Buying television
seems simple enough: figure out the rating, who’s watching and where your
target lies in relation to what’s available; then make a commercial that
grabs them and pony up the cash for the time. That’s a simplified version of
how broadcast television works.
It’s very different
in the realm of specialty television. A big part of the difference comes
from the way viewers watch broadcast and cable channels respectively. While
most couch-cowboys are content to lope aimlessly across the broadcast video
prairie, grazing via remote, specialty tuners are there on a mission.
People punch up
specific specialty channels for specific programs. That dedication and focus
means a keener audience for advertising — with the proviso that it has to be
presented in a way that takes the relationship between a specialty channel
and its audience into account.
Program sponsorships
work better than just buying commercials; making yourself part of the
program — rather than a break from it — can endear you as an advertiser to a
discerning group. And with specialty channels pulling more tightly defined
demographics, your message will be going to an audience likely to respond in
greater numbers than any random chunk out of the “free TV” audience wad.
Here are three cases
where an advertiser and specialty channel tailored working partnerships that
led to more effective advertising at lower cost; three relationships with
advertisers that echoed the relationship that specialty channels seek with
their viewers.
Jeff Carrique,
CIBC’s general manager of savings and investment, says the YTV Achievement
Awards are a good fit with the bank’s Smart Start program aimed at helping
children manage their money. And Terri Perras, YTV’s director of sales and
event promotion, says “tweens” aged nine to 14 have about $1.1 billion per
year to spend.
CIBC
and YTV
Given its audience —
which is made up principally of “tweens” nine to 14 — what is YTV doing
hooking up with a big chartered bank?
The Canadian
Imperial Bank of Commerce had solid reasons for hitching itself to the
channel’s YTV Achievement Awards, which this year were broadcast April 27.
“They’re launching a new program called Smart Start,” explains Terri Perras,
YTV’s director of sales and event promotion. “It’s aimed at helping kids
manage their money.” And YTV knows that kids do have money that needs
managing.
Perras says that
Canadian tweens have about $1.1 billion in disposable income to spend
annually. “Banks are now just picking up on that,” she says. “The kids are
also future customers. But banks have always wanted to target kids.”
Jeff Carrique,
CIBC’s general manager of savings and investment, says the YTV Achievement
Awards fit very well strategically with Smart Start. The sponsorship had its
origins when CIBC people met YTV people at a conference about marketing to
youngsters. Each realized it could gain from a deal.
“We know the
Achievement Awards are popular,” Carrique says. “And it’s the same audience
that we’re targeting. Plus, we know parents watch.” CIBC signed on as a
presenting sponsor, meaning it got its name mentioned right up front in the
program’s opening and in all the promotion leading up to the telecast.
In return, YTV built
excitement and a larger potential audience for the telecast of the awards
through a message displayed on the screens of CIBC bank machines urging the
bank’s customers to tune in.
For the network,
this is nothing particularly new. “It’s part of our philosophy, part of how
we sell and part of how we position ourselves to the advertising community,”
Perras says. “It took some media people a while to get their heads around
the concept. But once they did, it was fabulous the way opportunities opened
up.”
Media buyers aim for good numbers for cost-per-thousand viewers and the
reach television channels get. On those terms, cable channels look less
impressive; their audiences are smaller and specialty services are not
ubiquitous, the way regular TV is. But they offer a narrower target with
greater certainty to balance their smaller audiences.
Even now, Perras
says, many of the sponsorship deals are initiated and put together by
advertisers and the network directly. “Sometimes, money for this kind of
thing doesn’t come from an advertiser’s media budget,” she says. “It can
come from the corporate sponsorship budget or promotional spending. It may
be money that the client’s agency wouldn’t be spending anyway.”
Hydro-Québec and MusiquePlus
Stranger than a bank
hooking up with a children’s network would be the case in Quebec, where
MuchMusic’s sister station MusiquePlus has a sponsorship relationship with
the province’s massive power utility, Hydro-Québec.
“We get approached
for sponsorships all the time,” says Paul Parré, Hydro-Québec’s manager of
marketing and communications. “Usually, it’s something that we think would
be very good for us.”
That explains
selectivity. But what could a music video channel offer a power company?
Part of te answer lies in the methods for media buying in Québec, which
differ from their counterparts in anglophone North America.
“We don’t usually
buy by cost-per-thousand,” Parré explains. “Sometimes we buy things, then
find out that the CPM is pretty good. But it’s not always the most important
motivation.”
The relationship
between MusiquePlus and Hydro-Québec began with the music-video channel’s
tenth anniversary last year. With thousands of hours worth of interviews and
performances on tape, the channel decided to dedicate selected weekends
throughout the year to a particular year in the channel’s history.
Hydro-Québec became the exclusive sponsor, with regular station IDs and
other elements letting the viewers know that the retrospective was on
Hydro-Québec’s nickel.
MusiquePlus is
electrifying, went the refrain, so of course Hydro-Québec is involved;
electricity is its business.
“Every day we
receive five or six requests for sponsorship,” Parré says. “We had to
concentrate our money in a specific niche.” That niche was music.
In addition to
helping promote all kinds of music from Quebec — “and when I say that, I
mean music by Quebecers, no matter what language they speak,” Parré points
out — the utility also helped bankroll the Francofolies music festival in
Montreal and a similar gathering in Quebec City. It’s all part of a move to
be seen as beneficent to the community and impressing 18-to-25-year-olds.
“They will one day be our customers,” Parré says.
The theme continued
with MusiquePlus’s Vox Pop, the francophone equivalent of Speaker’s Corner
on Citytv of Toronto and MuchMusic. What did the channel’s viewers feel
would constitute an electrifying weekend? People lined up to give that
answer, with the best responses winning the weekend they described, paid for
by MusiquePlus and Hydro-Québec.
“The sponsorship
needed some interactivity,” says Louis Panneton, MusiquePlus’s director of
sales and marketing. “We had to get viewers more involved.”
“We do a lot of
testing for results and how sponsorships or campaigns are working,”
Hydro-Québec’s Parré says. “This is working. We’re recognized as being one
of the main sponsors of MusiquePlus, and our customers — their viewers —
appreciate that.”
An arrangement that
was only supposed to last for a few weekends stretched into a year. And now
both parties are negotiating how best to extend it into the future.
Parré says that for
Hydro-Québec the deal with the music-video channel has been “a real
bargain.” And its future will largely be determined by what MusiquePlus
decides the cost for continuing will be.
Johnnie Walker, Black Label and CBC Newsworld
When the CRTC
relaxed its rules about liquor advertising on TV, some might have expected a
sudden crop of commercials for spirits. But no brand was willing to take the
risk of being the first. And the high cost of making commercials made that
step less likely.
Johnnie Walker Black
Label scotch planned to find more drinkers through TV. But it sidestepped
the thorny question of how to do that with help from CBC Newsworld.
“This company had no
television creative,” says Newsworld account supervisor Ken Lydford. “They
had no intention of producing commercials for hundreds of thousands of
dollars just to test-market with.”
There was some TV
money in Johnnie Walker’s account at agency Leo Burnett in Toronto. It was
supposed to be spent during the pre-Christmas run-up, traditionally a good
time for boosting liquor sales.
Christian Morandin,
a group media director at Burnett, met with Newsworld to devise a strategy
subtle enough to get the scotch message across without raising hackles or
using a low-key approach so well that nobody noticed.
The two teams
decided that adapting another Johnnie Walker promotional tool made more
sense. The result was the Johnnie Walker Black Tie Guide to cultural events,
a one-minute segment on Newsworld’s weekly program, Gilmour On The Arts.
“The Johnnie Walker
Black strategy has always been a tie-in with the performing arts,” says
Burnett’s Morandin. “The Black Tie Guide booklet is about 90 pages and lists
all the performances in the Toronto area for an entire season.” Presumably,
many of the same people reading the guide would tune in a cable channel show
covering similar matters.
“Specialty viewers
watch for a specific reason,” says Newsworld’s Lydford. “It’s appointment
television. They don’t walk in the house at six, flip on Newsworld and leave
it on until eleven. Something like On The Arts talks to a much narrower
audience, and you have to get to them in a different fashion. They’re
discerning but not skeptical. Our research shows they’re more receptive to
advertising.”
So, give the viewers
what they’ve tuned in for — information — as long as you ensure that some
part of that information or the frame it’s in has your sponsor’s message
well-displayed on it.
Consistent with the
closer working methods that define such agreements, Newsworld pitched in for
much of the creative. Using the Black Tie Guide booklet as a resource, the
network designed the backdrop for the video guide for On The Arts, animating
the brand’s mascot — what else? — walking through the frame.
The fact that the
frame contains new information every week means the audience will look at it
repeatedly, while the unchanging element will sink in through prolonged
exposure. Newsworld and Johnnie Walker have expanded the initial eight-week
pre-Christmas run into a continuing 52-week commitment.
“They do a great job
of reaching that upscale audience,” Morandin says. “It’s a great fit.”
Hard numbers for the
partnership’s effectiveness aren’t available yet; Newsworld and Burnett are
working to come up with a means of testing its reach.
“The only thing
we’ve been able to measure so far is that last year, the scotch category was
down 2 percent and Johnnie Walker Black sales were up almost 7 percent,”
Morandin says.
But Burnett is
confident enough in its prospects to have put together a similar deal with
Bravo!, where it’s called the Bravo! Bulletin Board and runs throughout the
schedule.
“Specialty
channels tend to be a lot more flexible,” Morandin says. “They take more
initiative in understanding the client’s needs. Something like this just
seems to stand out more than a traditional 30-second ad; it’s like building
the message into the medium.” |
