Public Television Moves Out of Its Ivory Tower : Broadcasting: Ambitious PBS plans to become as much of a household staple as the Big Three. This year, it budgeted $3.4 million for advertising and promotion.

There was a time when the Public Broadcasting Service felt it was above such things.

In the past, when publications approached PBS with the idea of using the network’s name as the hook for a special advertising section, with part of the proceeds to go to public television, corporate development director Steven Bass turned them down. Such projects, he and others felt, were likely to turn out too commercial and crass to fit the PBS image.

But the offer from the New Yorker came along at the right time. The highbrow magazine made its proposal for last week’s 48-page supplement just as the network was preparing a splash entrance into the material world of self-promotion.

Now an estimated $40,000 to $60,000 richer, and with several dozen pages of favorable copy in a magazine whose researchers claim has the highest concentration of readers who contribute to public television, PBS is planning similar promotions for the future.

The promotional push comes from the same impulse that on the programming side has meant packaging programs, such as Ken Burns’ “The Civil War,” as blockbuster miniseries, just as a commercial network would, and gathering new programs into a special prime-time schedule introduced with a highly publicized “Showcase Week.”

Together, they are part of an ambitious plan, spearheaded by executive vice president for programming and promotion Jennifer Lawson, to make public television as much of a household staple as CBS, NBC and ABC.

Doing that, however, requires some tactics previously shunned by non-commercial TV.

“It’s new for a nonprofit organization,” Bass said. “It’s certainly not new in the commercial world. It doesn’t mean we’re going after the lowest common denominator and it doesn’t mean we’re going to pander, but it does mean we’re going to be signaling what we have to offer and trying to get people to give it a try.”

This year, for the first time, PBS budgeted about $3.4 million to spend for advertising and promotion, according to Susan Petroff, vice president for promotion and advertising.

Since the fiscal year began in July, PBS has launched several high-profile promotions, including a series of advertisements in Time, the Atlantic, Harpers and other magazines, plus the purchase of advertising time on commercial television. The coming months promise more of those, according to Petroff and Bass, plus joint promotions with corporations.

In the past, promoting a program meant depending on local stations and corporate underwriters to purchase or provide advertising. Last year, those sources came through to the tune of $28.7 million, according to PBS spokeswoman Mary Jane McKinven. Under the new plan, the stations and underwriters will continue to promote individual programs, but the new fund will advertise PBS as an overall institution.

“There’s a lot of noise out there (in the television marketplace), and we have a very small voice,” Petroff said. “We just can’t afford not to be letting people know what we have here.”

To some observers, promotional activity such as the New Yorker advertising supplement, which featured full-page ads from dozens of companies, and other techniques that allow underwriters to reap credibility from their association with PBS brings public television perilously close to its corporate sponsors.

“I’d rather have (the promotion) done for the programming itself than for the companies,” said John Wicklein, a former head of news programming for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting who until last year ran the Kiplinger Mid-Career Program for Journalists at Ohio State University. “I don’t like to see anything that gets them even cozier with the commercial underwriters.”

On the other hand, PBS executives fear that without promotion and something of a glitzy program schedule, public television is likely to become a gray shadow among the also-rans in the crowded television marketplace of the 21st Century.

“Lack of promotion is one of the things that PBS and all of public radio and television suffer from,” said Jerry Jacobs, who teaches television journalism at California State University, Northridge. “Nobody is there to see what they’ve got on the air because they cannot afford the kind of advertising and promotional campaign that CBS, NBC, ABC--even a pipsqueak local station--can afford.”

Now that there is money available for promotion, executives like Bass say they are trying to walk a tightrope between out-and-out commercialism and the rejection of self-promotion that characterized public television in previous years.

To that end, PBS during the next two to four weeks plans to announce what McKinven characterized as several “discreet campaigns,” on which the network will spend about $1 million. Like the New Yorker supplement and the magazine advertisements, the new campaigns are likely to focus as much on PBS’ public-service activities--such as the educational programming it provides to schools--as on programming.

“The key is to use those tools of the commercial broadcaster to develop interest in the program and then try to do the program with the style and the less crass aspects of commercial television that public television can do,” said Daniel Brenner, vice chairman of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. “The risk is that you get caught up in trying to do programs that are big ratings hits and you become focused away from things the marketplace doesn’t want.”