Be Indispensable
By Paul Greeley

They create advertising for the most ubiquitous programming on television.
They are responsible for millions perhaps billions of dollars of advertising time.
They didn’t graduate from college with a degree in this field as no university really offers one.  Yet, in spite of the fact that their work is seen by millions of Americans, little is known about them.
And while much has been written about local TV news and how the sagging economy caused many to lose their jobs, (according to the findings of the RTDNA/Hofstra University Annual Survey, in 2008, 4.3% or 1200 members of the local TV news workforce lost their jobs. In 2009, that number dropped to 400 people or 1.5% of the workforce), almost nothing has been public about what the economy has done to those who market it.
 
Until now.
 
I interviewed local TV broadcasters from CEOs to consultants, from network VPs to local station creative services directors to find out what impact the recession had on creative services staffing. I’ll reveal who lost jobs, where and why.  You’ll learn why some think hubbing and centralization could be the new norm. And if everyone agrees that creative services and marketing are vital to broadcasting, see why it
won’t return to what it once was.
 
Who are they?
They are alternately known as promo people, marketing gurus, preditors, promo writer/producers or members of creative services. And they practice their craft at the hundreds of local TV stations around the country that broadcast local news. But how many people there are in the field is hard to determine.
According to PROMAX, the only organization that represents broadcast creative services, there are no finite numbers as to how many people work in broadcasting creative services in the US. Some industry experts estimate the number to be between 6,000-10,000 people.
 
Jobs were eliminated:
Certainly, there were creative services jobs eliminated over the past couple years.
Scot Chastain, SVP/Affiliate Marketing & Development at NBC, said “marketing in general is seeing cutbacks due to the economy.”
The most surprising and deepest cuts were made by NBC which eliminated nearly all of the creative services staffs at many of its O&O stations like in Dallas, leaving only the CSD.
Brad Soroca, SVP of Marketing for NBC said they looked at the day-to-day function of how to build brand awareness and made some adjustments.
“We put the newsroom in charge of doing the news topicals. We’ve found great success on that. The news directors are saying that the topicals are better than they’ve even been because the people creating them know the story better than the creative services director ever would or could. In addition, we’ve brought in a world-class creative agency called Mother. We felt that bringing in a very creative partner with a different view was key to our future and our ability to innovate.”
When asked how the success of having an outside agency like Mother doing the news image creative is being measured, he said, “The business of creative is somewhat subjective. But the viewer feedback has been positive.”
An NBC O&O creative services director who asked not to be identified agreed that the creativity of the messages from Mother is subjective and that in general, the agency was doing a good job. But the challenge of using an outside agency to do the creative is “speed to market”.
(To see some examples of the creative used to promote the NBC O&O web sites, go to www.mothernewyork.com   You can see how easy it is to customize this creative for each market.)
Larry Rickel, president and CEO of the Broadcast Image Group, had this to say about NBC’s move to outsource their local TV stations’ creative.
“I think we always have to step back and look at different models. And evaluate those models based on what works in different situations, and for them, if the quality is there, it’s working for them.” But he was also cautious about the decision.
“I’m still a believer that localism is important, and that the kind of advertising you do is going to resonate with the local customer. I don’t think you can afford to outsource your news image without having a really strong sense of what your brand is at the local station level.”
Colleen Brown, the CEO of Fisher Communications, admits her company “may have adjusted positions within creative services, but we didn’t do away with the dept.”
 
Consolidation and re-structuring:
At the Journal Broadcasting Group, according to Jim Thomas, VP of Marketing, Programming and Interactive Media, there was some “job consolidation as some creative services people who left just weren’t replaced. But none were moved into news.”
Larry Rickel, president and CEO of the Broadcast Image Group, a company that does consulting, research, recruiting and training for broadcast companies, said, “I have not seen even in the most difficult of time, with the stations that we work with, did we see stations eliminating the marketing director. If anything has happened, there may be less people in the marketing dept than there may have been a year ago or two years ago.”
That observation was echoed by Tom Dolan, president of Dolan Media Management, one of the few companies which recruits for creative services.  “Companies that got rid of marketing staffing went from a 5 person dept down to 3 people.”
Graeme Newell, owner of the consulting company, 602 Communications, said he sees more companies consolidating the role of news marketing by moving its function and, in some cases, its news marketing people into and under the news dept.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jonathan Verk, the president of PROMAX/BDA, the only organization that represents broadcast creative services, is leery of the fact that some news directors are becoming the de facto marketing directors. “If so,” he says, “they need to develop marketing skills.” He goes so far as to say, and this might be music to those in creative services, that “the news dept should report to marketing. Marketers understand the audience. Marketing drives the business; if there’s no tune-in, there’s no business.”
 
While a few broadcast companies resorted to eliminating creative services positions, or moving them into news, some stayed the course.
Joe Rovito,  President at Clemensen & Rovitto cites companies “like Belo and Hearst which have historically not done layoffs in creative services because they recognize that the future lies in strong local news and they need to commit to strong creative services.”
 
Hubbing:
If broadcasting companies can hub traffic, master control and graphics, can news marketing be far behind and would it work?
“Some of the companies we work with have had discussions about hubbing some marketing,” reveals Larry Rickel.
Colleen Brown says Fisher hasn’t just talked about it, but acted on it.
“Centralized writers, centralized graphics, and centralized creative have made everybody’s creative services dept a little bit better, a little bit stronger. I’m all for looking outside the company and trying to figure out who can do it better and will do that if it makes sense. To some degree, we’re doing exactly what NBC did.”
And like NBC, Brown thinks, “the quality of the creative and the quality of the teases are better than they were in the past.”
Jim Thomas says that Journal Broadcasting is, “not a company that would centralize, but that they might share the talents of an exceptional graphic artist beyond one station.”
According to Rickel, “some topical and news image promotion could get hubbed, but I don’t think it would improve the quality of the content, because you might not be able to find the qualified people who are really good writers.”
 
The situation now:
Today, the headline is openings rather than eliminations. Since the start of 2010, stations in St. Louis, LA, Denver, Honolulu, San Antonio, Norfolk, Myrtle Beach, West Palm Beach, Albuquerque, Jackson, Mississippi, Portland, and Lufkin, TX have advertised for creative services managers. And other creative services staffing positions have opened in Orlando, Wilkes-Barre, Huntsville, Ft Myers, Monterey, Paducah, and Winston-Salem.
But even while there are signs that the situation is improving, some creative services positions are still being eliminated. As recently as May of this year, at the FOX O&O in Atlanta, a corporate decision was made to eliminate their VP of Promotion position.
 
So are the recent openings a sign that as revenue’s are improving, so are creative services opportunities?
Not so, thinks Graeme Newell, whose free, weekly job posting newsletter is the go-to-site for creative services openings.
“It’s more about normal churn than anything else. Some are leaving the industry or just changing stations.”
Scot Chastain at NBC says he’s “seeing signs of it coming back. There are openings as some companies see marketing is vital and need someone to look after the brand.”
 
That brand management and marketing are vital to broadcasting is unanimously upheld by everyone interviewed.
“No matter what the product,” says David Hershey, CSD at the Dallas CBS O&O, “you’re always going to need someone to promote it. So the skill set is valuable.”
Oscar Welch at Welsh Creative, a consulting firm that serves smaller markets says, “as long as there’s local news, they’ll need to find someone who knows news branding.”
Tom Dolan predicts that, “they can’t continue to scalp the marketing dept; it’s more critical than ever.”
Colleen Brown offers, “In a multi-channel, multi-platform universe, it is absolutely about brand management. And the only people who think about that are the brand managers and creative services depts.”
And Jim Thomas sees, “the skill set of creative services is great for the future. No matter what the media—mobile, digital, on-air, social media—they know what the audience wants and how to talk to them.”
But like Joe Rovito warns, “while depts have stopped layoffs, it may not return to what it once was.”
 
Indeed, it may not return to what it once was. Those interviewed said expect more scrutiny on results- more viewers, more users, more sales. Expect more broadcast companies to explore and implement hubbing and centralization—using the creative talents of their best marketers across more than one TV station and market. Expect more responsibilities with less people. And expect more demanded of you.
Colleen Brown says, “Today, more than ever, more is expected of the creative services depts.”
So how can you prepare for the future if you want to work in creative services?
Consultant Bruce Lindgren of Lindgren and Associates says his clients expect their directors to be “good managers of individuals, and know how the creative process fits into the marketing plan.
Oscar Welsh says his stations want a “greater depth of experience with the key on the ability to write.”
“Writing is still the key,” adds Jim Thomas.
“Educate your staff,” Larry Rickel says.
“Be indispensable,” advises David Hershey, “make it so your GM can’t be without you."
 
Paul Greeley is a former TV station CSD and broadcast group VP of Marketing. He writes a weekly humor column for the Keller Citizen (Texas). Email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or call 817-578-6324

One of the biggest criticisms of the millennial generation is that they confuse participation with winning.  Everyone gets a trophy in the playoffs.  They feel they deserve a promotion because they simply showed up for work everyday.

Well in the past decade, TV has slipped into this same mindset of mediocrity.  TV has experienced a subtle yet disturbing change in its measurement of success, and it is most evident in our most hallowed institution - the rating point.

When I began my career, broadcast TV was in its heyday.  Viewing was on the rise.  Production values were steadily increasing. Scripts were improving. Whole new genres were being born. 

Back then, TV staffers would gather around the table each morning and discuss the rating point levels for last night's shows.  Ratings are the percentage of ALL the people in a market who turn on a program.  Some viewers start with their TV off, and others switch over from other programs.  During these days times were good.  There was a tremendous amount of appointment viewing.  Viewers purposely tuned in for broadcast events like "Must-See TV."

During these early days, station staffers never paid much attention to the share of audience.  Share counts only people who have their TV On. It doesn't count people who could watch but choose not to.  You can have a tremendously high share, but it can be misleading.  If you are getting a huge piece of a very miniscule pie, you're not getting much to eat.  If you get a huge share of a very low rated program, you aren't attracting many viewers. 

During these heady days, we didn't need the calming illusion of share, because we were the tune-in masters.  A share number just couldn't properly showcase our glory.  Only a rating point could showcase the amazing appointment viewing prowess of our sticky programming. Only a rating point could glorify our raw recruiting muscle that could coalesce an audience from thin air.

Now fast forward a few decades and you'll notice that discussions about rating points have waned.  Talk of ratings points are a painful reminder of Broadcast TV's serious decline in the past decade.

We just couldn't bring ourselves to measure our life's work with such a miniscule digit.  "Woohoo! We got a 1.5 rating."  This just doesn't sound as good as "we got an 18 share."  And it sure is convenient and useful on those corporate performance calls.  By using share as the game standard, you didn't need to recruit an audience.  Beating the other guy across the street was enough.

So what happens?  The audience begins to disappear from the discussion.  In a workshop last week, I asked the station staff to describe how their audience had changed during the tumultuous days of the past two years.  They had a very time describing anything.  Then I asked them to describe how their competitors had changed in the past two years.  I had to stop them after a half hour of running down every miniscule blip from the guys across the street.

If you judge the success of your work by its share, you can continue to declare victory book after book, when the reality is that fewer and fewer people are using your product.

Judging performance by share gets us off the hook.  In the strange reality of share, it is okay that the number of people watching the show have seriously declined, as long as the guy across the street has a lower share than me.  We ease our mind  by telling ourselves that if all the competitors are declining, there is nothing that can be done.  This measurement allows us to delude ourselves into thinking that losing slowly, is actually winning.  It gives us an excuse not to improve, not to throw the bums out, not to transcend tired priorities.

This channel performance measurement has sabotaged innovation. By skillfully concealing the number of customers in a statistical representation, we can turn a failure into a success.  The metric serves the ego, not the bottom line.  A bigger share of nothing is still nothing. 

It's time we stopped talking about share and get back to the harsh reality of rating points.  Broadcast ratings will continue to decline in the coming years as cable channels proliferate, internet viewing takes off, and baby boomers die off.  

Respected television industry analyst Andrew Tyndall just made the prediction that broadcast television will be dead within ten years.  "Broadcast television is an industry in decline. There will be demand for video journalism, just not on a broadcast platform."

When we talk about share, we are kidding ourselves.  If we hope to reverse the slide, we need to openly embrace where we are and the pain to come. The future is not about winning a bigger portion of an ever-diminishing audience, it is about recruiting brand new customers from unexpected places.   We need a metric that is an unflinchingly pragmatic gauge of new customer recruitment.  Unless we bring non-viewers into the tent, Tyndall's prediction is inevitable. 

This is where we need to take a cue from the Canadians, because they have created an admirably courageous success metric.  They don't talk about share.  They don't even talk about ratings.  They talk about viewers.  Ask a Canadian executive how she did last night and she will quote the number of people who watched.  "I had 91,000 viewers last night." Ask an American producer how many actual people watch his show and most will not be able to tell you. 

The Canadian metric is a raw, unflinching gauge of success that has nothing to do with competitors and everything to do with audience. A competitor's success doesn't matter.  Just because your competitor loses doesn't mean you win.  Turn off the competitor's channel feed in your office.  All that matters is the number of people your channel turned into customers tonight.

Graeme Newell is a broadcast and cable marketing consultant who specializes in relationship branding using core emotional drivers.  He guarantees that his teasing seminar will immediately increase your news ratings or his workshop is free.  Find out more here.