CBS Plans Promo Blitz for Letterman

To those few souls out there who still say, “Huh? Who?” when the words David Letterman are uttered, your days of blissful ignorance are numbered.

In late June--almost immediately after his last NBC show airs June 25--CBS will launch a massive tune-in promotion campaign for its new late-night host. It will be the network’s largest promotion for a single show this year and almost certainly one of the largest in history for any network show over a concentrated period of time.

By the time Letterman joins CBS in the last week of August (an official date has not been set), viewers will have seen ads touting CBS’ Great Late-Night Hope in just about every show on its schedule. (Those few snobs who disdain the tube won’t escape either: There also will be newspaper ads, transit posters, outdoor spreads. . . .)

“It will be a huge media commitment on the part of CBS,” said George Schweitzer, senior vice president of marketing and communications for CBS.

The new ads are certainly Lettermanesque: dry, sardonic and a mite snide. Only a few have been shot so far since Letterman is still, technically, an NBC employee.

One, titled “Dave is coming to your house,” shows a leering Letterman against a white background. As he draws his scrunched face closer and closer to the camera, sniffing all the while, he asks, “You got a cat in there?” The ad ends with the line, “You should tidy up your den.”

Schweitzer said all the ads will revolve around a common theme: “Same Dave . . . Better time . . . New station.”