Back to the Future?

What goes down, comes round.

Who ever said that there's nothing left that's new in television may be right. There's nothing left to innovate, instead just great revolving cycles of approach and execution.

No better is this illustrated than with Wal-Mart's entry into own-it-all television program production.

Back in April … in partnership with Procter and Gamble … the two corporations produced "Secrets of the Mountain" which we can look at as a backdoor pilot. In advertising we used to call this a "time buy" with the corporate pair owning it all, including the essentially pre-sold availabilities. They brought the project to NBC with the two companies controlled ALL ad revenue for the two-hour block program.

And the viewers watched (17.5 million for "Secrets of…") most without even noticing the sponsor's exclusivity.

Now comes "The Jensen Project" on NBC with Wal-Mart and P&G again underwriting the program content and controlling all ad placements in the old two-hour MOW format revival.

Both these family-friendly fare flicks target children and parents alike, the exact demographic to which Wal-Mart and P&G market. Plus the resultant DVDs and soundtrack CDs get pushed in the stores and online, and since it's all theirs, all of the product's profits go directly back into the corporation coffers. Sounds ideal, a media match made in marketing heaven. Total content control.  

And exactly the model existent in the 1950's for network television, inherenting the originallycommercial model forged from the development of network radio -- total program sponsorship.

Advertisers owning outright the entire show, in many cases even taking over the shows title, as with The Chase and Sanborn Hour, starring Edgar Bergen and Charley McCarthy or The Johnson's Wax Program with Fibber McGee and Molly or The Pepsodent Show with Bob Hope.  The earliest network television hits carried on this model, often with TV stars stopping the weekly storyline to perform in the sponsor's own commercials.

Eventually when these old classic programs reverted to syndication, the crossover sponsorship and content create problems. As with I Love Lucy, The Lone Ranger, Adventures of Superman and others, newly edited or reshot opening and closing credits were necessary to remove the intertwined sponsorship evidence.

And now we've come back around, full circle again, with major advertisers buying not just 30 second ad slots but two-thirds of the entire nightly primetime block, producing it all from opening tease to closing credits. And it's working because there's no financial downside. It's risk-free for NBC because the producers paid for it and guarantee the network won't lose money by airing it.

Talk about an example of classic TV …

Jim Furrer

Should broadcast TV seek salvation from radio?

While in San Francisco last week, I had a chance to talk with Steve Kotton, the associate director of the School of Multimedia Communications at Academy of Art University. The future of viable local television came up, and Steve (a veteran of the broadcast wars) told what happened at KRON-TV in S.F.

Sold for an unbelievable amount of money, the new owners of KRON soon found themselves -- as a leading NBC affiliate -- embroiled in "reverse compensation" negotiations with the Peacock network. The new owners tried stonewalling, only to find NBC pulling the station's affiliation and giving it to a much smaller station on the edge of the ratings book.

The sheep in wolf's clothing was the new management's ruthless cost-cutting measures, including a massive conversion to cheaper MMJ operations. With backpack journalists replacing reporting teams and resulting staff slicing, KRON is surviving as an independent station -- with a new news infrastructure favoring strong localism in the wide and diverse San Francisco market.

As with many other TV operations around the country, shrinking revenue from ad dollars going to the Internet, and collapsing "eyeball time" from viewers creates a difficult financial balance sheet, when your source of prime programming comes calling to renegotiate a once historically positive compensation cash flow. Today CBS, ABC, Fox and NBC now want their own cut back from the tower owners for carrying net programming. Another dip into the red ink well for local operators.

So where does radio come into play?

As another historical reference -- the situation was similar in the very late 1940s and early 1950s, when network radio was king, and the listeners and advertisers courted broadcast radio for most all electronic entertainment and information. But the upstart television medium siphoned off listeners, making them viewers instead, with loss of sponsors, and even big-name talent to "the box." Collapse of the established profit paradigm brought radio to its knees.

But radio survived, by turning to (1) formatting, and (2) localism. Gone where the national programming and major corporate advertisers, but "going local" radio found it could survive with local ad dollars and by catering to a targeted demographic.

Perhaps broadcast TV is now on the same cusp. Could local TV broadcasters survive without their network fare, through first-run syndicated shows and local origination programming? Think about it. Foregoing national net dollars for a beefed up portion of the local ad market? Offering a concentration on connected and motivated local eyeballs? Reducing cost of increased local presence through mobile device technology?

Is the coming collapse of the second golden age of network television, in reality, the second cycle for formatting and localism for broadcasters?

What do you think?


Jim Furrer