SMTE: Big Ideas For Small Market Stations

When Dr. Loren Loewen opened his dental implant clinic in Wichita, Kan., in 2008, he tried to attract patients with flyers, newspaper ads, the yellow pages and even a little TV. Nothing worked — until he hooked up with Dan Wall, GM of Gray Television’s KAKE.

Together, they created a series of low-cost testimonial ads featuring some of Loewen’s smiling patients and began airing them as often as a $5,000-a-month budget would allow on the ABC affiliate.

Business took off and has been great ever since. Loewen now spends $10,000 a month with the station and he added a 15-minute infomercial that runs in a back-to-back block on weekends. “We can tell it’s running because the phones begin ringing,” he says.

Such stories are the stuff of the NAB’s annual Small Market Television Exchange (SMTE) at which around 500 broadcasters, mostly sales managers, from markets 75-plus, swap stories and ideas on how to sell time and boost revenue.

This year, the conference was held over this past weekend (Thursday through Saturday) at the Arizona Grand Resort, a not-nearly-as-grand-as-it-used-to-be golf resort outside of Phoenix. Helping to sustain the three-day affair were 53 exhibitors, pitching everything from CRM and CMS software to diginets to market research.

SMTE Co-Chairwoman for Life Madelyn Bonnot Griffin, of KVHP Lake Charles, La., explained the purpose of the conference at what seemed to be its opening session, except that it began at 5 p.m., at the end of the first full day of activities.

The mission, she said, is to “reenergize you and arm you with sales ideas that you can implement back at your station on Monday morning.”

Happy TV customers like Loewen were invited not only to testify to the power of TV, but also to spark ideas and promote idea sharing.

At Loewen’s session, for instance, Adam Chase, the local sales manager at Nexstar’s KGET Bakersfield, Calif., shared a program with the SRO crowd that has helped him land professionals who balked at the cost of advertising on TV.

The program: Bring together three professionals — say, three lawyers — who don’t compete directly with one another and form a  “consortium” that allows them to share costs. A joint spot would present the three as a team of legal “experts.” Callers to the spot’s 800-number would be directed by an automated answering machine to the specialist of their choosing. Not bad.

The heart of the conference is the Topper competition. Two dozen broadcasters present their best sales promotions and other money-making ideas in a round-robin tourney of sorts with their peers acting as judges and voting by texting.

At the round-one session I attended, I liked the Topper from Tim Gazy, statewide advertising coordinator for the Montana Television Network, a group comprising KBZK Bozeman and several other CBS affiliates around the state.

The station made around $400,000  by essentially running a sweepstakes with a $30,000 scholarship to Montana State University in Bozeman as the prize.

Consumers had to register at one of the 46 participating advertisers. Each of the advertisers was featured in a shared and an individual promo and got to draw the name of a finalist. From the finalists, the MSU president will pick the winner at the school’s Oct. 26 home football game.

The best part is some kid ends up with a potentially life-changing scholarship to Montana State.

The exhibitors set up shop on tables in the back of the same huge ballroom that was also used for the general sessions. Exhibitors I spoke with liked the arrangement as broadcasters tended to mill around the exhibit area between sessions and during buffets and open bars in the hall.

Exhibitor Doug Smith, CEO of ATV Broadcast, a firm that helps stations with their retrans negotiations, said he appreciated the “laid-back atmosphere,” saying it was conducive to business. “Some of us started out the day with ties.”

Back to that “opening” session: NAB President Gordon Smith was on hand to talk a little politics. He conceded that cable and satellite interests were making headway in their campaign to convince Congress that the retransmission consent regs are trouble for consumers and tipped in favor of broadcasters.

“We can’t let them win that fight,” he said, urging the broadcasters to invite lawmakers to their stations where their efforts to “educate” them or retrans will be more fruitful.

As part of the conference, the NAB brings together owners and top managers of small-market stations, including representatives of Nexstar and Sinclair, for a “roundtable” discussion of industry issues. However, most of them must have headed out to the golf course after the meeting. Few were around for the late afternoon session. Smith’s call for past and present NAB board members to take a bow drew little response.

The obligatory digital guru for the session was Blake Irving, the new CEO of GoDaddy, the web registration and hosting company. With shaved head and dressed all in black, Irving strode back and forth across the stage with his PowerPoint clicker.

His basic message was that broadcasters ought to be paying attention to all these new-fangled digital media — local, social, mobile and Big Data. But what wasn’t obvious was obscure.

Here’s what I jotted down from one of his slides: “A digital identification in the next decade means getting in front of your brand.” A free TVNewsCheck ball cap goes to the reader who can divine the meaning of that.

Irving’s talk would have gone much better if he had just reviewed how GoDaddy had broken through the Web-services clutter by recruiting beautiful women and placing them in sexually provocative TV commercials — a strategy based on marketing techniques so ancient that examples can be found among the Paleolithic cave paintings of Northern Spain.

To get a sense of the digital revolution and how to adapt to it, broadcasters were much better off squeezing into the Thursday morning session (or its afternoon repeat) that featured Steve Van Dinter, the on-air Gadget Guy from WISC Madison, Wis.

Among the gadgets he talked about were Google Glasses, the “wearable” computer that should be available early next year for around $300. I’ve seen reports on these, but I never thought of them as a tool for TV reporters. Van Dinter says they would be great for POV videography and teleprompting.

He also recommended another Google product, Chromecast, a gizmo not much bigger than a flash drive that plugs into the HDMI port of TV sets and turns them into smart TV. For $35, how can you go wrong?

NAB keeps telling me what a winner the SMTE is, and after attending for the first time, I would have to agree. An energetic and engaged group of sales folk came together not to lament the good old days or wring their hands about disruptive technology, but simply to find a few ideas that they can put to work starting this morning to meet their sales goals.

You wonder why there isn’t something like it for stations in markets 1-74.

Harry A. Jessell is editor of TVNewsCheck. He can be contacted at 973-701-1067 or [email protected]. You can read earlier columns here.