertainment, notes that the networks did not suddenly discover cross-promotions this season. They have been experimenting for about three years. Last year, NBC did a cross-promotion with TDK videotapes. ABC tried a similar stunt with Sony videotapes, encouraging viewers to tape last season’s 32-hour miniseries “War and Remembrance.”

“It seems like the curtain went up and we all went out immediately, taking up ourdifferent campaign strategies,” Miller said. “Actually, we had all taken some preliminary steps to lead to this explosion.”

More promotions: CBS has saturated 10 women’s magazines, including Cosmopolitan, Elle, Vanity Fair and McCall’s, with ads for comedies with strong female appeal, including “Designing Women” and “Murphy Brown.” Schweitzer believes the print ads will reach 59% of working women aged 18-34 and 54% of women 25-54. For the pre-18 crowd, ABC eventually plans to place ads for “Living Dolls,” a series about teen-age models, in Seventeen, Glamour and other magazines for young women.

The effort to reach women through women’s publications mirrors an NBC plan of two years ago to distribute a magazine called Daydream. The magazine, containing tidbits about NBC’s daytime serials, was to be placed in “every pediatrician’s and OB-GYN office we could find,” Miller said. “We were trying to appeal to the new mother, a woman who might be changing her daytime habits. We couldn’t get it sponsored (with paid advertisements) at the time.”

This summer, NBC came up with yet another idea to sell its soaps: an NBC “Soap Phone,” giving viewers a 900 number to call to hear stars talk about their favorite shows. (The cost to each caller is about $2.) The network plans to unveil more promotion plans within the next few weeks.

Although decreasing audiences encouraged the trend, Schweitzer guesses the sudden interest in cross-promotions was triggered by K mart. It began, he said, when K mart, the second biggest retailer in the country, came knocking at the doors of all three networks, looking for a partner.

Schweitzer, who spent a year away from CBS a couple of years ago working for the Young and Rubicam advertising agency, said he learned a lot there about how to sell toothpaste, shaving cream and Lincoln Continentals. During the dark days of last fall, as the TV audience ignored CBS’ new shows, Schweitzer decided to call on such promotional tactics. After all, he reasoned, a CBS show is a product, just like any other product.

So Schweitzer sat down with associate Michael Mischler, CBS vice president of advertising and promotion, and tried to think of ways to bring more of a “consumer perspective” to their shows.

“The No. 1 incentive for most products is couponing,” Schweitzer said. “You see it in the newspaper every Sunday, and you will try it at least once.” Unfortunately, he added, TV networks can’t offer TV watchers a discount coupon for their products. So CBS went to a game company to co-design an audience participation game.

“We had it all mapped out before K mart was even on the scene,” he said. “But we couldn’t afford to buy these newspaper inserts; it would have cost us between $7 million and $10 million. So we kind of put it on hold.”

Then, last January, K mart called the three networks with the idea of co-sponsoring a contest of some sort using the company’s stores as a place to promote TV shows. “They called all the networks and said, ‘Are you interested?’ We said: ‘ Interested ? We’ve got the game!’ ”

Schweitzer added that cross-promotions allow the networks and their co-sponsors to do more promoting than each could afford on its own. “This thing is beautiful because it’s media leverage. . . . What we’re both getting out of this is, like, $25-million worth of media value we never paid a nickel for,” he said.

In the CBS game, the 76 million shoppers who each month visit the 2,200 K mart stores across the country will be exposed to “The Get Ready Giveaway.” The “instant win” game requires viewers to watch CBS shows to get information to match with game cards they pick up at K mart. The game cards also will appear in “CBS Premiere Spectacular” inserts in K mart’s Sunday newspaper advertising supplement, which is delivered to 72 million households and represents the largest-circulation weekly publication in the world. The winning numbers will be broadcast during breaks in the program.

The NBC-Sears game does not require viewers to watch NBC shows. Grand prize winners will be jetted to Hollywood to appear on NBC prime-time programs.

And about 20 million Sears customers will receive an eight-page color insert describing the new shows in their September Sears- Charge bills.

ABC passed on K mart’s offer when the department store first approached all three networks, and NBC and CBS fought over the contract for several weeks, according to Schweitzer. When CBS won, NBC made a similar deal with Sears. “ABC tried desperately to put some other things together” but couldn’t come up with a promotion as big as the Sears and K mart deal, Schweitzer said.

Naturally, the other two networks tell the story differently. NBC chose Sears not through default but because it best suits the network’s promotion efforts, Miller said. ABC’s Zakarin insisted that ABC made a conscious decision not to enter into a department store promotion. “We’re very interested in doing a cross-promotion, but it has to be the right fit,” he said.

ABC also turned down an offer from Pizza Hut to do a cross-promotion. The plan was to add not only pepperoni to the pizza but a printed schedule of ABC programs to the pizza box. That plan fizzled, an ABC spokesman said, in part because the flyer would also promote programs on the competition, HBO and Fox Broadcasting.

Zakarin remains skeptical of the department store deals. Along with a possible “irritation factor”--being bombarded in department stores by public-address-system messages about fall schedules or by inserts and contest forms--customers might not take too kindly to the NBC fall lineup being presented in the same envelope as a hefty bill from Sears.

“Our research department is going to track attitudes about all these cross-promotions,” Zakarin said. “It has to be done so it doesn’t feel like hucksterism, like you’re getting up on a soap box to hawk your shows. It couldn’t hurt to have pictures of your stars show up in a store, but it has to be entertaining, attractive and informative, not an intrusive pain in the ass.”

Some naysayers believe that CBS and NBC risk more than simply becoming pests with their cross-promotions. CBS in particular finds itself deflecting pointed questions from the press suggesting that an association with budget-conscious K mart might tarnish the image CBS has long tried to project as the “Tiffany Network.”

Schweitzer said: “Give me a break! Let’s face it. America isn’t shopping at Bloomingdale’s and Tiffany’s--it’s shopping at K mart, and they’re going to read those ads.”

Schweitzer is more offended by the elitism inherent in criticizing CBS’ marriage with K mart than he is that viewers might associate CBS with bargain shopping. “We could see it coming, we knew what the headlines were going to be when we announced this: ‘The Tiffany Network Goes to K mart,’ ” he groaned. “But I tell you, we would rather go for a 10th of the K mart audience than all the Bloomingdale’s shoppers that there are,” Schweitzer said.

“Right now, we need circulation. They’re a mass retailer, we’re a mass retailer.”

Miller doesn’t mind pairing NBC with Sears, either. “We want the upscale, we want the young, the 18-34 and the 18-54 audience; those are the demographics that Sears provides,” Miller said.

But a TV network becoming bedfellows with a major company raises a more disturbing issue. Following a season fraught with advertiser paranoia and boycotting of controversial television shows, might Sears or K mart seek to control show content? Especially in the case of CBS, where contest information is actually broadcast during specific shows? Schweitzer answered an emphatic “no.” “This isn’t advertising; these (cross-promotions) are not K mart commercials,” he said. “We designed this game before the new shows were even picked. This game will be in all new shows at 8 o’clock, because that is our weak spot. As an advertiser, they can (refuse to advertise) on any show they want--but that’s a different part of the relationship.”

Though none of the cross-promotions has yet been given the test, all three networks say the department store deals triggered an onslaught of promotional offers from other companies. “I don’t believe what I’m hearing,” Schweitzer said. “They say, ‘We’ll give you cars, we’ll do anything.’ I think it represents to them that the barriers are down, that there is no rule against it.”

Today Sears and K mart; tomorrow, the world. Schweitzer said Australia’s Nine Network and Italy’s Berlusconi networks have asked CBS for details on how to design a similar contest for their own countries.

Though contests, giveaways and newspaper inserts may make the audience more aware of network shows, will they induce the viewer to actually watch? Opinions vary.

“When you look at next year’s numbers (ratings), the network decline will be halted, or at least it will have been slowed,” said Miller confidently. “We’re aggressive; we’ll really be hitting the ground running this year.”

CBS’ Mischler predicts that competition will force the networks into new promotional tie-ins at the beginning of each season. “The landscape of launching a fall season, if this is successful, will probably change from this point on,” he said. “Every year, there will be a major promotional effort going into the fall. What do you have, three weeks, to show up and get sampled (watched at least once)? And if you don’t get sampled, that window starts closing fast.”

Zakarin, however, said ABC prefers to take a wait-and-see attitude, especially to see which game works best: NBC’s, which does not require viewing NBC shows, or CBS’ game, which does. ABC still spends 90% of its self-promotion dollars on traditional on-air spots--although Zakarin acknowledges that a greater proportion of that now goes to advertising on cable than in years past.

“There is no body of research on this,” Zakarin said. “The reality is, people don’t watch TV in order to win coffee mugs or T-shirts; they watch because the show intrigues them.

“The range of possibilities embrace no one ever doing this again, to us doing it three or four times a year, every sweeps period. Nobody knows.”