Market Share

Sure, news is a serious business, but that doesn’t mean your promos have to be. It helps if your staff and management can laugh at themselves.

Stations across the country take different tacks in promoting their morning newscasts. From humorous to urgent to testimonials, the campaigns focus on their news teams and resources and often attempt to reference and reinforce a market’s unique characteristics.

The Cox ABC affiliate in Orlando has taken a different tack in its news promos to stay atop this contested market. It uses campaigns from Churchman Productions that feature station viewers because “viewers talking on our behalf can be more powerful than anchor-driven, on-camera spots,” according to Bob St. Charles, the station’s creative services director.

Without must carry, LP stations might rely on viewers with antennas and the willingness to receive TV over the air. One LP operator in Atlanta sees this as a challenge. He is promoting OTA reception the best he can. Another, in Portland, Ore., warns that the FCC spectrum grab is going to make it tougher for LPs and full-power stations alike.

Often with the help of outside companies that provide software and support, broadcasters are finding that Groupon-like group buying deals and rewards programs are a valuable new source of revenue — a good way to bring in smaller, local businesses like massage therapists that may not be able to afford traditional on-air spot campaigns.

From nowhere in 2003, to the third largest Hyundai dealership in the U.S., Scott Fink’s  New Port Richey, Fla., store grew because he had a plan and a consultant who made it happen. But in some cases, success came in spite of station account execs who, Fink says, often don’t listen to what he wants and needs in a buy.

The city of Concord, Calif., has banded together with local auto dealers to commit up to $80,000 to a multimedia ad campaign promoting buying cars at home. So who’s getting that money? Not a single TV station. Instead, Comcast Spotlight, which divides the area into 22 mini-markets with targeted advertising. With most TV stations still not sure what to do with multicast channels, it would seem to me that it’s somewhere between plausible and possible to reorient them toward serving a geographic segment of a station’s market. 

After Fox turned down a Super Bowl spot from Birmingham, Ala.-based Fixed Point Foundation suggesting people check out the meaning of “John 3:16,” the group went local, buying time on Birmingham Fox affiliate WBRC and has approached Fox O&O WTTG Washington. Next year, the group’s executive director says, Fixed Point won’t even attempt to place the ad within the Super Bowl, but will buy time to air the same ad in more local markets where the getting is easier, and cheaper. 

Even though the BCS Championship Game between the Oregon Ducks and the Auburn Tigers is on ESPN, stations in the schools’ home territories were making hay (and revenue) by producing pregame specials and live reports that were finding eager advertisers. Said KMTR Eugene, Ore., GM Cambra Ward:  “Getting this kind of advertising opportunity in the first days of January is great for us.”

Thanks largely to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s high-profile campaign to hang on to his seat in November, KSNV Las Vegas was one of the many stations around the country to enjoy a political advertising windfall. To make amends to regular advertisers who were shoved around to make room for the TV campaigners, says GM Lisa Howfield, the NBC affiliate is now offering a “local political rate card” discount to them. “We’re trying to issue our own stimulus package.”

The Media Rating Council’s revocation of its accreditation of Nielsen’s NSI diary ratings last month didn’t surprise many in the industry who have complained about the paper-based system. And while Nielsen says it’s fixed the problem, getting reaccredited takes time. So by the time the February ratings books go out, Nielsen (and its clients) may still be hanging out on a limb.

Here’s a tale of two broadcasters, undeterred by the economic doldrums, who started new broadcasting-support businesses. Ex-KXASer Larry Watzman created Revnew, which offers stations inexpensive, turnkey promotional campaigns that come complete with slick videos. Linda Wellman, who says she came up with the idea of online/on-air obits as an account executive at WNEM Flint, has gone off to market her own service, DirectObits.tv. “My goal is 70 stations by 2012,” she says.

KXXV Waco, Texas, dreamed up “Free Lunch Friday,” which uses direct text marketing to link contestants to eight restaurants in a weely contest to win a free meal; and the other contestants receive a consolation prize of 25% off. The station estimates it will generate $35,000 this year from the promotion, and has budgeted $90,000 for next year.

The government thinks that so called “for-profit” colleges are making empty and expensive promises and want to do something about it. For broadcasters, the fear factor is that if some of the schools go away or get regulated more closely, hundreds of millions in ad revenue may be in jeopardy.

There were plenty of great ideas for driving sales at the NAB’s annual small-market conference, but the best one came from DMA 98, El Paso, Texas. Each morning, News-Press & Gazette’s ABC affiliate broadcasts and posts on its website the local most-wanted list. In the first month, unique visitors to the site doubled and a bail bondsman and defense attorney have signed on as sponsors. The cops are happy; the station is happy. Don’t hesitate to steal this idea — that’s what the whole conference is about.

The NAB’s annual small-market sales conference got underway in Scottsdale, Ariz., yesterday with broadcasters sharing ideas on how to generate revenue. Among the ideas: turning drug-bust loot into public service campaigns, helping to get grants for public service campaigns and squeezing in 5- or 10-second crawls and spots wherever possible. It all adds up, the broadcasters say.

The Television Bureau of Advertising’s annual TVB Forward Conference on Thursday will look for the vital signs of an economic recovery and prospects for growth in the digital arena. Then, next week, from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25, the National Association of Broadcasters hosts its annual Small Market Television Exchange, where executives from stations in markets 76 and smaller meet to swap ideas and strategies to coax more ad dollars out of locales where mom-and-pop merchants supply much of stations’ bread and butter.