Jim Chabin

World Screen Weekly, June 16, 2006

By Anna Carugati

Jim Chabin

CEO

Promax/BDA

Hundreds of television professionals will be flocking to New York City next week. Their quest is to find better ways of cutting through the television and media clutter in order to reach audiences that are increasingly platform agnostic.

Marketing, promotions and other TV executives from the U.S. and around the world will be attending the Promax/BDA conference that will be held at the New York Marriott Marquis Hotel in Times Square from June 20 to 22. Promax/BDA is a worldwide association of marketers, promoters and designers and it provides its members with education, recognition and networking opportunities through conferences, award competitions and publications.

Some 3,300 people are expected next week in New York, and Promax/BDA has prepared quite a lineup of speakers, panel discussions and workshops. Over the three-day conference, speakers will include the CNN anchor and correspondent Anderson Cooper; Mike Wallace of 60 Minutes fame; CNN’s Larry King; Brent Magid, the president and CEO of Frank Magid Associates; Bob Liodice, the president and CEO of the Association of National Advertisers; Dennis Swanson, the president of station operations at the Fox Television Stations Group; Greg Moyer, the general manager of VOOM HD Networks; Michael Benson, the senior VP of marketing, advertising and promotion at ABC Entertainment; Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Blink, and John Miller, the chief marketing officer of NBC Universal Television Group.

Jim Chabin, Promax/BDA’s CEO, is very excited about the group of professionals the conference has been able to attract. And he wants to make sure that members attending, including the international contingent that makes up about 25 percent of the participants, are well served. “There’s so much out there that we can’t even imagine how to approach our jobs as marketers with all of these new technologies,” he says.

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The Outlook 2006 session on Wednesday morning forms a large part of Promax/BDA’s efforts to serve its members. This will include the presentation of a study commissioned from Frank Magid Associates on what the new generation of consumers wants and how they use television and the Internet. The discussion will then examine advertising.

Thursday’s sessions will focus on technology. “It’s really about how you target and create communities of viewers in this new televisual age,” says Chabin. “We will have speakers talking about cell phones, the Internet, all of these new toys, devices and technologies. Design, marketing and promotions have changed overnight. It’s now a partnership between the advertiser, the designer, the promoter and the content people. [T123462he challenge is to find our audience,] gather them and make a community out of them. In the end it’s going to be about the story. As long as you’re a good storyteller, it doesn’t matter what technology you use. We will have people talking about that.”

Chabin, who has been president of Promax/BDA for 11 of the past 14 years, has witnessed firsthand the changes that have taken place in television marketing and promotion. Prior to re-joining Promax/BDA in 2001—he first headed the organization from 1991 to 1999—he served on the launch team of E! Entertainment Television as the VP of promotion, and before E!, he was western marketing manager of the CBS Television Stations.

As successful as this year’s conference will be, Chabin never takes his eye off the next one. The organization hosts events in Europe, Asia, Australia, the Middle East and Latin America.

The U.S. conference will remain in New York next year, but will move from the Marriott Marquis to the New York Hilton. “We’ve signed a five-year deal with the Hilton. New York is where the advertisers are and so much of our core constituent and all the people who are leading this new evolution, or revolution, in television.”

The revolution he is referring to is the “anywhere, anytime” trend of consuming programming, which has emerged over the last year or so. People are now watching their favorite movies and TV series on computers and all sorts of handheld devices.

“When Apple and Disney announced that they were making TV shows available on iTunes to be downloaded on iPods, the Los Angeles Times ran a story on its editorial page,” explains Chabin. “I said to my 90-year-old mom, ‘Look at this; this is the day television changed forever.’ This signifies something I’ve never seen in my lifetime in this business. Yes it’s scary and yes it’s competitive, but at the same time I’ve never seen people more looking forward to a conference and wanting to hear the speakers because there’s so much to talk about. What’s the online component, the podcast component, the cell phone component? Marketers have a seat at the table because someone has got to have the smarts to take all of this stuff and get the audience together. Content continues to be king, but marketing is now the army that keeps the king in power.”