AD SPACE: One of the first things you notice when you do a job like mine is how much more mail you get. There are a lot of shows out there competing for the attention of viewers and TV writers alike, and there’s a whole part of the industry devoted to getting its products noticed. If you were sitting in the chair in which I’m writing this, you’d notice the glass globe paperweight etched with a logo for the BBC’s Planet Earth miniseries, a remote control plane I was sent to publicize Ed’s Up, the OLN series starring Barenaked Lady Ed Robertson, and a battery-operated rotating light, a toy version of the kind you find on police cars and ambulances, sent to publicize something I’ve completely forgotten about. I’ve lost count of the plush toys, noisemakers, masks, hats and other sundries that have disappeared into my daughters’ room.
The desk of one Metro colleague is ringed with bobbleheads promoting everything from the Jack Black film Nacho Libre to Justin and Colin’s new home makeover show on HGTV. Promo marketing is a small world; bobbleheads are just one of the more popular gimmicks in the publicists’ arsenal these days.
With the new TV season upon us, the networks are desperate to get their shows noticed above the white noise, and according to Advertising Age magazine, CBS has been the most inventive self-promoter. There are the sugar packets pushing Cane, the new prime-time soap starring Jimmy Smits as the new patriarch of a mobbed-up Cuban-American sugar dynasty, and Chinese food takeout containers emblazoned with the logo for Survivor: China.
The gee-whiz factor has been reserved for the campaign for Moonlight, the network’s vampire melodrama and unwitting tribute to Forever Knight, a Canadian production that ran on the network in the TV wasteland of the early ‘90s. A decal with the logo and air date of the show has been pasted onto the glass doors of supermarket freezers, and when a customer opens the door, the face of Alex, the show’s bloodsucking protagonist, appears in frost on the glass.
Ad Age sees these campaigns as a sign of desperation as much as anything else: “For decades, networks were largely content to run promos on their own airwaves. But with TV audiences eroding and more people consuming TV shows through digital means, networks have to cast further afield.” As for CBS, they seem to regard the campaign with the sort of damp-browed optimism you’d expect in an uncertain time. “We get people when they are least expecting messages about entertainment, but they are very receptive to them,” said George Schweitzer, president, CBS Marketing Group.
Alternately, you could say that they’re getting people when they’re least likely to retain a memory of a message about entertainment, beyond a pause and, possibly, a muttered “Huh?” or “Whoa. Cool.” For my part, I can say that no bit of marketing swag, not matter how creative, ever inspired me to write more favorably about a show. Unless it came wrapped in fifty-dollar bills. That would be a hint, by the way.
