MTV RAISES NICKELODEON IN ITS OWN HIP IMAGE

Nickelodeon, the channel aimed at children, began 11 years ago as a low-cost sop to critics concerned that cable television was nothing but an avenue for uncensored movies and racy programs.

But when the parent firm of Nickelodeon, MTV Networks, went public in 1984, “Nickelodeon went through a fundamental change,” says Scott Webb, the channel’s vice president and creative director. “There was a desire to have the whole company become more attractive to Wall Street.”

That meant turning the “value-added service” of commercial-free Nickelodeon into a full-fledged moneymaker for MTV Networks. The rehab that Webb and MTV pioneer Fred Seibert helped engineer gave the channel a kiddie version of the slick, knowing promotional identity of MTV and, for the first time, included commercials.

As Webb, 32, sees it, everybody won: The channel began making money, advertisers found a new way to reach 2- to 15-year-old viewers and children got a network with the editorial voice of a pre-adolescent smart aleck.

Nickelodeon’s strategy has a simple premise. “Kids are powerless in the adult world. There are no kids in Congress, NASA isn’t picking any kids for the space program,” Webb said. “We can’t change that, but we can understand that.”

As a result, Nickelodeon promotions unstintingly advocate the pre-teen agenda: embarrassing grown-ups, evading authority figures and having as much to do with slime as possible.

One campaign featured a team of precocious detectives who used their video camera to capture adults in foolish positions. Another focused on a troika of mean grown-ups conspiring to stamp out fun in the world.

As Nickelodeon’s slogan tells viewers, it’s “the only network for you.”

The 1984 make-over also addressed another commercial shortcoming of the station: Youngsters go to sleep early, allowing a measly 13 hours of programming a day. Instead of letting the channel fall into the hands of home shoppers or self-help cassette hucksters after the children’s schedule signed off, MTV Networks created Nick at Nite.

Featuring perhaps the weakest lineup in all television--the station shows sitcom reruns from the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s--Nick at Nite represents MTV Networks’ greatest triumph of advertising over content.

Promotions purporting to find subliminal messages (“Drink Your Milk”) in “The Donna Reed Show” and posing existential questions about “Bewitched” (“Could Samantha create a boulder so heavy she couldn’t lift it?”) have won the station accolades--and an audience--its programs alone never could.

Webb uses an apt metaphor for what Nick at Nite does: “You know all soap is the same--it’s only the packaging that’s different. Our strategy is to create brand loyalty in a way that a Channel 2 or NBC has never done.”

But can that brand loyalty be extended for a lifetime? Will Nickelodeon’s young viewers be segued into the 18- to 24-year-old demographics of MTV, then to the 25- to 49-year-olds of VH-1 and ultimately to the all-ages insomniac network called Nick at Nite?

“Well, there’s no tried and true way to manipulate people,” says Webb. “But we all hope it works like that.”