Mega series

October 2007

By Bill Dunlap

It wasn’t all that long ago that a show’s success was
measured exclusively by its ratings.

Today, prime-time hits are no longer simply shows. They
have become small businesses that generate multiple revenue streams—from
program sales and home video to download-to-own and consumer products—for
the networks and studios that produce, air and distribute them.

And as viewers have taken charge of when and where they
watch shows, studio and network executives have had to invent new promotion and
marketing strategies to manage these prime-time hits.

Shows like Lost, 24 and Heroes bear little resemblance to the popular dramas of just a
few years ago, and the support that Disney-ABC, Twentieth Century Fox and NBC
Universal, respectively, are providing bears little resemblance to traditional
TV promotion.

“The landscape has changed significantly,” says Mark
Pearson, the senior VP for brand and franchise management at Twentieth Century
Fox Television. “There have been dramatic shifts in the last couple of years
because of how some of the business models have evolved, where people are going
to view shows, and the kinds of shows networks are programming.”

Pearson points out that the old model had the networks
promoting their shows more or less equally and doing a lot of their marketing
on their own air. “Now it’s so much harder to reach consumers that the networks
have to make their bets a little differently, place their chips behind a few
shows that they want to prioritize and devote a lot more resources to reaching
consumers in other places,” Pearson notes.

And, he continues, there is now a greater role for the
studio to support the network’s marketing efforts. “24 is a highly serialized show. The
Internet platforms, new distribution opportunities, new business models, allow
people a chance to stay involved with the show. You can catch the show online,
you can buy individual episodes for download—and those are legal business
models that you wouldn’t have seen three years ago. That’s our challenge and
the network’s challenge, to make the content available when and where the
consumer wants it. Five or six years ago, the TV-on-DVD business was a
few-hundred-million-dollar market. Now it’s a several-billion-dollar market.
That enables a show like 24 to go six or seven seasons plus.”

That model fits NBC Universal’s Heroes, too. “We have people who are fans
of Heroes who
tell us they have never seen the show on the air,” says John Miller, the chief
marketing officer at NBC Universal Television Group. “They’ve seen it on
iTunes, where they’ve downloaded it to a mobile device or laptop, or more
likely they’ve gone to NBC.com, where they can stream it.”

Miller points out that Heroes, Lost and 24 share some characteristics. “All
three shows have male and female appeal, they tend to have some level of
excitement or adventure to them, they have themes that have worldwide
potential—humans in unusual situations—and all have some level of
serialization that creates involvement or engagement with the viewer.”

NBC’s launch promotion for the first season of Heroes was pretty conventional, Miller
says, but when it scored well in the ratings and then came back strong after a
brief hiatus around the 2006–07 holiday season, the studio began to look
at the show as an asset, not just for the network but for several parts of the
studio.

“What is new to us is that this is a property that we saw
impacting five or six divisions,” he says. “We haven’t had one of those. We had
the Law & Order franchise that played across multiple platforms, but it didn’t
necessarily have the huge international take. DVD was OK but not huge. Heroes was something we could exploit
domestically on multiple platforms and internationally as well. We all got
together and figured out how we would exploit the show. As a result of all this
ancillary activity, it’s tough to tell where the promotion ends and the revenue
generation begins. They all work to help each other.”

Studio executives are not the only ones who recognize the
value of turning shows into profitable franchises—so do creative
executives.

“My main focus as the creator of the CSI franchise is to keep it healthy
by bringing fresh new ideas to the public and really getting into the
multiplatform world of the Internet and wireless entertainment,” says Anthony
Zuiker, who created CSI, CSI: Miami and CSI: NY.

Zuiker believes that making the CSI shows available on Apple’s iTunes
Store was a good move. “It is a revenue-generating entity but it’s also a heck
of a promotional tool. Airing shows on the networks is also important, cable
reruns are also important, but so is a third medium like the Internet or mobile
phones. People want content on the go; they want customization of content.”

Heroes “has huge Internet and merchandising and ancillary
material,” says Tim Kring, the show’s creator. “It’s like being the CEO of a
big company. It’s a giant ship right now. We have been running an online comic
book concurrently with each episode. It enhances what you’re watching—a
side story about a character that helps you know more about [him or her]. We
also have an online experience/ game, sort of a treasure hunt, where you follow
a trail that you’re being led on and you gain little nuggets of knowledge along
the way.”

Regardless of how many new screens a show can be seen on,
the television broadcast is still the main driver of its success. And ensuring
that a show is sampled by as wide a TV audience as possible is a top priority
for studio executives.

It’s the nature and quality of the current crop of Disney
shows that Steve Copestake, the senior VP of marketing at Disney-ABC
International Television, points to when assessing promotional strategies.
“We’ve been lucky with fabulous quality content the last few years,” he says,
citing Lost, Desperate
Housewives,
Grey’s Anatomy
and Ugly Betty.

“There’s a huge appetite internationally for these
properties. There is a great variety in the ways we can promote and publicize
them because of the number of different markets and cultures. We try to balance
service to our broadcast customers with what we call the content
imperative—doing the right thing by the shows.”

MARKETING
24/7

Fox’s 24 has been a solid, if not spectacular, ratings performer.
Pearson says its serialized format and the devotion of its fans are what make
it an ideal candidate for the kinds of marketing he is supervising.

“24 has very passionate fans,” he says. “They’ll follow the show. They’re
not passive, pure network watchers. The real shift over the past couple of
seasons has been in terms of how people view, where they view. We sell a lot of
DVDs, and for the past two seasons we’ve done ‘bridge’ content that bridges the
gap between seasons of 24 on DVD.”

The “bridge” content on DVD also allows the producers to
step outside the rigid 24-hour format of the show to offer something new to the
most die-hard fans.

“You can only find that on DVD,” Pearson says. “In part,
that’s a reward for the people who are willing to shell out 50 bucks to buy the
24 DVD. In
addition, we did an exclusive DVD-ROM Internet link that you can only access
through the DVD that brought you behind the scenes into the production of each
episode.”

While the “bridge” episode is designed to support DVD
sales directly and the show indirectly, a similar venture with American Express
this year is a combination of business and promotion.

When the 24th hour of the 2006–07 series ended in
May, fans who were American Express cardholders could access a series of
short-form vignettes, under the title 24: Day Six Debrief, which chronicles an encounter
between 24’s
Jack Bauer and the federal agent assigned to find out just what really happened
while he was held captive in China. After two weeks, the material became
available to Sprint TV subscribers.

A deal with Unilever for its Degree Men brand featured
commercials with the look and feel of 24, online short films about a rookie in the show’s
Counter Terrorism Unit, and other promotional tie-ins. At the conclusion of
season six, Degree Men presented Day Zero, an online animated prequel to 24 that dealt with events that took
place before the series began. “We have many more revenue streams on a TV
series than we did before,” Pearson says, “but the bulk of the business is
still driven by network licensing revenue, DVD and international. These other
things are incremental opportunities.”

Pearson notes that such tie-ins with advertisers always
include involvement from the show’s producers. “We worked with Unilever to
create a series of commercials using our assets. We gave them our ticking
clock, we let them work with our director of photography and other people, and
they created some commercials with the look and feel of 24, all in conjunction and
collaboration with our creative partners.”

“You’re seeing on the network side advertisers looking for
close associations with our brands, and us working with the network to create
relationships that allow that,” Pearson says. However, he adds, “We would never sacrifice the creative
just for a promotional tie-in.”

Fox is a major player in the mobile-phone content business
through its Fox Mobile Entertainment unit and its controlling interest in the
Jamba/Jamster content provider, but its first 24 mobile deal predates those
entities, going back to the fall of 2004. The deal provided for Vodafone to
distribute 24 serialized 60-second episodes of 24: Conspiracy in up to 23 territories in
Europe, beginning in January 2005.

“We’ve done a number of those series,” Pearson says, “and
we’ve changed the business model on that. We’ve done a series on Prison
Break that was
ad-supported. The original model on 24: Conspiracy was pay as you go, 99 cents a
pop.”

The Vodafone deal predated Fox’s U.S. mobile offerings
because the European market was further along in phone technology, but today
the 24 push is
very much an international venture.

Michael Bessolo, the senior VP of marketing, publicity and
promotions for Twentieth Century Fox Television Distribution, says the unit’s
broadcast clients are behind 24 as strongly as they are their own homegrown series.

“International broadcasters want to do bigger launch
campaigns,” Bessolo says. “The viral marketing, the mobile, the things that
used to be addenda to a marketing campaign, are now an integral part. The
challenge for us is to collaborate with all our divisions and figure out ways
to help that broadcaster achieve what it wants to do to be successful.”

The fact that 24 is a global franchise helps make it a priority for
broadcasters, Bessolo says. “Everything the broadcasters want to do with their
local programming they also would like to do with 24. It’s a challenge to us to
constantly meet the aggressive marketing criteria of the broadcasters. We
applaud that and are thankful they want to be as aggressive with 24 as they do with their local
product.”

In the U.K., one promotion consists of interactive kiosks
where fans hear from Kiefer Sutherland as Jack Bauer. “Sky came up with
kiosks,” Bessolo says. “We find with our broadcasters a level of creativity
that is just tremendous. They realize the power of interactivity with their
viewers.”

HEROES
HIT THE ROAD

NBC Universal’s marketing honcho John Miller says that the
signature event behind Heroes, a world tour, came out of a meeting of the various
businesses in the company to explore ways of exploiting the success of the
show.

“One of the things that came out of that meeting was from
the creators, who had gone on some tours and found people were crazy about the
show,” Miller says. “Many of the divisions were in favor of a world tour. It
started as sort of a promotional play, but in addition to that, it’s a business
plan. It’s taking a property we own and exploiting it across many businesses worldwide.”

Nissan, which has been a lead sponsor of Heroes, was brought in to sponsor the
tour, which included not just a star or two, but virtually the whole cast and
the producers.

The tour had several purposes, Miller says. “It’s a
promotional and business play and they complement each other.” In some of the
nearly 150 territories where Heroes is licensed, the tour was a launch promotion. In those
where the first season has aired, it was a fan promotion. The U.S. and Canadian
stops served as a boost for the launch of the first-season DVD release and the
second-season premiere.

Much of the focus of the tour was on international
audiences and the logistics were handled mostly by NBC Universal International
Television Distribution. Pauline Böhm, the VP of international marketing for
the unit, says elements of the tour were tailored for each country. “We
selected those territories where we knew there was some inherent interest in it
already,” Böhm says—“London, Paris, Munich, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong,
New York and Toronto. All our partners have completely embraced it. They have
come back with extremely sophisticated proposals in terms of their
presentations and what they’re doing. We have great confidence in them.”

In Paris, TF1 hung an enormous billboard across its
building and arranged for a city tour atop a double-decker bus. In London, BBC
Two took over the top floor of the iconic “Gherkin Building” in the financial
district for a press event and cocktail party, accompanied by multiple
talk-show appearances.

And in Hong Kong, STAR organized a photo shoot in the
harbor on the Aqua Luna Junk, followed by a gala dinner tying in to the green
concept of the show.

Filling out the tour bus were executive producers Tim
Kring and Dennis Hammer, along with cast members Santiago Cabrera (Isaac), Jack
Coleman (HRG/Mr. Bennet), Noah Gray-Cabey (Micah), Greg Grunberg (Matt), Ali
Larter (Niki), James Kyson Lee (Ando), Masi Oka (Hiro), Hayden Panettiere
(Claire), Adrian Pasdar (Nathan), Zachary Quinto (Sylar), Sendhil Ramamurthy
(Mohinder), and Milo Ventimiglia (Peter). In size and number of stops, Böhm
calls it the largest promotional tour ever.

“People really get passionate about Heroes,” Böhm says, in explaining how
broadcasters promote it with as much verve as they do their locally produced
fare. “They really get excited about it. I think once they’ve seen the reaction
from the fans—online and all the blogs and downloads—there’s a huge
undercurrent of interest. It takes on a life of its own because of that. Some
shows just lend themselves to this kind of promotion.”

An important element to the Heroes effort, Miller says, is the
involvement of Nissan. “Nissan has been a great partner with Heroes,” he says. “Last year, when the
pilot was long, they presented the show with limited commercial interruptions.
We put together a number of things for Nissan to make it a good package for
them. One was sponsoring the world tour. They paid some additional money for
that, but they’re getting a significant amount of support worldwide.”

For the upcoming season, the Nissan Rogue SUV is
integrated into the show. During the first season it was the Versa model that
was featured.

Miller plans to continue to focus on key shows that are
proven assets when it comes to high-powered marketing, and he has his eyes on
one for next year. “Bionic Woman is one of those properties we think could have universal
appeal and be very much in that Heroes camp,” he says. “Right now it leads all network
shows in awareness and intent to view, so we think we’re on the right track. It
comes from the executive producers of Battlestar Galactica, and that show has traveled well
internationally.”

PROMOTING
OUT OF THE BOX

For Disney-ABC, Lost has inspired a variety of initiatives that blur
the lines between promotion, marketing and new business.

In addition to original mobile phone mini-episodes and a
video game, the producers devised an elaborate charade in the form of an online
game and viral campaign called The Lost Experience, with a website at
www.thelostexperience.com. The scheme kicked off with a fake public-service
announcement during a commercial break for the mysterious Hanso Foundation,
which was first mentioned in Lost’s second season.

A Hanso website offered clues about the foundation hidden
in other websites, fake voice-mail messages and video clips. The site,
www.thehansofoundation.org, currently carries an ominous farewell.

At a comics convention last summer, an angry protester,
hired by the producers, disrupted their own presentation, seeking to expose the
phony foundation.

Disney-ABC’s Copestake says that international
broadcasters who bought Lost have been inspired by what Disney-ABC has done to support
the series.

Copestake says the scope of promotion is broader than it
has been, “but it has to be grounded on a consistent platform. Our job is to
take that platform and inspire our customers with the potential that platform
gives them creatively.”

Copestake took The Lost Experience to Disney’s
international customers and asked for their creative input. “We took that to
Channel 4 in the U.K., which had the show at the time, and Seven in Australia,
and asked them to be part of that initiative,” he says. “That was a first for
us. We’ve never handed over some of the creative responsibility to a customer
that way. We give them everything we think we can and then encourage them to be
as creative as they can.”

One of the things Channel 4 did was to hire the noted
photographer David LaChapelle to make what Copestake calls “the most
extraordinary” on-air promos for Lost and Desperate Housewives. “They are very imaginative and
have very high production values, to the point where we’re having a discussion
with ABC about what elements of the campaign they could use back on the mother
ship.”

Like his counterparts at Fox and NBC Universal, Copestake
says broadcasters are strongly behind Lost, as much as they are with their local content.

“We’ve been very much struck by the appetite of our
broadcast clients to get behind these shows,” he says. “A trend we’ve seen is
that shows like Lost and Housewives have become portfolio shows for some broadcasters. Sky is a great
example, by picking out key shows, and our shows have been part of that. That’s
another reason that it pays for us to promote and support the shows very
heavily. The stronger our promotional support and the creativity that underpins
that, the more chances [we’ll have to] get those prime-time slots and the
better those shows will perform.”