PromaxBDA: What Makes Great Promo Copy?

For me, effective advertising is most nearly always about the words. So today we’ll take a look at the finalists in the copywriting category from the 2013 PromaxBDALocal Awards.

Toronto’s Pride Parade is held during the end of June each year. CP24, a 24-hour local news channel in Toronto, carries the event live. To highlight the various meanings the word “pride” has for people in the city, CP24 created this spot that asked, what does pride mean to you?

“We did create specific parade coverage spots,” says David Johnson, VP creative and promotion for CP24, “so this spot was intended to spark a conversation.”

“The shoot was a very ambitious undertaking,” he says. “We used a small crew that gave us mobility to shoot in live situations, quickly and efficiently.” 

CP24 has been using the theme, “What does pride mean to you?” for four years. “With this new campaign, we set out to show the diversity of people across the city,” Johnson says. “The spot drove solid ratings on the channel and brand recognition. The event itself attracted an amazing 1.2 million people.”

It’s the holiday season, time for your station to create that special message that conveys holiday cheer.

Kevin Kolbe, the creative services director for WRAZ, Fox 50 (Capitol Broadcasting) in Raleigh, N.C. (DMA 24), says he wanted his station to do something different.  

So what can you promise viewers that you’re sure will give them holiday cheer? How about your programming?

“Using talent stills adorned with hand-drawn holiday items, the Fox 50 Holiday Storybook was born,” says Marc Derro, WRAZ’s senior promotion producer.

“The challenge, of course, was making it rhyme,” he says. “I kept working on it on my commute home, dictating lines into my iPhone. It’s a long drive from Raleigh to Greensboro.”

This is an example of a simple idea that is well-executed.

The goal for every local TV station’s late news is to outperform the network entertainment program that leads into it, or at the very least, hold that audience into the news. Ideally, stations want viewers to tune into their late local news regardless of what channel they’ve been watching.

Donna Weston, VP of advertising and promotion at NBC O&O WRC Washington (DMA 8), says there “was a lot of switching going on at 10:59” in her market.

So the station created this spot, purposely designed to not look like a typical news promo. There are no news anchors, no bold graphics, no background music or sound effects. Just one continuous shot of a guy standing in a white background holding the most powerful hand-held device known to broadcasting.

Where does your inspiration come from? How does an idea pop into your mind?

For Scott Altus, creative services director for Fisher Communication’s ABC affiliate KOMO Seattle (DMA 12), the idea for this spot came from the movie, The Avengers.

“I was watching the movie and they showed some of the tools that the Avengers used, and I thought, ‘tools don’t matter, it’s the people using them’.”

In Seattle, just like in your market, it’s how you differentiate your news product from the competition that matters. They’ve got news vans, you’ve got news vans. They’ve got cameras, you’ve got cameras.

“We all have the same tools, more or less,” Altus says, “but it’s our people that make the difference.”

What makes this spot particularly appealing are the rich quality of the images, and the tightly edited sequence of shots.

TVO is the public education channel in Toronto, Ontario, akin to PBS in the United States.

“TVO is commercial free, so we have to fill in the gaps between programs,” says Lance Goddard, TVO’s promotion producer/director. That comment drew a laugh from me as I told Goddard that in commercial TV, some might think it’s the programs that fill in the time between commercials.

“We try to fill it with interesting stuff, anything from 90 seconds to 2 minutes that is educational as well as entertaining” Goddard says.

“The challenge in this spot,” Goddard explains, “was to unite the diverse subject matter that is covered in the documentaries we air — art, photography, nature, history, world affairs and geography. So I took the angle that the programs represent a collective experience that is a reflection of the artist, us and the community.”

“We live in an area that moves fast,” says John Zeigler, VP creative for WPIX, New York’s Tribune Broadcasting-owned CW affiliate.

“But when Hurricane Sandy hit us, we were struck by how small town New York really is. We showed amazing heart. In this spot, I just wanted our viewers to tell their own stories that we are going to get through this.”

We Are One is part of the station’s overall marketing campaign.

“Our news product advocates passionately on behalf of our viewers. Like them, we’re scrappy fighters. After this spot aired, we got a lot of ‘thanks yous’.”

Market Share by Paul Greeley is all about marketing and promotion at TV stations and appears every Monday. Read other Market Share columns here. If you have some ideas or stories you want to share, please let me know. You can reach Paul Greeley at [email protected] or at 817-578-6324.