Free to Gain Traction for About $50 Million
By STUART ELLIOTT
August 25, 2006
What is green, fills 13 hours a week of television in prime time and hopes to bring viewers top models, superheroes, a glib mother-daughter pair, high school basketball players, girlfriends, smackdown wrestling and runaways?
An ad for the third season of "Veronica Mars," starring Kristen Bell.
The answer is CW, the broadcast network that takes its name from its parents, CBS and Time Warner, and which will be introduced on Sept. 20. CW is the successor to UPN and WB, two smaller networks - weblets, in the parlance of Variety - that will go dark in mid-September after losing tens of millions of dollars between them in more than a decade of operation.
To help the new network gain traction in the proverbial 500-channel universe, CBS and Time Warner are sponsoring an ambitious campaign to create an identity for CW and by extension its series, which include "America's Next Top Model," "Smallville," "Gilmore Girls," "One Tree Hill," "Girlfriends," "W.W.E. Friday Night Smackdown" and "Runaway." The campaign, created internally and by an agency named Troika, is estimated at more than $50 million. That includes the value of the commercial time on the network and on the local stations that will be part of CW if the time were being sold to outside advertisers. By comparison, $50 million is about what national marketers like E*Trade, Hertz and La-Z-Boy each spent last year on advertising in major media, according to data compiled by TNS Media Intelligence.
The CW advertising is already running on television and radio, in print, online (cwtv.com) and on signs, transit posters and billboards. The campaign carries a theme, "Free to be," intended to appeal to potential viewers for CW series, primarily viewers ages 18 to 34.
"We did a ton of research with the target audience when I got here; I didn't poke my head out of a focus group for six weeks," said Rick Haskins, who joined CW as executive vice president for marketing and brand strategy after serving as general manager for the Lifetime cable network.
"'Free to be' is about how we can fit into their world," Mr. Haskins said, referring to youthful viewers, rather than "forcing our brand on somebody."
"This audience doesn't want to be advertised to, and doesn't want to be told what to do," he added. " 'Free to be' says, 'You can be anything you want to be and you're welcome at the CW.'"
• It had long been the conventional wisdom in the television industry that viewers watch shows, not networks, and the money spent on network branding campaigns was as wasted as time spent watching "The Love Boat."
But the success of branding ads for cable networks like the sports maven ESPN, Lifetime ("Television for women") and TNT ("We know drama") has encouraged their broadcast counterparts to undertake similar efforts.
"A network is like a shopping mall, and the shows are the stores," said Jonah Disend, chief executive at Redscout, a brand strategy company in New York. "You just don't go to the stores, you go to the mall."
Branding a network is becoming increasingly important, Mr. Disend said, because of the growing ability of consumers to watch shows "in more than one place" - that is, not only on TV sets but also on the networks' Web sites like abc.com, fox.com and InnerTube (cbs.com/innertube); on video iPods; and on Web sites like aol.com, tvguide.com, video.google.com, video.yahoo.com and youtube.com.
"As we're speaking," Mr. Disend said during a telephone interview yesterday, "I'm downloading last night's 'Project Runway' on my computer."
All the CW ads, along with the network's logo, are being colored a bright green, just as during the 1990's another broadcast network, ABC, cloaked a series of cheeky campaigns in an eye-catching shade of yellow evocative of the tint used for smiley faces.
ABC executives came in for a lot of kidding over the yellow ads, which they said were intended to convey qualities like fun and playfulness to potential audiences.
Do executives at CW and Troika expect a similar barrage of catty comments about their decision to adopt the color associated with grass, envy, frogs, menthol, chlorophyll and environmental consciousness?
"I understood some of the mocking" directed at ABC, said Dan Pappalardo, partner and executive creative director at Troika in Hollywood, Calif., who worked with ABC and the TBWA/Chiat/Day ad agency on the yellow campaign.
"The green is fresh, vital, alive, the color of spring," Mr. Pappalardo said, and is meant to signal that CW is "something new, not your typical broadcast network."
"I expect some people to react to it negatively," he added, "but in focus groups, they loved it; they said, 'This is something cool.' "
• The first commercials for CW use a version of the Temptations song "Get Ready" as reimagined by two contemporary singers, Fergie and Will.i.am of the group the Black Eyed Peas. The campaign pairs the "Free to be" theme with words and phrases that relate to the network's prime-time series, which will have their premieres over a two-week period ending Oct. 3 with "Veronica Mars."
For instance, ads for "Veronica Mars," about a young female detective, carry the headline "Free to be fearless." Ads for the reality series "America's Next Top Model" depict the host, Tyra Banks, next to the headline "Free to be fierce."
The talkative stars of "Gilmore Girls" appear in ads carrying the headlines "Free to be witty" and "Free to be girlie." Ads for the sitcom "Everybody Hates Chris," created by Chris Rock, carry the headline "Free to be funny." And ads for "One Tree Hill" feature a cast member, Chad Michael Murray, and carry the headline "Free to be cool."
"We had a challenge," said Mr. Haskins, the CW marketing executive, "in that we had to put under one roof programming from UPN and WB and make it feel like one network."
The solution, Mr. Haskins said, was to focus on what the predecessor networks had in common, which was their younger viewers, "and create an environment that was relatable to their lives."
Someday, there will be an article about television in which no executive uses the word "relatable," industry jargon for something with which viewers are supposed to identify or connect. Alas, this is not that article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/25/business/media/25adco.html
